I had promised myself not to write any reviews this year. But that was before last night’s concert.
Andras Schiff is a breathtaking virtuoso, a man of prodigious energy – who else would follow last evening’s scheduled works with opus 111?! — and of capacious memory. I hear he is touring with the English suites along with what we heard last night. You get the sense that, if you woke him up at 2:30 in the morning, he could launch himself into any Beethoven sonata or Bach keyboard work without hesitation or dropping a note. He is also a seeker!
A great artist will occasionally offer a new insight into a well-known work. This can make the concert memorable. The performer has remained true to the tradition of its past realizations, has not left the context of its place in the history of music and yet opened — or rather proposed — a new perspective on it that may stand the test of repetition. One is grateful for such events; there are not many in a lifetime.
But when every page is played in “innovative” ways, no matter how brilliantly and with what astonishing fireworks, when tempi are changed arbitrarily, rhythms pulled this way and that, articulations altered, notes and chords willfully accented, then one finds oneself not listening to a known work creatively reinterpreted, but rather wondering what the limits to such renewals might be. That, I’m sorry to say, was the case in both works last evening, especially in the Bach?
As someone said to me afterwards, the lighter variations shone with Mr. Schiff’s virtuosity, but one wanted “a bit more substance” in the slower and more contemplative variations. I agree; much of this steep, challenging work sounded more like Scarlatti sonatas dashed off by a brilliant, light-fingered magician.
The Diabelli theme waltz was played so fast that for a full realization one had to rely on one’s memory more than on one’s ear. Not to go on too long with this dirge of a review – maybe it’s too late for that already! — one of the variations sounded so strange and unfamiliar that speculation arose in my neighborhood of the hall as to whether this was Mr. Schiff’s own interpolation: “I’ve never heard THAT one before,” she said.