OLLI
MUSTONEN Piano Recital
22nd
Singapore
International Piano Festival
International Piano Festival
Victoria
Concert Hall
Friday (26 June 2015 )
This review was published in The Straits Times on 29 June 2015 with the title "Bizarre but rewarding fare".
It would appear that concert-goers are
still scared by the name of Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), which might explain
how a near full-house that greeted Imogen Cooper's recital of Chopin, Schumann
and Schubert on Thursday had almost halved by the time of Finnish pianist Olli
Mustonen's recital on Friday evening. What he offered was unprecedented in Singapore
To the less initiated, Prokofiev equates
with loudness, percussiveness, abrasiveness and dissonance. Mustonen was to
partly dispel that notion, but did not always help his cause by the affectation
and mannerisms in his playing. He used very little sustaining pedal, prefering
a dry and tinny sound as if to accentuate the music's acerbic qualities, and
then placing accents, often hammered out like a dentist's drill, in spots where
one would least expect them.
Add these to his playing with the aid of
scores, the finicky tendency of his right hand to quiver and quake just before
descending on the keyboard, and his sitting on a stool that had been raised to
its highest limit and further placed on a wooden board (like a Glenn Gould in
reverse). All these were recipe for a potential artistic disaster. Despite the
I-do-as-I-please stance which occupy piano narcissists like Ivo Pogorelich,
Lang Lang and Tzimon Barto, he kept the audience spellbound and enthused, which
was no mean task.
The first half opened with Fifth Sonata in its earlier version
(with a quieter ending), which was mostly congenial in a neoclassical way, but
with a brittle central movement played with so much staccato as if he was
daintily skipping through a floor of broken glass. The monumental Eighth Sonata that followed, arguably
the greatest work of the set, came close to a travesty.
Those who grew up with Sviatoslav Richter
or Emil Gilels' classic recordings would have found Mustonen's version a
caricature of the masterpiece, sickly and grotesque. The first movement's
bittersweet lyricism was run roughshod but its development was undeniably
thrilling. The second movement's gavotte was soggy rather than crisp and the
athletic finale becoming a breathlessly incoherent race to the finish line. At
least he was not boring.
The second half began with two
single-movement sonatas that played for under eight minutes each. The First Sonata, a student work, was
lathered with so much romanticism and rubato that it began to sound like
Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov. The penchant for exaggeration was even worse in the
popular Third Sonata which despite
its compactness was strangely shapeless. Young pianists who play like this will
be ejected in the first round of any competition, anywhere.
As if reserving his best for the last,
the Seventh Sonata – Prokofiev's most
popular - was a total triumph. The work is already so over-the-top, and
indestructible like a Soviet T-34 tank, that any overstatement would scarcely
be possible. Here all the excesses Mustonen could muster just aided its
inexorable narrative.
Its impression of a war juggernaut was
totally apt, and the tolling bells of the slow movement a memorial to total war
and utter desolation. The notorious
precipitous finale was taken a breakneck speed and he did not let up for a
single moment until its romping bitter end.
The tumultuous applause was totally
deserved, and two Prokofiev miniatures as encores – the harp-like Prelude (Op.12 No.7) and the March from The Love For Three Oranges -
completed a bizarre but surprisingly rewarding evening's fare.
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