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The great Nikolai Lugansky shows off his aristocratic melancholy, plus the best of December’s classical concerts
The otherworldly pianist wrapped his audience in a mood of romantic contemplation at the Wigmore Hall
Nikolai Lugansky/Wigmore Hall ★★★★☆
Romantic pianists are generally a breed apart but there’s something especially lofty and otherworldly about the 50-something Russian virtuoso Nikolai Lugansky. When he came onto the stage of the Wigmore last night in evening dress complete with wing collar and shimmering yellow cummerbund he bowed with a faint, lopsided smile. It seemed as if the lights were too bright for him, the audience just too insistently present. One imagines Chopin must have looked much the same when facing his public.
As for the music-making, it wrapped us in a mood of romantic contemplation. Lugansky shrewdly programmed the evening as a rising wave of passion, beginning with the decorous mood-painting of six of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, passing through two of Chopin’s Ballades, and ending with the ecstasies of the Love-Death from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.
Lugansky can certainly produce a thunderous (but still beautifully balanced) sound, as he proved in that final Wagner piece. But it’s when romanticism speaks in a whisper that he really comes into his own. The very first of those Mendelssohn Songs without Words has a simple phrase which is immediately echoed. In Lugansky’s hands this graceful idea became full of romantic pathos, as if the echo was coming from across a valley in the twilight. In Chopin’s 3rd ballade there’s a moment where the first melody dies away and gentle swaying in the right hand takes over. Lugansky made us wait for that moment, which emerged from the pianistic haze like a dream.
The concert was full of perfect moments like these. But it’s a hard fact of life for really fine artists that they set the bar by which they’re judged. When performances are at such a high level you become sensitised to things that are less high, and overall there was a certain coolness in Lugansky’s playing, especially in the Mendelssohn pieces, which needed more vigour.
In fact that “letting go” did eventually come, in Lugansky’s own arrangement of four scenes from Götterdammerung, the Twilight of the Gods. It takes a special confidence or maybe arrogance to think you can capture Siegfried’s Funeral March and Death, the sad singing of the Rhinemaidens, the flooding of the Rhine and the end of the Gods with just 10 fingers and a piano. But Lugansky managed it magnificently. His arrangement was not just pianistically shrewd, translating orchestral colour into piano colour, but faithful to the complex web of Wagner’s melodies. One heard the Valhalla melody intertwining with the Redemption melody, with the Rhinemaiden’s innocent warbling peeping out in between.
Finally came that Love-Death which grew in a perfectly formed arch from intimate hush to an ecstatic climax—though it was the way Lugansky led the music gently away into oblivion at the end that really told. Having despatched the main business of the evening Lugansky actually lightened up, smiled, and despatched us into the December night with encores by Rachmaninov and Chopin that were delicious tender and brilliantly light-hearted by turns. IH
CBSO/ Kazuki Yamada, Symphony Hall, Birmingham ★★★☆☆
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Japanese music director Kazuki Yamada is turning out to be quite a champion of English music. On Wednesday night, he offered one of the great pre-first World War works by Edward Elgar, his Violin Concerto, alongside the Second Symphony by a composer almost half a century younger, William Walton.
As the concert reminded us, although these two belonged to different historical era, Empire united them. Sandwiched between the two main works was Walton’s very imperial-sounding Orb & Sceptre March, composed for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. After an exciting beginning, it eased into one of those big tunes that sound very like one of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches – though frankly not as good. And the tone was different, in a way which reminded us that Walton was composing in a different era. At some points, a Broadway glamour invades the march; at others, there’s a touch of saucy syncopation, which must have raised some eyebrows in Westminster Abbey on that far-off day. Yamada has a humorous streak in him, and he seized these moments with delighted glee.
However the evening’s real emotional heart was in the concerto, which Yamada moulded and caressed with typical heart-on-sleeve impetuousness. Next to him on the platform was Eugene Tzikindelean, a straight-backed Romanian virtuoso and winner of numerous big violin concertos, who also happens to the CBSO’s leader. (Never underestimate the level of talent in our orchestras.) He produced a tone of magnificent, commanding assurance, even in the finger-twisting passage-work of the finale, and he brought out the startling emotional intensity in the restless, troubled searchings of the first movement. Yamada caught the way the music moves rapidly between diffidence and impetuous self-assertion, and the orchestra produced a sound of rich, ripe expressivity.
And yet ultimately this was not a completely satisfying rendition of Elgar’s great concerto, I think because it missed the element of shy diffidence at its heart. The slow movement, where this feeling comes to the fore, seemed too solid and prosaic. It should feel like a dream of something long ago.
As for Walton’s Second Symphony, no one could accuse it being shy or diffident. It’s a piece of relentless shiny orchestral brilliance with a strange mix of romantic heat, nocturnal glamour and the thrill-of-the-chase tension. It’s the kind of heady emotional brew Yamada thrives on, and the performance was enjoyably brilliant, with razor-sharp chordal stabs from the brass and licks of catwalk elegance from the woodwind.
The piece managed to sustain itself until the half-way point, when the echoes of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring became just too insistent, and the dogged insistence on repeated patterns soon ran the music into the ground – despite the delirious energy lavished on the piece by everyone involved. In other circumstances, hearing Walton’s flawed piece might have been more of a pleasure; but coming after the heights of Elgar’s complex, often sublime masterpiece, it was bound to leave us with a feeling of disappointment. IH
No further performances