Piotr Anderszewski returns to the Gilmore Festival with probing, poetic recital

The 2024 Gilmore Festival was a homecoming of sorts for Piotr Anderszewski, who cites winning the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award in 2002 a major inflection point in his career. During his extended residency in western Michigan, he will also close the festival conducting the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra from the keyboard. Two days ahead of his solo recital, the festival presented a screening of Warsaw is My Name, a 36-minute film the pianist wrote and directed, consisting of striking imagery of his hometown in the Polish capital set to his own recordings. Anderszewski was on hand for a Q&A afterwards with the Gilmore’s artistic director Pierre van der Westhuizen, affording festival goers a more in-depth portrait of this multi-faceted artist.

All selections Anderszewski presented during his recital could broadly be defined as suites, sets of pieces from five composers that offered both cohesion and contrast. Beethoven’s final major work for piano solo, the Bagatelles, Op.126, opened the evening. From the onset, Anderszewski was a probing, thoughtful interpreter, and his carefully judged playing was never without clear purpose. The second bagatelle was a rapid affair to provide maximal contrast, and the fourth stood as a highpoint in its balance of the dramatic and the playful.

Mazurkas rounded out the first half, beginning with Chopin’s Op.59. Anderszewski captured the wistful, intoxicating melancholy, and elegantly articulated the distinctive mazurka rhythm with singular authenticity. Indeed, Anderszewski’s biography parallels Chopin’s in that he is a proud Pole who now makes his home in Paris. The second was perhaps the most spellbinding of the set, and the final selection benefited from a particularly stylish reading.

Without pause, the pianist delved into the mazurkas of Karol Syzmanowski, presenting a continuous thread that illuminated the composer as the logical heir to Chopin. Anderszewski carefully selected five of the twenty mazurkas that comprise the composer’s Op.50. There’s certainly familiar elements to Chopin’s, but Szymanowski presents the mazurka as obfuscated through an impressionist and richly chromatic lens, with indebtedness to his predecessor while purveying a wholly original conception of the venerable dance form. A selection marked Tempo oberka (no. 7) was a livelier work, growing to a strident climax, and the closing piece (no. 4) was of a militant urgency, given at present with singular intensity.

Terse and aphoristic, Bartók’s Op.6 Bagatelles say much in little, perhaps even more concentrated than Beethoven’s. Despite being an early work, they evidence much of the Hungarian composer’s most recognizable traits: modal melodies, percussive ostinatos, sounds of nature. They break from convention right from the onset, with the first bagatelle having each hand play in a different key. In lesser hands, these pieces could sound like mere trifles, but Anderszewski teased meaning out of each one. Perhaps most impactful were the final two, said to be inspired by the composer’s unrequited affection for violinist Stefi Geyer, comprising a somber funeral march followed by a frenetic waltz.

In addition to the Polish repertoire, Anderszewski is deeply connected to music of Bach, and closed the program with the Partita no. 1 in B flat major. The prelude opened the suite with elegance and rarefied charm, a refinement further conveyed by its delicate ornamentations. The dance movements that followed were each imbued with individual character, and flowed forth organically. Anderszewski opted for minimal but judicious use of the pedal, closing on the fleet, rapid Gigue, replete with its dazzling hand-crossings. 

The pianist indulged the supportive audience with a pair of encores, revisiting the same two composers explored in the latter half: a beguiling folk song setting by Bartók, and a pensive Bach prelude.