RARITIES
OF PIANO MUSIC
AT
SCHLOSS VOR HUSUM
JONATHAN
PLOWRIGHT Piano Recital
Thursday
(27 August 2015)
British pianist Jonathan Plowright is a
regular at Husum, where his breadth and depth of his enormous repertoire gets a
sympathetic hearing. There were none of his Polish favourites on show this
evening, which began with hyphenated Bach. Busoni and Siloti were not on the
slate but instead, the likes of Granville Bantock, Herbert Howells, Constant
Lambert, Eugene Goosens and Lord Berners.
These were transcriptions of chorale
preludes and short movements from the collection for Harriet Cohen (famed lady
pianist who was the mistress of Arnold Bax), and in these were a wealth of
surprising harmonies that ticked the ear, all performed with refinement and
obvious love by Plowright.
What followed were hardly rarities,
Brahms's Four Ballades Op.10, repertoire Plowright is working on in his
ongoing Brahms cycle for BIS recordings. He produced a warm and burnished sound
for the familiar favourites, comfortably overcoming the tricky bits of the Second Ballade and conjuring a dreamy,
hypnotic mood for the Fourth Ballade in B minor. In this quiet number,
one could hear a counterpoint provided by the nesting migratory birds and ducks
from the Schloss vor Husum moat, a famous and not unwelcome fixture of evening
recitals here.
The only work in the second half will not
be heard anywhere else outside of Husum, the piano transcription in 9 movements
of Constant Lambert's ballet Horoscope. From the composer of The Rio
Grande, this is a wonderfully crafted work comparable to Glazunov's ballet The
Seasons and Gustav Holst's The Planets, just to name orchestral
works with multiple movements. Lambert's is slightly more elusive, opening
with a prelude (Palindrome) composed solely of a series of chords
exploring different tonalities.
The ensuing dances combined fast and slow
numbers, with Leo being the obvious star among the stars. There is an element
of the rough and ready in the writing, but the slow movements fared best in
Plowright's hands, some music I will definitely want to hear again.
Encore time: Harold Craxton's neo-Baroque
Sarabande and Rigaudon was tinged with interesting harmonies, and no one
would have expected American band-leader Jack Fina's rumbling Bumble Boogie
to follow. It was back to the sublime with Federico Mompou's Secreto (Secret)
with more achingly beautiful harmonies.
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| Give that man a beer! Jonathan Plowright is toasted by Peter Froundjian (left) and Ludwig Madlener (right). |
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