Review: Boris Giltburg (piano), Chopin and Rachmaninov
The much-anticipated, multi-award winning Russian-born piano virtuoso Boris Giltburg arrived at the Cambridge Music Festival on Wednesday evening to give a recital of works by Chopin and Rachmaninov. He was welcomed by a packed house at West Road Concert Hall and began his recital with Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor.
This sonata is one of Chopin’s most well-known works, notably because of its famous 3rd movement – a solemn and emotional melody framed by the inexorable tread of a Marche funèbre.
The two first movements are each darkly tempestuous in their own way. The scherzo contains an element of unease with an ominous trill anticipating the threatening one so prominent in the slow measure of the march to follow.
The final movement is a sudden and eerie whirlwind of notes without a perceptible theme which rapidly dispels the mood of the Marche funèbre. Lasting for little more than 90 seconds it seems somehow oddly out of place with what has come before and could equally have been perhaps one of Chopin’s 24 Preludes.
The last of the four Ballades in F minor came next, a wonderful work whose magically evocative principal theme is subject to a sequence of bold energetic transformations.
Giltburg followed this in turn with Chopin’s Scherzo no. 4 in E major Op. 54), its rapidly ascending and descending scales enclosing another example of this composer’s heart-stopping gift for lyricism.
Each of the compositions we heard before the interval was delivered by a pianist wholly in command of the keyboard, whether in the softest melodic tones he created or in percussive passages frightening in their power as in the scherzo of the sonata.
At the piano Giltburg was reminiscent of one or two former celebrated pianists. His nose firmly to the-keyboard and with a low posture that required a bespoke piano stool, he inevitably recalled Glenn Gould; and Horowitz, too, sharing with that pianistic prodigy his ability to tuck in the pinkie finger of his right hand, and yet somehow manage the most astronomical feats of pianism without employing it.
Giltburg has attributed his lifelong love for Rachmaninov’s music from his first hearing the 24 Preludes at age 7 or 8, and in particular those in G minor op. 23 No.5 and G sharp minor op 32 No.12, both of which we heard among the six that he played. He has said that he thinks of each Prelude as a world separate to itself and of how each touches the heart and elicits our strongest, deepest emotions with every turn of phrase.
Rachmaninov took almost 20 years to achieve the complete sequence of 24 Preludes and this allows us, says Giltburg, to watch the composer proceed from what he calls a lush early Romanticism to a more muscular and modern profile. In character, mood, texture and colour, in harmonies and rhythms alike we discover a development as we listen.
As the recital progressed and the more one marvelled at the astonishing ability of such a virtuoso the more one felt inclined to consider the view that, the piano after all is just a machine, and those who are keyboard prodigies are those who know best how to operate it.
Well, maybe so, but as Alan Rusbridger, former Editor of The Guardian who gave up the piano at 16 said –‘everybody who gives up the piano . . . it’s usually their biggest regret in life.’ And in his memorably titled book –‘Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible’, he engagingly describes his year-long mid-life experience of learning to play (and then playing it in public), Chopin’s Ballade No. 1.
Your reviewer, too, who can play the piano a little bit, and who has viewed Rusbridger’s commendable attempt, similarly aspires to the seat of such gods as Boris Giltburg. However, a book which he’s just finished reading is more suited to his current level, I’m afraid, ‘The Perfect Wrong Note’ (William Westney).
Giltburg concluded his recital with one of Rachmaninov’s still relatively lesser-known works, the Piano Sonata No.2 in B flat minor, op.36. It was written contemporaneously with the composer’s much more familiar work, his choral symphony ‘The Bells’ (1913) with which it has many similarities.
All his life Rachmaninov was haunted by the sound of Russian church bells, and the tumultuous opening movement of the sonata contains runs of bell-like sonorities throughout. Later (in 1931) the composer revised the sonata (the version we heard at the recital) to bring it more into line with his current thinking on keyboard style.
This was an exacting composition with which to conclude an already demanding succession of major Romantic piano works. But Boris Giltburg rose perfectly to the formidable challenge with his amazing and sustained virtuosity fresh and undimmed as in the first notes of his recital. Two further Preludes of each of the evening’s composers were this wonderful pianist’s gift to the audience for the standing ovation he had so much deserved.
JOHN GILROY
