Le Piano symphonique: in at the deep end for harpsichordist Jean Rondeau in Lucerne

Dear reader, freezing fog at Heathrow and a wildly eccentric train service from Zurich conspired to prevent your correspondent hearing most of Rudolf Buchbinder’s opening concert in Lucerne’s new festival “Le Piano Symphonique” last night, but the struggle to get there was rewarded, not so much by his authoritative reading of Schumann’s Études symphoniques, Op.13, but for his wondrous encores. More on that later.

First, let me begin at the end, as it were. The late-night event on the first day of this festival – devoted to music that emphasises the orchestral quality of the piano – was curiously given over to the art of the solo harpsichord, an austere instrument with little to offer, one might think, in terms of symphonic grandeur. 

And where are we, for heaven’s sake? The harpsichord is placed in the deep end of an empty swimming pool, with the diving board perched menacingly above the soloist. What’s going on? Is this a surreal dream? And how on earth will it sound? Well, surprisingly good, actually. The clean, tiled walls of the Neubad – now a space for music – acted as a sympathetic sounding board, gently amplifying the harpsichord’s rich, warm tone – quite the opposite of the jangling echo one might expect.

Perhaps conscious of our scepticism about the ability of the instrument to be symphonic, Jean Rondeau, a master of this music, chose to coax us into his net little by little, luring us slowly with a carefully judged programme that traced a line from elegant austerity to nourishing abundance, so that we came away thinking afresh about the harpsichord.

He opened with a stately selection from Rameau, starting right at the bottom of the register with the slow unwinding bass line of a Prelude in A minor, before running us fluently through an Allemande, Courante and Sarabande from a 1728 suite, each flourish placed precisely, with a fine sense of shape. Things got more elaborate when he reached the complicated Gavotte avec les Doubles de la Gavotte, a set of variations that gradually increase in grandeur and complexity – a nice introduction to the more florid music that followed.

And yet even in the essentially more open style of the four short pieces by Couperin he chose (Prelude, Allemande, Sarabande and Chaconne), Rondeau could not disguise the essentially inhibited nature of the music. It almost feels as though it is trying to say something but can’t quite find the words. 

However, there is no such inhibition in the work of Pancrace Royer (1703-1755) which closed the recital. The virtuosic La Marche des Scythes is a rich, rewarding display of the true capabilities of the instrument, which Rondeau obviously relishes, particularly when the tempo doubles in a headlong dash to the finish. Now that does feel symphonic.

Back to Rudolf Buchbinder for a moment. He chose Schubert’s Impromptu no. 4 in A flat major as his first encore, the feathery cascade of notes in the right hand beautifully controlled, the brooding central section urgent and questing: a glorious moment. Then he went into show-off mode, delighting everybody with Soirée de Vienne, waltz transcriptions from Die Fledermaus, that fizzed like a good champagne... and inevitably brought the house down.

Stephen's press trip to Lucerne was fund by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra.