Few things are louder than the anticipatory hush when Wigmore Hall is packed for a recital. There’s a pre-concert buzz as the expectant audience – everyone from keen students to seasoned sages – take their plush red velvet seats, the glow from the lights suffusing the hall’s russet marble. Last night that buzz was for Moscow-born Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg in a programme of piano heavyweights Chopin and Ravel, peppered with Prokofiev. Would Giltburg deliver? He most certainly did… eventually.
His four Chopin Ballades were idiosyncratic. The opening phrase of the G minor no. 1 felt elongated beyond its seven bars, the slow tempo for the ensuing Moderato either dreamy or funereal, depending on your mood. The gentle barcarolle-like rocking that opens the F major no. 2 lunged unsteadily, but Giltburg tore into the tornado of the Presto con fuoco section with relish, drawing a thunderous response from the Fazioli piano that shook the hall. The A flat major no. 3 is the sunniest of the set – an aural bouquet of roses and the only one to end in a major key – and it’s here that Giltburg really hit his stride. He found a rhapsodic mood at its opening, while the central episode was shaped with poetic feeling; these are ballades, after all. Harmonically, the Fourth anticipates Debussy and Wagner, and Giltburg layered its polyphonic lines impressively, building to a volcanic climax before a tempestuous coda and a storm of applause.
Any doubts were firmly banished in a thrilling second half. Prokofiev, the inveterate recycler that he was, transcribed ten numbers for piano from his ballet Romeo and Juliet. Giltburg played them with such character that it was impossible not to see Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography playing in your head: the young Juliet dancing capriciously; the Dance of the Knights at the Capulets’ ball, taken at a propulsive lick; the boisterous Mercutio. The longest number – Romeo and Juliet Before Parting – was played with such loving delicacy that I regretted Giltburg hadn’t programmed all ten pieces.
“My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words,” wrote Maurice Ravel. His Gaspard de la nuit is based on three prose poems by Aloysius Bertrand. They have a fantastical, grotesque quality that Giltburg relished. The water sprite Ondine was awash with liquid shimmer and a huge flood of rich tone, while a sense of desolation was depicted in Le Gibet (The Gallows), its distant bell tolling against a reddening sunset. Scarbo, the demonic goblin, pirouetted menacingly before disappearing in a puff of smoke.
But that wasn’t quite all. Giltburg, acknowledging that his programme may be sending “mixed messages” on Valentine’s Day, lit the candles with a luminescent Clair de lune, but couldn’t resist bringing us down to earth again – or below – with Scarbo’s devilish cousin, Prokofiev’s caustic, finger-crunching Suggestion diabolique.
