MICHEL DALBERTO Piano Recital / Review

 

MICHEL DALBERTO Piano Recital

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory 

Recording Studio

Tuesday (28 October 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 30 October 2025 with the title "French pianist Michel Dalberto plays with passion and purpose in jam-packed 105-minute recital".

Some 47 years ago, French pianist Michel Dalberto was awarded First Prize at the 1978 Leeds International Piano Competition. Now at the age of 70, he rolled back the decades to perform a 105-minute piano recital without a break. Never has so many notes been packed within a showing that did not look out of place at the Singapore International Piano Festival.

Not to be typecast as a French music specialist, he opened with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sonata No.23 in F minor (Op.57), also known as the Appassionata. Although the venue had been switched from the conservatory’s spacious concert hall to its much smaller recording studio, no concession needed to be made for sound production.

Photo: Lucas Kwai Ming Yang

Dalberto played with fire, purpose and projection, yet was careful to differentiate between quieter sections and those with barnstorming. There was little to no banging, yet every note was made to count. The central movement’s variations unfolded majesterially before the finale’s unrelenting wave of perpetual motion threatened to boil over. He was in perfect control throughout and defined what passion was all about.

Then came the French segment, where three composers were united not so much by nationality and location, but by aspirations and aesthetics.

Photo: Lucas Kwai Ming Yang

In the First Book of Images of Claude Debussy, Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water) was distinguished by Dalberto’s deft pedal-work. While this spelt Impressionism on the surface, it also possessed an underlying spiritual thread that continued into the formal neoclassical lines of Hommage a Rameau (Homage To Rameau) and the chattering rumbles of the closing Mouvement.

The bygone Belle Epoque world of Gabriel Faure did not seem so far away. While the innate lyricism of his Impromptu No.3 in A flat major (Op.34) could have been more fluently voiced, the long-breathed beauty of Nocturne No.6 in D flat major (Op.63) was handled with such poise that one was sorry it had to end.

Faure was the teacher of Maurice Ravel, whose three-movement Sonatine seemed like an unbroken continuation of his sound world. The central Mouvement de Menuet, a courtly dance, was played with a detachment that seemed distant initially, but soon warmed up to become the work’s glowing and beating heart. The finale’s whirlwind seemed to echo the last movements of the Beethoven and Debussy works.

Dalberto, who was hitherto silent, finally waxed lyrical about his final piece, Franz Liszt’s Reminiscences de Norma. Also called the Norma Fantasy, this was far more than a medley of popular melodies from Vincenzo Bellini’s bel canto opera about a fallen Druid priestess, but full-blown conflation of virtuoso ideas wrapped up in a compact 17-minute musical present.

Photo: Lucas Kwai Ming Yang

All of Liszt’s finger-twisting complexities and Bellini’s gift of melody came to fruition through Dalberto’s unerring vision. This guided its gripping narrative from opening trumpet fanfares, the heroine’s angst and loves all through to her final and fatal conflagration. After this thrilling ride, there was no need for an encore, as everything had been said and done.