This wunderkind plays with the grace of a dolphin
Britain’s very own piano wunderkind isn’t a natural talker, which can be a problem in an age when giving a loquacious interview seems to matter as much as actually performing. In the chat with fellowpianist Lucy Parham shown after this streamed concert from the Barbican, Grosvenor came over as sweetly earnest but reluctant, as if protecting an inner core.
Which is just fine, because at the keyboard that core shines out with perfect lucidity. The sheer naturalness of Grosvenor’s playing gilds the experience of listening to him at every moment. One enjoys it the way one enjoys the sight of a dolphin swimming, or a master of Chinese calligraphy executing a character with three quick but perfect strokes.
His programme was not long in terms of clock-time – a mere 65 minutes – but it was musically huge, with Chopin’s third sonata and Ravel’s vastly taxing Gaspard de la
Nuit separated by the three slight but charming folk dances by Argentina’s national composer, Alberto Ginastera. At no point did Grosvenor give the impression of being stretched by the music’s demands, even at the delirious climax of Ravel’s Scarbo, when the hands leap back and forth across the entire length of the keyboard.
What makes Grosvenor’s aristocratic impassivity so piquant is the way it’s contradicted by the flickering sensitivity of his sound. The beginning of Chopin’s third sonata, in some pianists’ hands, is statuesque and noble; here it was hugely impetuous and fierce, which made the spaciousness of the later lyrical melody all the more telling. And it’s not as if nobility were lacking. It stole over the music towards the end of the movement, where it seemed like a quality hard-won from all the previous turmoil.
The glittery, coiled-spring opening of the second movement was a touch po-faced in its brilliance, but the contrasting slow section had a beautiful soft-edged poetry. In the third movement Grosvenor again played on contrasts, emphasising the bitter hauteur of the opening gesture so that the vast spaciousness of the slow ruminative section really stood out. At the opening of the fourth movement the surging melody was phrased so carefully it seemed almost pedantic but the payoff was that the overflow of passion at the close seemed immense.
What this showed was Grosvenor’s way of harnessing his perfect control of sound and texture to give a thrilling sense of things eventually spinning almost out of control – a quality he put to telling use in the first and third of Ginastera’s Three Argentinian Dances, which had a terrific jangling swagger. In Ravel’s Scarbo he discovered, between black and jet-black, an astonishing range of colours.
All this was wonderful. But in the end it’s Grosvenor’s limpid lyricism that makes his playing so treasurable. It was there in the opening piece, Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s well-known Ave Maria, where our attention was poised between Liszt’s silvery ornamentation trickling down from above, and Schubert’s beautiful melody. It was there in the dreamy second movement from Ginastera’s dances.
And it was there in Grosvenor’s encore piece, Saint-saëns’s The Swan, from Carnival of the Animals, in an arrangement by the great virtuoso pianist Leopold Godowsky. The well-known melody unfurled in perfect lucidity, the little curlicues of Godowsky’s ornamentation supporting it tenderly, like the around a Renaissance Madonna.