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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
July 8, 2011
The Golden Age of the composer-pianist ended, by common consent, with the deaths of that generation of pianists born just before the turn of the twentieth century. A line stretching from Mozart and Beethoven to Grainger and Rachmaninov came to an end after almost two centuries.
Or so it would once have seemed. For those willing to stray a little off the main road of the top ten concertos and the top twenty sonatas, it is clear that the line has never been broken and that such figures - familiar and less so - as Artur Schnabel, Kaikhrosu Sorabji, Ronald Stevenson, John Ogdon and Frederic Rzewski kept the flame alive even when the night seemed at its darkest.
More recently there has been something of a resurgence and pianists such as Stephen Hough and Marc-André Hamelin have been both composing and including their own works in their recitals.
To this illustrious panoply of names we must now, it seems, add another: that of Walter Prossnitz, who opened the second half of his superb recital on Friday night with half of his Twenty Four Preludes.
In his commendably lucid, brief and - not always the case in the Phillip T Young - audible spoken introductions to the pieces, Prossnitz made it clear that the example of Chopin was an inspiration in more ways than one, and that certain of his preludes were actually derived from those of Chopin.
Not that this was at all obvious: this was no Godowskian exercise in inflation and hyper-virtuosity, in fact the first two preludes, both derived from Chopin's famous E minor, struck me as sparse and almost cold.
Overall, the set displayed a genuine compositional personality and covered a range of moods: the warm, rhapsodic feel of number five (the numbers refer to the complete set, but rely on the accuracy of my notes, so...), the darkness of number six, the modal feel of number ten, the dancing rhythms of number eight.
I particularly enjoyed number seventeen, after Chopin, but with an exotic feel, which put me in mind (I think it was the right hand flourishes) of Sorabji's Pastiche on the Merchant's Song from Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko.
Throughout all these, Prossnitz played with the authority one expects of the composer. He should be encouraged to return and give us the complete set.
The final works in the programme were two of the Transcendental Etudes - unless I am mistaken, they were the untitled second study in A minor and Wilde Jagd - by perhaps the archetypical Composer-Pianist: Ferenc Liszt.
In these remarkable works one can hear - and, if appropriately seated, see - Liszt inventing modern keyboard techniques, particularly when played with the almost-casual virtuosity Prossnitz displayed. A highly suitable birthday tribute.
César Franck's Prelude, Aria and Final is perhaps slightly less well-known than its sibling - the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue - although neither is exactly a popular classic.
Fortunately, from my point of view, Franck's solo piano music contains little of the cloying chromaticism of his orchestral music and none of the perfervid emotionalism of, say, the piano quintet.
Which does not mean that, despite Prossnitz's excellent playing, I could not have been equally happy had the music been half as long.
The performance itself was first-rate; throughout Prossnitz's control of dynamics, his tonal palette, his handling of the music's sometimes considerable complexity and his wonderful cantabile were all at the service of the music itself. For a brief period he even convinced this decided non-Franckophile that he was mistaken.
I have no such doubts about the music of Joseph Haydn, whose E major piano sonata opened the recital.
There were, I know, some raised eyebrows at the huge tone Prossnitz employed from the very beginning of the work.
I may, of course, be completely off the mark but, after my own eyebrows had resumed their normal position vis-a-vis my personal eyes, I took this to be Prossnitz's way of saying "Dammit! this is not a fortepiano and I am not going to pretend that it is. Moreover, this is great music and I am not going to pretend that it is not."
For me this was a marvellous performance, cleanly articulated and witty in the opening movement, highly concentrated in the slow (with its main theme almost seeming to prefigure that of Beethoven's "Les Adieux"), spirited and lively in the finale.
It has been, by my calculations, a dozen years since Prossnitz last performed in his home town.
I dearly hope that it will not be another dozen before his next appearance. This was one of the most rewarding piano recitals I have attended in quite some time.
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