CD Reviews (The Straits Times, July 2015)

IDIL BIRET

LP ORIGINALS EDITION

Idil Biret Archive 8.501402 (14 CDs) 

****1/2

The Turkish pianist Idil Biret (born 1941) was a child prodigy student of Nadia Boulanger, Alfred Cortot and Wilhelm Kempff, those combined tutelage nurtured an artist of catholic tastes, phenomenal versatility and uncommon technique. This box-set brings together all her LP recordings (on five different labels) dating from 1959 to 1986, including works by Chopin, Brahms and Schumann to the Second Viennese School and the avant-gardeists.

Among the latter is Turkish-American composer Ilhan Mimaroglu's Session, an aleatoric work with pre-recorded taped sounds dedicated to Biret, of which this 1976 recording is the definitive performance and entity. The composer had expressly forbidden any further performances or recordings (even by Biret herself) ever again. Her command of other 20^th century works by Berg, Webern, Boulez, Scriabin, Bartok, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Miaskovsky has also much to recommend.

Of the mainstream repertoire, Rachmaninov's Corelli Variations and Moments Musicaux, Brahms' Handel and Paganini Variations, and Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit reveal a virtuosity that has been underrated. The best sound is to be found in Liszt's transcriptions of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and Beethoven's Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, where her command of orchestral sonorities on a single keyboard have to be heard to be believed.  

BRITTEN Piano Concerto

BARBER Piano Concerto

ELIZABETH JOY ROE, Piano

London Symphony / Emil Tabakov

Decca 478 8189 / ****1/2

This is a most logical coupling, the only piano concertos by the most revered 20^th century composers of England and America, who happened to be close contemporaries and good friends. There were many parallels with Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) and Samuel Barber (1910-1981), in terms of their shared love for vocal music, use of dissonance and lyricism in compositions, and alternative lifestyles. Britten's Piano Concerto (1938, revised 1945) was a slick and bold work of a young man, while Barber's Piano Concerto (1960-62) was borne of maturity and experience.

Both have loud and percussive pages but are tempered with passages of songlike wistfulness. While Britten's strong suit is wit and humour, Barber draws on the extremes of violence and nostalgia. The performances by Korean-American pianist Elizabeth Joy Roe, one half of the famous Anderson & Roe piano duo, are elegant, incisive and often insightful, even if the recorded sound possesses a softer edge than some of her rivals. Her pair of encores are well-chosen, contrasting Barber's Nocturne (Hommage to John Field) with Britten's Night Piece (Notturno). This is wonderful programming coupled with playing of trenchant brilliance.      

OUT OF THIS WORLD / Anderson and Roe Piano Duo / Review

OUT OF THIS WORLD

Anderson and Roe Piano Duo

Esplanade Concert Hall

Sunday (4 November 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 6 November 2012 with the title "Flying on two pianos". 

A curious but true fact: there has never been a piano duo concert at Esplanade Concert Hall until this evening. The honour of being the first went to the American duo of Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe, or the legal-sounding Anderson & Roe for short. And there is unlikely to be one to make quite the same impact, that is, unless they come back again.

Make no mistake, this was still a classical concert, but one touched with pop sensibilities, and updated to meet 21^st century tastes. If they are renowned, that is because they belong to the YouTube and Facebook generation, boosted by music videos that are slickly produced with soft focus camera-work and high-definition sound. In real life, they are a class act and totally likeable too.

Music for two pianos is thin on the ground, so their own arrangements fill a much-needed niche. The music that opened the two-hour concert was Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre, in an expansion and elaboration of Franz Liszt’s famous transcription for two hands. Playing completely from memory, their ensemble work on two Steinway Ds was breath-taking for pinpoint accuracy, rapid-fire synchronisation as well as stylishness of execution.

In quieter numbers, such as Bach’s Erbarme Dich (St Matthew Passion) or Villa-Lobos’s Aria (Bachianas Brasileiras No.5), fancy filigree work never got in the way of melodic inspiration. In their versions, one hardly missed the soprano voice, oboe or cellos of the originals.

When they converged onto a single keyboard, things began to get even more interesting. In Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the only work in its original form, it became a game of staking one’s turf, jostling for space and preventing collisions, all this being captured on a large screen behind the stage. In Piazzolla’s Libertango, they came within kissing proximity, their eyes met, and the frenetic music told the rest of the story.

After the interval, their Mozart-inspired suite of Papageno! (a fantasy on the bird-catcher’s themes from The Magic Flute), Soave sia il vento (Cosi fan tutte) and Ragtime Alla Turca provided a smorgasbord of different styles. The latter was, of course, a jazzed up version of the Turkish Rondo in the manner of Joplin meets Volodos.

Rachmaninov’s melancholic Vocalise built from a simple wordless chant to a shuddering climax of barely-contained grief, with decorative figurations the late Earl Wild would have been proud of. The Anderson & Roe signature piece, Carmen Fantasy closed the concert on a high-octane and high decibel spell.  

There were four encores, which included Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, Khachaturian’s earthy Sabre Dance before blasting off into orbit and the astral nocturne of the Force Theme from John Williams’s Star Wars. By the end of the fourth, the high spirits of the audience had more than taken flight, and was already out of this world.

Testament to the popularity of Anderson and Roe: the line for their autographs was longer than that for Lang Lang's.