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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
October 3, 2016
Three composers, Mozart, Schubert and Chopin, among the greatest who ever lived. Very different in many ways — Mozart the child prodigy, celebrated throughout the then-civilised world, transforming virtually every musical genre to which he turned his hand (and he turned his hand to most), as a child he toured the then-civilised work before ending his days in Vienna; Schubert the supreme composer of song, virtually unknown in his own lifetime, the only one of the great "Viennese" composers actually to be born in the city; Chopin, another youthful prodigy, who laid bare the soul of the piano like no other and spent most of his working life in exile.
And yet in one regard they were the same: none of the three lived to see his fortieth birthday.
These three, in many ways very different, composers provided the music for Arthur Rowe's superb recital on Monday.
The music was performed chronologically; moreover, the age of the composer of each sonata similarly increased: Mozart's K.332 was composed when he was twenty-two, Schubert's D.894 when he was twenty-nine and Chopin's Op.58 at the age of thirty-four.
Mozart's finest piano music, it has long seemed to me, is in the concertos and some of the chamber music (the piano trios and quartets). Rowe performed the F major sonata with elegance and grace; the drama of the first movement's development was firmly and finely controlled; the adagio was songful and quite lovely; the finale bouncy and almost puckish. I greatly enjoyed the false ending and then the almost throwaway real one, which Rowe played knowingly but not archly.
Schubert, unlike Mozart and Chopin, was an indifferent pianist, yet his piano sonatas form a major part of his oeuvre. Robert Schumann called the G major sonata, D.894 "the most perfect of his sonatas in form and spirit".
Rowe immediately adopted a warmer, more "Romantic" sound for the Schubert, whose solemn and concentrated opening reminds one that the angel of death always seems to be hovering over the composer's late works. The movement's development was powerful with excellent dynamics.
The slow movement, with its cantabile theme and blustery subsidiary subject nicely contrasted the two ideas and the close was beautiful.
The minuet was a great favourite during Schubert's lifetime and it is easy to understand the attraction, from the marche militaire-style opening to the gemütlich trio. In some ways the music seems to look forward to Schumann.
The finale was given a carefree air, although once again we remind ourselves that this is late Schubert and that he was aware that he was not a well man. There is darkness in the music, although it is essentially optimistic. Rowe guided the movement unerringly to its gentle ending.
Although Chopin is, for many, the composer par excellence for the piano, his piano sonatas only number three — and the first of them, composed at the age of seventeen, is rarely heard. In any case, despite the greater maturity of his two later sonatas, it is arguable that Chopin was happiest and most successful with less formal musical structures, particularly those which he either created or made his own: ballades, mazurkas and nocturnes, for example.
Chopin's B minor sonata, Op.58, was composed in 1844, during the last happy summer he spent with Georges Sand.
Rowe demonstrated his versatility with a superbly idiomatic account of the sonata, from its torrential opening to its dizzying final pages. His rubato — that feature by which so much Chopin playing is judged — was excellent and natural-sounding.
Perhaps the highlight was the largo, focused and concentrated, Rowe's limpid pianism was unutterably gorgeous.
I realise that this recital was held on a wet Monday evening in autumn, but for a recital by one of Victoria's outstanding musicians, which should have been packed to the rafters with a queue of disappointed would-be attendees left in the cold, the hall was disappointingly un-full.
But for those who did make the effort, that effort was more than rewarded.
Another exceptional evening from Arthur Rowe.
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