If anyone in the audience believed the fiction that playing the piano is the genteel activity beloved of melancholy heroines of 19th-century novels, then 90 minutes in the company of resident Sheffield pianist Tim Horton and guest Ivana Gavrić would surely be enough to dispel that misconception for ever. This was piano playing at its most brutal and visceral, and I hasten to add that I mean that in the most complimentary way.
Stravinsky’s own two-piano arrangement of his ballet The Rite of Spring attempts the almost impossible – to condense the richly textured sound world of a huge symphony orchestra into the essentially monochrome palette of the piano keyboard – but what is lost in orchestral texture is more than compensated for in its focus on The Rite’s principal mode of operation: rhythm. Horton and Gavrić, enabled by the Crucible Playhouse’s enclosed, in-the-round intimacy, made us feel the work’s hammer blows, its primal ferocity, as though absorbed by our very bodies. Not that the performance was all sound and fury: the yearning bassoon solo at the start and the quivering flute melodies of the work’s second movement sang hauntingly in their keyboard guise.
But what lingered long after the final decisive chord had been struck was the sense of having witnessed something being almost savagely reborn: outside, the icy streets of sub-zero Sheffield, but inside, the violent cracking of the sudden onrush of the Russian spring. As Horton and Gavrić shared a warm (possibly rather exhausted) embrace, the foot-stamping of the audience told its own story.
Not that the evening’s performance was perfect. There were moments of slight rhythmic imprecision, when the two performers were not quite perfectly in sync with each other, even though the physical arrangement of the pianos on stage allowed each pianist to watch the other’s movements intently. But I would happily forego a kind of antiseptic precision if the result feels intensely lived, as these performances did. The works by Shostakovich and Rachmaninov in the first half of the programme were delivered with the same commitment, even if they are clearly worlds apart in their musical language.
Rachmaninov’s Suite no.1 (“Fantaisie-Tableaux”) is the work of a teenager, but one with almost full access to the rhetorical tricks of the adult composer he would become. The mature Rachmaninov’s fingerprints are everywhere here: rising and falling triplet figures, arpeggiated chords, the relentless ostinati that drove the more exultant sections of the piece with an almost motoric energy. Listening to Pâques, with its tolling Easter bells, one might make the case for Rachmaninov the early Minimalist. In all these four movements recurring figures being pushed to the limit of what they could sustain did an awful lot of heavy lifting in terms of the musical argument. But the performers clearly love the music, and their engagement with it was compelling, in the lachrymose third movement as much as in the ringing finale.
In some ways Shostakovich’s Concertino in A minor felt like the odd man out here, depicting not so much renewal as relief, at having survived the Stalin years more or less intact. A work from 1954, the year after Stalin’s death, it sees Shostakovich in largely unbuttoned mood, the austere declamations of the opening giving way to the sort of ‘circus music’ that Shostakovich the comic satirist wrote three decades earlier. But there are musical echoes too of the Tenth Symphony, showing that for Shostakovich a grin is never far from a grimace. Horton and Gavrić balanced its brittle humour with the shadow of something far more sombre.
