Brahms to the rescue after a frustrating start
Inon Barnatan is an Israeli pianist, much praised in the US – where he is Artist in Association with the New York Philharmonic – but rarely seen over here. His Wigmore Hall recital last night proved he has pianistic flair and musical imagination to burn, but it wasn’t an unalloyed joy.
The problem was that Barnatan is a devotee of those cunningly curated sequences of short pieces, which are starting to become fashionable. Instead of having a complete Baroque suite, you take just the Minuet, and place it cheek by jowl with a Romantic miniature and a modernist firecracker. It’s not surprising that this idea has taken off – concentration spans are supposedly shorter these days, and having a succession of contrasts delivers a regular jolt of electricity, which stops the listener from daydreaming.
Admittedly, the idea can work at a deeper level, but to do that there have to be affinities between the pieces as well as contrasts, and those were hard to discern on Tuesday night. It should be said that at the level of the individual piece there was much to enjoy, as Barnatan has an ability to turn in an instant from one stylistic world to another. The pomposity of Handel’s Chaconne in G major, the tender melancholy of the Courante from Rameau’s first book of keyboard pieces, the stark, rigid mechanism of Hungarian modernist György Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata, all shone with engaging vividness. Thomas Adès’s Blanca Variations, drawn from his recent opera The Exterminating Angel, had an extravagant unappeasable melancholy, expressed in virtuoso flourishes which Barnatan clearly relished.
To be jerked from this into the mechanistic world of Ligeti without even a pause for breath was a rude shock, but not as rude as the switch from Couperin to the rumbustious Rigaudon from Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, which was like a slap in the face. It was a relief to know that, after the interval, Barnatan would allow us to savour one composer’s world uninterrupted. He played Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, one of those pieces which – typically for Brahms – is fiendishly difficult to play, without being gratifyingly flashy to the listener.
Barnatan managed the finger-twisting difficulties dexterously, but he also made us aware of the huge expressive world these variations inhabit. The angular strict canon had a huge moonlit mystery, and the beautiful musette (bagpipe) variation took on a lovely fairy-tale sense of far
Hear this concert for 30 days via the BBC Radio 3 website www.bbc.co.uk/radio3