Vadym Kholodenko, despite winning first prize at the Van Cliburn Competition in 2013, has not enjoyed the same superstardom that attends his successor, Yunchan Lim. To judge from this astounding Wigmore Hall recital, the 39-year-old Ukrainian pianist is such an individual that he is bound to polarise responses. He has some idiosyncrasies – but if they are comparable to anyone else’s, it could only be Grigory Sokolov or Arcadi Volodos, which is a good start. This is high-wire pianism, with no vestige of safety net: grand-scale artistic vistas in which one encounters massive risk-taking and no compromises.
The Fazioli piano was a special partner to him. Sitting rather high, bearing down on the keyboard, he conjured from it a startling intensity of atmosphere, accessing emotions of which other musicians scarcely dream. His touch wrung the last drops of sound and feeling from it – though he showed, too, the capacity for filigree flutters at more nonchalant moments.
Not every pianist could open with Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, Op.106. With this work, the composer pulled himself out of one of his worst sloughs of despond around 1817, creating a work so challenging and unfathomable that nobody dared perform it until Franz Liszt. Controversies about it abound, notably the first movement’s extremely fast tempo indication; some pianists insist that there must have been something wrong with Beethoven’s metronome.
In Kholodenko’s highly flexible canvas, though, there’d have been no use for a metronome at all. It took some getting used to, until you realised that this was not so much a performance as a re-creation, the pianist as much possessed by the music as possessing it.
The opening B flat major fanfare blossomed through the space; the rest seemed to grow out of its sound. That improvisational quality abounded in the first two movements with their outbursts of pent-up fury, polyphonic intertwinings and moments of repetitiveness, which Kholodenko seemed almost to parody with high-raised fingers and quasi-pernickety whimsy.
The vast Adagio – taking about 19 minutes, the upper end of its potential timeframe – was hypnotic, delving into emotional and spiritual regions of immense darkness, yet finding comfort in the depths of the bass; among Kholodenko’s secret weapons is a magnificent left-hand sound that speaks with immense power. The great fugue, which foreshadows and rivals the Grosse fuge for string quartet, provided summit-conquering magnificence quite beyond the notion of how anybody manages to memorise it.
If you thought things couldn’t get darker than the Adagio, think again. After the interval Kholodenko launched into the Three Preludes, Op.38, by his compatriot Boris Lyatoshynsky (1895-1968). Written during World War 2 while the composer was an evacuee in Saratov, they present icily cruel soundscapes, headed by quoted poetry but suggesting something more personal, sometimes horrifying. The first is moody and lyrical, but the second, a graveyard scene, builds a nightmarish atmosphere through a recurring figure verging on what Woody Allen might term ‘heaviosity’. Kholodenko went right to its terrifying heart, using extended techniques of touch that the instrument seemed lucky to withstand.
Six Liszt Paganini Études might appear more superficial virtuoso fare, except that Kholodenko does not do superficial. Brilliance, yes indeed; the pianistic equivalent of looping the loop in mid-air, absolutely; this was a remarkable virtuoso performance, refreshingly lacking in performativity. The Theme and Variations drawn from Paganini’s Caprice no. 24 made a suitably rousing conclusion.
One encore, Prokofiev’s Gavotte from Ten Pieces for Piano, Op.12, was unusual and welcome, but perhaps some of the audience, slinking out afterwards, were afraid that he was going to play more Lyatoshynsky.
