A PIANO JOURNEY:
FROM BOHEMIA TO BROADWAY
KAREL KOSAREK Piano Recital
Victoria Concert Hall
Friday (4 July 2025)
This review was published in The Straits Times on 7 July 2025 with the title "Delightful programme of Bohemian and jazz selections".
The Singapore International Piano Festival has come and gone, but the piano music continues. This weekend, Victoria Concert Hall hosted another two fine pianists. The first was veteran Czech pianist Karel Košárek, replacing his young and prodigious compatriot, the indisposed Jan Schulmeister.
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| Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884) |
Performing on a Czech-made Petrof Monsoon grand piano, Košárek’s delightful programme of dance and song began in his homeland of Bohemia before crossing the Atlantic to the United States of America. Coaxing a rich yet mellow sound, without being over-bright in upper registers, Bedrich Smetana’s Skocna (Hop Dance) from the second book of Czech Dances was a virtuoso study of light touch and vibrant rhythm.
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| Photo: Guan Ziwen |
This was in the same popular vein as the well-known dances from his opera The Bartered Bride. Just as nationalistic was the Fantasia on Czech Folk Songs, which displayed a Lisztian level of technical prowess. This was well-articulated, with emphasis on crisply detached notes and no smudging of textures by over-pedalling.
By way of contrast, two of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt’s Petrarch Sonnets (Nos. 104 & 123) from the Italian Book of his Years of Pilgrimage were oases of lyricism, dressed up with the filigree of florid cadenzas. Still from Bohemia, the well-travelled and highly cosmopolitan Bohuslav Martinu’s Three Czech Dances of 1926 – the Obkrocak (Stepping Dance), Dupak (Stomp Dance) and Polka - were eclectic, with spicy dissonances, quirkily kinetic rhythms and jazz influences that reflected 20th century trends but without forsaking their folk roots.
All this set the stage for Košárek’s second half, which opened with six Preludes by George Gershwin. Did the American song-writer and jazz legend not compose just three of these? The inclusion of three posthumously published pieces was a revelation and provided pure aural pleasure. It was hard to dislike the playful insouciance of Novelette in Fourths, contrasted with the Chopinesque vibe of Rubato and the bluesy languor of Sleepless Night. The original three Preludes were performed idiomatically and with clear rhythmic insight.
More virtuoso-oriented were the musings of Austrian pianist Friedrich Gulda, who worshipped Bach and Beethoven but regularly moonlighted as a jazz pianist, sometimes playing in the nude. His Exercise No.9 from Play Piano Play was pure fun, then launching into the syncopated Bachian tribute that is his wild and anarchic Prelude and Fugue, later popularised by Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
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| Photo: Guan Ziwen |
The main work of the half was Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Although he performed the published solo version which had some cuts, Košárek tore through its pages with a fearless abandon, raising a huge cheer from the clearly enthused audience.
His well-received encores included Lou Busch’s riotous boogie-woogie arrangement of Aram Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance and a welcome return to Bohemia with the simple unadorned beauty of Smetana’s Poetic Polka No.2 in G minor (from Op.8).
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