The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Encores that demand to be played again
ENCORES
Nelson Freire Decca
Let’s face it, we all love encores. They slip down as easily as a glass of prosecco on a summer afternoon, and there’s an extra pleasure to be had in watching the pianist’s fingers leaping in a blur over the piano keys. But there is a terrible snobbery about short encore pieces, encapsulated in Stravinsky’s sneery reference to “virtuosos without virtù” – meaning musicians who are all finger-technique but no heart or brain.
The implication is that encore pieces are all show and no substance. This delightful new release from Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire shows what an undeserved slander that is. It takes a special skill to say something distinctive and yet popular in only three minutes, and nearly all the composers represented here have it in spades.
Besides, an encore doesn’t have to be extravagantly virtuoso. Most of the pieces on this CD make fairly modest technical demands, apart from a couple of gorgeously Spanish numbers by Isaac Albéniz placed strategically at the end of the 30 pieces. So these performances rarely dazzle, but they certainly charm.
Freire has now been performing for 71 years – he gave his first concert as a precocious four-year-old in the little Brazilian town where he was born. During the Sixties he teamed up with another even betterknown South American virtuoso, Martha Argerich, and they still often play duet concerts together.
Freire has released the album to mark his 75th birthday, and it proves that his famously subtle, cushioned touch and lyrical gift are undimmed. Even tired old warhorses such as Rubinstein’s Mélodie recover their fragrance, and the dozen little character sketches that make up Grieg’s Lyric Pieces have the soft-edged gentleness of watercolours.
The three early Fantastic Dances by Shostakovich have a lovely, nimblefingered charm, lightly spiced with sarcasm. And just in case we suspect that Freire no longer has the “chops”, as jazzers say, he throws off the two virtuoso pieces by Albéniz with the kind of dazzling deftness that a 20-year-old might envy.
Perhaps a touch more variety of emotional tone would have been welcome; for instance one of the elegant tangos or polkas by Freire’s compatriot Ernesto Nazareth could have provided a dash of something exotic. That reservation aside, this CD is a total delight.