HELENE GRIMAUD IN RECITAL / Review

 

HELENE GRIMAUD IN RECITAL

Victoria Concert Hall 

Thursday (17 October 2024) 

This review was published in Bachtrack on 21 October 2024 with the title "Hélène Grimaud splendidly unites the Three Bs in Singapore". 

Outside of the Singapore International Piano Festival, the Singapore Symphony group does not often present piano recitals, but this one was an exception. French pianist Hélène Grimaud, who joined the orchestra on tour to Japan, followed up her performance of Ravel’s G major piano concerto with a solo recital of repertoire which Artur Schnabel described as “better than could be performed”. 

Quite unusually, she performed the two halves of her recital on two different Steinway Ds. The first was a fire engine red beast, famously played by Lang Lang in Singapore’s 60th anniversary mega-concert to a crowd of thousands at the National Stadium in 2015. 

The recital began with Beethoven’s late Sonata No.30 in E major (Op.109), a reading liberal with pedalling, coaxing a luscious sonority with much reverberance. There was no disguising that Beethoven had ushered in the Romantic era, a paradigm progression from his early sonatas influenced by Haydn and Mozart. The Prestissimo central movement was delivered with vehemence, and the finale’s Theme and Variations was distinguished by a beautifully voiced chorale theme. This was followed by some of Beethoven’s most inventive writing, looking ahead to the corresponding movement of his final sonata (Op.111), with resonating trills and the freewheeling approach of a jazzman. 

Some seventy years separated autumnal Beethoven (1822) from late Brahms (1892) but no one would have guessed. Grimaud’s inclusion of two sets of the latter’s piano pieces contrasted Apollo with Dionysus. The Three Intermezzi Op.117 were his “lullabies of grief”, the hymn-like simplicity of the E flat major first then turning into the darker shades of the B flat minor second. The smouldering disquiet generated by Grimaud was gripping, with no relief provided in the even more solemn C sharp minor third. The opening bare octaves were reminiscent of Gregorian chant, then into evolving into rich harmonies which were quintessential Brahms. 

The Seven Fantasies Op.116 which opened the second half were performed on a matte black Steinway D, which had a slightly mellower tone but was no less reverberant. Clearly both pianos had been tuned and voiced by a master, later revealed to be Steinway technician Walter Haass, specially flown in from Western Australia for these two concerts. Impetuosity ruled the opening Capriccio in D minor, the violence of which was a shock to the senses. The aging Brahms still had much fire in his belly, a defiance continuing in other three Capriccios, balanced by calming influences of the Intermezzos. 

The big beefy tone of the final Capriccio in D minor went attacca (without break) into the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, written in the same key. There was simply no time for applause, instead Grimaud steadily built up a Gothic cathedral of sonority, its chordal excesses being a far cry from the original unaccompanied violin Partita No.2 of old Johann Sebastian. This was literally “Bach to the future”, with the 170 intervening years between both composers seemingly erased. Hans von Bülow’s “three Bs of music” – Bach, Beethoven and Brahms – had been seamlessly united in this splendid recital. 

Grimaud returned to the “fire engine” for her three encores, which came from a different world altogether. Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s soothingly sentimental Bagatelle No.2 hovered comfortably between E minor and E major, while Rachmaninov’s Etudes-tableaux in C major and C minor (Op.33 Nos.2 & 3) did the same. Truly a balm for the ears. 

Star Rating: *****

The original Bachtrack review may be found here:

Hélène Grimaud splendidly unites “The Three Bs” in Singapore | Bachtrack

CD Reviews (The Straits Times, September 2016)

RARITIES OF PIANO MUSIC

AT SCHLOSS VOR HUSUM 2015

Danacord 779 / *****

The world’s musical capital of piano esoteria is surely the north German town of Husum, where an annual summer festival is held to celebrate the forgotten alleys and byways of the piano repertoire. The 2015 festival again unearthed a rich vein of gems in the form of concert pieces and encores.

It takes something to omit the likes of Chopin, Schumann or Rachmaninov to present instead music by Alkan, Hummel, Harold Craxton and Mompou, performed with refinement and dedication by the likes of Yuri Favorin, Florian Uhlig, Jonathan Plowright and Jonathan Powell. What about the the music of Issay Dobrowen's Poem (Powell again) or the delights of Carlos Guastavino's La Nina Del Rio Dulce from the loving fingers of Martin Jones? One is unlikely to hear these performed better anywhere else.

Improvisations and jazzed up numbers have a prominent place, not least in Cyprien Katsaris's 18-minute mash-up through Romantic operas, concertos, symphonies and ballets in the manner of Liszt, which was his pre-recital preamble. See if you can name all the tunes. 

Whoever remembers Alexander Zfasman, a Soviet-era bon vivant (an oxymoron if any) whose Fantasy On Themes By Matvei Blanter matches the syncopated best of Zez Confrey or Billy Mayerl? Played with infectious verve by American Alex Hassan, this sums up the heady spirit of one of the world's most special piano festivals bar none.

WATER

HELENE GRIMAUD, Piano

NITIN SAWHNEY, Producer/ Composer

Deutsche Grammophon 479 3426 / **1/2

Even for fans of French pianist Helene Grimaud, this release may come as somewhat of a disappointment. First the music: there are eight short movements of composers musing on the watery realm. The usual suspects are there, with Liszt's Les jeux d'eau a la Villa d'Este and Ravel's Jeux d'eau depicting fountains, Debussy's La Cathedrale Engloutie (The Engulfed Cathedral) and Takemitsu's Rain Tree Sketch II. 

Lesser-known pieces like Faure's Barcarolle No.5, Berio's Wasserklavier, Albeniz's Almeria and a movement from Janacek's In The Mists are also given a hearing. She plays these well but the recorded sound is tinny and over-reverberant, as if to lend the music an added mystique.

Each of the pieces are separated by an interlude, entitled Water – Transition (and there are 7 of them) by British composer-producer Nitin Sawhney. These are little more than bitty morsels of recorded electronic or ambient sounds which do little to enhance the understanding or appreciation of the actual music. 

To conclude, there is an 11-minute so-called bonus track Water Reflections, which reprises a few bars from earlier music and Grimaud plainly reading out their titles and spouting a few choice words. All in all, there are just over 50 minutes of real music in this concept album; the rest is pretentious dross.

CD Reviews (The Straits Times, May 2014)

MOZART Piano Concertos Nos.19 &23

HÉLENE GRIMAUD, Piano

Bavarian Radio Chamber Orchestra

Deutsche Grammophon 477 9849 / ****1/2

Mozart’s piano concertos can be said to be an ultimate form of chamber music, one in which the virtuosic solo keyboard part is so well integrated with the orchestra that the two become inseparable. This is the spirit in which French pianist Hélène Grimaud takes to two of Mozart’s happiest creations in this genre. The F major concerto (No.19) is ebullient as the A major concerto (No.23) is lyrical, with Grimaud’s crisply articulated playing and singing tone the common pleasure. Her understated virtuosity serves the music, even if the choice of Busoni’s cadenza for No.23 (also used by Horowitz) is an unexpected gambit.  

Inserted between the concertos is the concert aria Chio Mi Scordi Di Te? (I Forget You?), comprising a recitative and rondo from a revision of the opera Idomeneo, with soprano Mojca Erdmann. The piano obbligato part comes like a surprise, but acts as an extra voice that comments on the sentiments expressed by the singer. The accompanying DVD includes a video of the lilting Adagio from Piano Concerto No.23 with photographic stills of trees by Mat Hennek, a pleasant but not essential part of a well-conceived and smartly packaged album.

CONCERTI CURIOSI

Charivari Agréable / KAH-MING NG

Signum Classics  SIGCD249/ *****

The baroque concerto was popularised by Antonio Vivaldi who composed more than such 500 examples, including The Four Seasons. This recording delights in the lesser lights of an art form that later gave way to the classical concerto exemplified by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Whoever thought that A Favourite Concerto of 1768 for harpsichord by Pietro Paradies (1709-1791), so-named in order to boost its popularity, would be virtually forgotten today? It’s an enjoyable 12 minutes, longer than the other concertos in this collection, including two cornet concertos by Johan Berlin and Pietro Baldassari. The instrument more associated today with marching bands has a mellower and softer sonority than the mighty trumpet.

                 

Johan Hertel’s Trumpet Concerto No.3 (with soloist Simon Desbruslais) is probably the least obscure work here. Johann Pepusch’s Concerto For 4 Violins deserves more listens, as does Anton Reichenauer’s Oboe Concerto, which is comparable with the best of Albinoni’s better known concertos. Reviving the fortunes of these is the Oxford-based period performance group Charivari Agréable (translated as “Pleasant Tumult”), led on harpsichord by Petaling Jaya native Ng Kah-Ming. The spirited and exemplary performances are hard to dislike, which makes one crave for more of the same.  

What did Helene Grimaud perform as her encores?

Helen Grimaud speaks at the post-concert
Symphony Chat as Maestro Shui Lan looks on.

After performing one of the most exciting and adrenaline-driven performances of Brahms's First Piano Concerto with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra in recent memory, Helene Grimaud obliged with two encores:

1. Chopin Étude No.1 from Trois Nouvelles Études

2. Rachmaninov Étude-tableau in C major, Op.33 No.2

For the record, the SSO under Shui Lan also performed at the Gala Concert on 12 January 2013 Richard Strauss's Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) and the Asian premiere of Christopher Rouse's Third Symphony.