Review: Cambridge Music Festival: Benjamin Grosvenor: Brahms, Schumann, Mussorgsky, West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge
Celebrated pianist Benjamin Grosvenor has said that it’s always a pleasure for him to perform at Cambridge, a city he has described as “a wonderful cultural hub”.
On Monday evening (17 March), he was at West Road to give an eagerly-awaited recital as the concluding event of the Cambridge Music Festival’s current season.
Grosvenor began his programme with some of the late piano works of Brahms.
Brahms was a superb pianist and the late piano pieces are generally considered to be among some of his finest compositions.
To begin the recital, Benjamin had chosen the three intermezzos from Op 117 (1892).
The first, a lullaby referred to by Brahms as “The Cradle Song of my grief”, had a Scottish folk influence which can be clearly heard.
The second is a more agitated piece, and the third deeply melancholy as if Brahms is conscious now of his remaining days.
Short though these pieces are they have an extraordinary range and variety and are beautifully worked miniatures where Benjamin, after each one, allowed the resonance of the piano to fade naturally over several seconds - a technique he applied throughout the recital.
The seductively effortless ease of the performance lured us into a sequence which became more demanding and difficult as it progressed.
To follow, Benjamin had selected two of the most challenging pieces of piano literature imaginable, the execution of which duly reflected the reputation he has earned as being among the ’50 greatest pianists living and dead’ (Gramophone). An accolade to live up to indeed.
Schumann’s Fantasie in C Major, Op 17 is a monumental work written during the composer’s passionate courtship of Clara Wieck.
It is a deeply intimate composition in three movements. Judging from the expression markings of the music, the first represents a passionate declaration of the pain of Schumann’s separation from Clara.
The second is a march expressing the joy of the composer in his prospect of marriage to her, and the third movement’s slow and quietly melodic passages are written in what many would identify as essentially Schumann’s style, Benjamin beautifully capturing their tender elusiveness.
When Schumann decides to be challenging he is challenging in a very big way (eg his fiendish Toccata).
The demands made on the left hand in the Fantasie’s first movement almost defy its anatomical capability (Schumann did in fact damage his own hand irreversibly with practising).
Benjamin, however, tossed aside these challenges as though they were non-existent.
Towards the end of the March are some of the most dangerous leaps for the piano keyboard, the notes seldom hit squarely by any pianist.
Even Vladimir Horowitz messed them up slightly in his historic return to the concert platform at Carnegie Hall in 1965.
Yet for Benjamin Grosvenor, if he found them difficult, there was nothing to reveal it.
The interval was followed by Pictures at an Exhibition, written by Modest Mussorgsky after he’d visited a retrospective of his late friend Victor Hartmann’s paintings in 1874.
Four paintings of the ten represented in Mussorgsky’s suite are lost, but six are extant, and the work represents the composer ‘promenading’ around the exhibition and ‘commenting’ on the painting just passed, or anticipating the one to come.
Six years had elapsed since the composer’s death before ‘Pictures’ was published in 1866, and even then, for some time, the solo piano work, as intended, remained unfamiliar and known to most through Maurice Ravel’s orchestrated (and very popular) version of 1922.
Here again Horowitz comes into the story with Mussorgsky’s original text and Ravel’s orchestration behind his recordings in the 1940s.
Horowitz enlarged Mussorgsky’s sound and texture to produce two recordings, one of which was a live performance at Carnegie Hall, apparently an electrifying event of which one reviewer commented, “You had to be there to believe it”.
But Mussorgsky was also himself a brilliant pianist with a true understanding of the piano as the appropriate instrument for a performance of ‘Pictures’.
Purists argue that one unsurpassed is the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter’s in a Sofia recital of 1958.
It is worth comparing the two approaches, both available on YouTube [Horowitz 1947.3.28] and Sviatoslav Richter 1958 Sofia Recital].
A distinction is immediately evident from the opening bars of the first ‘Promenade’.
There is something very unsettling about Pictures at an Exhibition. It seems to encompass the dark obverse of Romanticism: Hartmann dead at 39, Mussorgsky from alcoholism at 42 (and we might include from this concert also the depressive and failed suicide of Schumann at 44).
Among the movements’ subjects, many are derived from legend and folklore, such as Gnome, which opens the suite.
There is an atmosphere of hopelessness and desolation about The Old Castle.
We come face to face with death in Catacombs, with its echoing chords alternating between loud and scarcely audible, and we encounter the forest dwelling of the fearsome witch, Baba-Yaga (The Hut on Fowl’s Legs), together with the terrifying witch herself.
Benjamin Grosvenor’s performance of this wonderful work was magisterial and must now surely be ranked among those of only its legendary interpreters.
The brilliance of the pianism and especially the timing (among Grosvenor’s greatest strengths) was present in all movements, but especially notable was his extraordinary dexterity (The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, The Market Place at Limoges), as well as an immense power in his playing which on occasion transformed the piano into a frightening instrument.
I wasn’t around to hear Horowitz’s version of The Great Gate at Kyiv, but one thing is for sure, Benjamin Grosvenor’s will remain long in the memory of those who witnessed his. You had to be there to believe it.
