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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 June 1999 Issue No. 432 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 June 1999 Issue No. 432
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Interview Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Falling, falling soon
By David Blake
European Music Programme, Poland; Pawel Kowalski, pianist; Cairo Opera House Small Hall, 29 May
Pawel Kowalski
If you too are at your last gasp -- not another pianist, I've heard my last piano -- then hang on a bit, don't give up, just find where Kowalski is playing and go hear him and soon you will share the same wings he has.
He has come a long way in a short time. He is not one of us, nor one of them, the players who wallop you in the face with their technique and give only a deep, cool profile. He's a young old-fashioned pianist -- a lover of the poor old thing with the black and white keyboard.
Kowalski hits it, but he is not a terminator in spite of his name. He's never caught Tennessee Williams' street car and could not tie a straight-jacket. The power, certainly, is there, and the threat, but then comes something else.
Pianists, like great singers, are a race apart. They begin at three and go on till 90. No one ever shoots them like they do other artists, because the presence of the piano emanates a special aura of its own. It places everyone, audience and performer alike. No player ever gets away with anything, because the piano will always have the last grin.
Kowalski belongs to that chosen race -- Hungarian, Polish, Russian -- who seem barely to need to be told anything about the instrument. The knowledge of it courses through their blood and they understand it like family. Just watch Kowalski surge into a sequence of notes fiendish enough to twist the hands off, see him accomplish it to perfection and then note how he finishes. He makes a tiny gesture, patting the piano on the back.
Young players with as complete a sense of history as Kowalski are beyond price. They get around in the material world, but they are meditative spirits, outside explanation.
Neither Kowalski nor his programme was dull or conventional, though the compilers of the European Music Programme could have played it safe with the usual, stately old classics. Fortunately, we avoided that side of boredom, which is too familiar to everyone, and to the pianist more than the audience.
The programme began with Alban Berg's Piano Sonata op 1. Forty years ago it would not have been possible for a young pianist like Kowalski to play the Berg sonata as he did this evening, but time irons all things. From 1999 this long turmoil suddenly appears an exercise in melody, form and living excitement.
Kowalski was brusque, and the internal beginnings of the atonal sound were plentiful, though he made an effort to dig out every note of this work's Viennese origins. There were sad dance steps, weak kneed, and falling, falling soon, came Berg's acid tears. His music dates beautifully and while the usual ghosts haunt the piano everything is broken into chips and remnants. There are shadows of Berg's two operatic masterpieces, Wozzeck and Lulu as, through all the chop-chop of the chords and octaves and irritable colour changes the piano shone, sometimes bronze metallic, sometimes silver.
Berg is not lonely music. Sometimes he is horrible, at others caressingly sensual, personal and intimate. He is always there, a guide through the detritus of the 20th century. Everything appears in his music -- Puccini, Stravinsky, Weill and the American musical. All this is music from our dearest, most precious old concert friend, the piano, played and presented by a man young enough to see far into the next century.
Kowalski comes from Warsaw. He has performed everywhere to acclaim and has a big repertoire of contemporary music. He sat bolt upright throughout this long and disturbing concert, not stiff but bien planté, a lovely, confiding and reassuring way to face his best friend. His hands are simple, not flying fish in the air, and there is not the smallest touch of the mad genius of the keyboard in his behaviour. Quite the contrary -- it all looks too easy for him to create these shoals of dazzling thunder.
The other two selections were Andrezej Panufnik and Alexander Scriabin, the Russian incubus. The Scriabin, especially, was outstanding. From where do all the notes come? Who directs such playing? Kowalski produces these effects from a piano, a recalcitrant object made of wood and metal that is suddenly transformed into an artery of lunacy and divine order. Let loose on Bach, what would Kowalski find?
The last group was Chopin. Recently a Cairo pianist, Moushira Issa, played some stirring Chopin at the opera. We had a well laid out pattern. She was helped in her youth by Ignace Tiegerman -- a Pole whom Richard Capell, the stern music critic of London, hailed as supreme among all Chopin players. Kowalski plays this music as Issa did. Every piece was deeply concentrated and sounded new minted. Kowalski flew at the music with devilish glee, polishing off mazurkas and polonaises and high-leaping scherzos -- effortless and full of the things he has, the things that technique alone can never buy.
I Solisti Veneti; director Claudio Scimone; Cairo Opera House Main Hall, 30 May
They may be bees, they certainly move like bees, they make honey like bees, but their entire ensemble is wrapped in finest silk. So there are bees flying the silk road. It is an unbeatable combination, and a very strange one -- almost eerie. Their opening number was from Vivaldi's L'Estro Armonico, which went off like a nuclear missile -- same speed, and almost the same results. Such speed and perfection of detail and colouring has its limitations. You can't go further than this, so why bother at all?
Their perspective of performance is almost a drawback. They move in an arena of their own. A special sound emanates from them; a swarm of bees has it. They are almost deadly in their accuracy. Claudio Scimone's direction, which is well-known in most of the music centres of the world, has a Toscanini-like precision. But Toscanini's perspective was huge. The Solisti are limited to the 18th century, at least in this concert.
If only they had played some Busoni, or Dallapiccola, or Respighi. Occasionally a phrase would emerge from the Vivaldi offerings which took up the entire first half of the concert, and give a tantalising taste of what all their precision and maestria was about. If only the perfect silk screen within which they wrapped themselves could have been torn open, to let out a change of speed, and some heart.
For the Solisti, despite all their dedication, do seem rather heartless. No need to ask for a wrong note, or some such calamity, to give variety; but a change of tone would have given their performance a mood which was lacking -- one of compassion and reality.
We seemed less in a musical sphere, than viewers of something far away up on the ceiling, as if we were gazing into a fresco by Tiepolo -- beautiful, but stuck in place. Music, however, moves, not in tempo only, but in spirit.
Every performer in this orchestra is a virtuoso in his own right, and each is given a chance to shine and amaze. The tiny mandolin concerto by Vivaldi was given a lovely performance, with the mandolin whispering far away on the slopes of Mount Parnassus.
The first violinist, Marco Fornaciari, is a gem, completely and ferociously equipped to sail over and through any complication that even the devil could offer the violin. He seems a thousand-note-and-tone man -- if he's a man at all, and not an immortal, whose performance of Paganini's infernal Carnival of Venice Variations demonstrated an unimagined speed. There was also Clementine Hoogendoorn Scimone on the piccolo in a Vivaldi concerto. She also seemed well nigh immortal.
And then another talent, Lorenzo Guzzoni on the clarinet, to give us melodies from the operas of Rossini, Moses in Egypt and The Lady of the Lake. Rossini, of course, is immortal; and so, it seems, is Guzzoni. His voicing of the master's melodies was the one really shiny item of the evening. His superhuman breath control set the tunes circling up into the spaces of the opera house, knife-sharp, deep of tone, and with sheer audacity in face of all the difficulties involved, which gave the audience a taste of what the great age of Italian Bel Canto must have been like. And he ended with a bristling, shiny long-held high C.
A large audience stamped and shouted for more, and the Solisti even obliged. Immortal to the last.
