pianomania: POETRY, PASSION & PROKOFIEV / ZLATA CHOCHIEVA Piano Recital / Review

POETRY, PASSION & PROKOFIEV

ZLATA CHOCHIEVA Piano Recital

Victoria Concert Hall

Saturday (16 August 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 18 August 2025 with the title "Pianist Zlata Chochieva plumbs Prokofiev's Romantic heart".

On an evening with multiple concerts involving both national orchestras and other musical groups, Russian pianist Zlata Chochieva, presented by Altenburg Arts, did well to attract a modest but discerning audience with a programme of varied but substantial works. Schumann and Prokofiev, like chalk and cheese, did not strike one as immediately appealing on paper but reality proved otherwise.

The recital opened with the Sonata in C minor by little-known Venetian baroque composer Giovanni Battista Pescetti (1704-1766). Originally conceived on harpsichord, Chochieva coaxed a luscious and velvety sonority on the modern grand piano with deft and sensitive pedaling. Its three short movements were binary (each with two halves) in form, playing and sounding like a sequence of Domenico Scarlatti sonatas.

Dance-like in feel, this was the perfect appetiser for Davidsbündlertänze (Op.6) by Robert Schumann (1810-1856), a succession of 18 short character studies opening with a boisterous yet beguiling mazurka. The German composer’s imaginary League of David which this work celebrates represented the ideals of contemporary composition which he dearly espoused.

Among the characters were the conflicting alter egos Florestan and Eusebius, reflecting the extroverted and introverted sides to his personality. Chochieva weathered the movements’ many dynamic shifts with much aplomb. Overcoming treacherous challenges in the Florestan movements and finding poetry in the Eusebius movements made this an absorbing reading from start to finish.

Particularly striking was the penultimate 17th movement, with a reminiscence of the gorgeously beautiful 2nd movement - revealing the true meaning of nostalgia – before dissolving into a slow final waltz to close the work on a sublime note.

The entire second half was devoted to Soviet era Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953). Before one decried a penchant for dissonance, Chochieva revealed him to be a Romantic at heart. Three Pieces (Op.95) from the ballet Cinderella – a pavane, a gavotte and a slow waltz - had lyricism as their cores, with her subtly supplying orchestral textures around the melodies.

Photo: Pianomaniac

These were palate-cleansers before the onslaught that was his Sixth Sonata in A major (Op.82), composed during wartime. The opening movement is renowned for its pummeling brutality, and Chochieva amply delivered by the fistful, but her musical sensibilities were never found wanting.

The middle movements were dances. The first was angular and grotesque but infused with ironic humour, while the second was a slow waltz, its troubled Romanticism mirroring the preceding dances from Cinderella. A machine gun brilliance lit up the finale, with a resumption of earlier hostilities. Chochieva’s keen and incisive fingerwork, unlike the Soviet troops at Stalingrad (the sonata’s occasional nickname), took no prisoners.

Her encores were also tantalisingly varied. The quickfire of Rachmaninov’s Etude-tableaux in A minor (Op.39 No.6), sometimes called “Little Red Riding Hood” sharply contrasted with the bluesy elegance of Soviet era Ukrainian jazz composer Alexander Tsfasman’s slow foxtrot Stay With Me. Chochieva’s fine recital was certainly one to remember.