pianomania: GODOWSKY'S LEFT HAND / HENRI SIGFRIDSSON Piano Recital / Review

GODOWSKY’S LEFT HAND

HENRI SIGFRIDSSON Piano Recital

Conservatory Orchestral Hall

Wednesday (5 March 2025),

This review was published in The Straits Times on 7 March 2025 with the title "Henri Sigfridsson offers voice and shade in works for left hand".

Concert pianists specialising in works for the left hand along are a special breed. Many do it out of necessity, such as Americans Leon Fleisher and Gary Graffman who suffered from focal dystonia, or the Austrian Paul Wittgenstein whose right arm had to be amputated following war injuries.

Finnish pianist Henri Sigfridsson, however, does it simply because he can, with the first half of his recital being for left hand alone. A repertoire staple is Johannes Brahms’ transcription of the Chaconne in D minor from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Partita No.2. Piano-fanciers will know Ferruccio Busoni’s famous version for both hands, however Brahms’ leaner take is more faithful to the original source.

By trimming off the fat, clarity was the result, with the violin’s sleek melodic lines articulated with transparency by Sigfridsson. His instinctive ability to voice and shade the music was admirable, and even when textures got more complex and cluttered, vision and pulse were never in doubt.

Also familiar were Alexander Scriabin’s Prelude and Nocturne (Op.9), composed after straining his right hand from over-practicing. While the former was chaste in textural simplicity, the latter was a ravishing love song, its Chopinesque melody sung above over harp-like accompaniment and climaxing in a fiendishly dizzying cadenza.

The art of making one hand sound like two came to full fruition in Leopold Godowsky’s 53 polyphonic rearrangements of Frederic Chopin’s Etudes. Of these densely-packed finger-twisters, he wrote 22 for left hand alone, earning him the moniker “Disciple of the left hand”. Sigfridsson played five of these, warming up with No.44 in F minor and No.45a in D flat major, both based on Chopin’s lesser-known Trois Nouvelles Etudes (Three New Etudes).

Even in these “simpler” numbers, Sigfridsson unlocked their secrets with consummate ease. Then came the heavy duty studies. No.22 in C sharp minor is based on the fiery Revolutionary Etude (Op.10 No.12), where he almost came unstuck but soldiered on to an emphatic conclusion.

The tender melody of No.5 in D flat major (after Op.10 No.3) was retained, but its central section saw a departure in thematic material with its own inherent difficulties ingeniously sorted out. The set concluded with No.43 in C sharp minor (after Op.25 No.12), where Sigfridsson’s thunderous response to the so-called Ocean Etude’s relentless waves of sound was wholly appropriate.

The second half saw both hands united for three pieces from Franz Liszt’s ten-movement cycle Harmonies poetiques et religieuses (Poetic and Religious Harmonies). Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude (Benediction of God in Solitude) highlighted the left hand’s baritone melody sung over the right hand’s filigreed accompaniment.

This most sublime of essays then shifted to the tolling bells of Funerailles, where mourning gave way to the left hand’s octave stampede, supposedly simulating the Polish cavalry charge in memory of Chopin. Cantique d’amour (Song of Love), which closed the set, was the triumph of wondrous melody.

A departure from all that barnstorming, Sigfridsson’s sumptuously-voiced encore of Jean Sibelius’s The Spruce (Op.75 No.5) from The Trees put intimacy ahead of bluster.