Ignas Maknickas – finds a home in an artistic oasis between the Gherkin and the Shard

Ignas Maknickas and Wouter Valvekens Music at the Matthiesen Gallery “If Music be the food of love please,please play on”

Fascinating to be at Ignas Maknickas Wigmore debut after hearing him at the beginning of his studies here in London when he played the Mozart Double concerto with Alim Baesembayev in the RAM Piano Festival.
Alim has gone on to a glorious victory in the Leeds and judging by what we heard today it is just a question of time before Ignas too receives his just recognition
A young enormously talented Lithuanian pianist with a fluidity of sound and an enviable ease and fluency at the keyboard who has gradually realised that as Curzon said,playing the piano is 90% work and 10 % a God given talent possessed by a rare few.
Showing now a mastery and authority that could allow him to take us into a magic sound world that is of those very few blessed artistic souls .
Sounds that not many even know exist or imagine that can be conjured out of a box of hammers and strings with the ease of a master magician .
This is what we heard today from the very first magic notes played with an ease and fluidity the belied the tension that he must have been suffering with a major London debut in his hands .
I have heard him play the Schubert Sonata several times this year but never as today.It was Fou Ts’ong who said that it is easier to be intimate in a big hall than vice versa.The Wigmore hall is the ideal size with its resonance and walls that have been witness to some of the greatest chamber music performances of the past century.
Ignas rose to the challenge and obviously relished every minute as was obvious from the ravishing opening colours to the aristocratic ‘joie de vivre’ he brought to Schubert’s final Allegro ma non troppo.
A scherzo that was a lesson on how to play with charm, grace and beauty and not just speed and the worst sort of Beethovenian brutality.Has the Trio ever sounded so absolutely right just as did the rude interruptions of G in the last movement?
Everything fell wonderfully into place in a musical conversation that held us mesmerised for almost thirty five minutes.
It should have been forty had he not decided to leave out the bars that Schubert penned to return to the opening exposition.
Arrau and Serkin would not have been amused.Schiff simply says who are we to decide that we know better than the composer?
Richter clocking in at almost an hour with slower tempi that lesser mortals would ever have thought possible also never excluded the composers repeats.
Ignas’s sense of flow and architectural shape was remarkable and accounted for a faster than usual ‘Molto moderato’ first movement that after the initial surprise worked so beautifully without any artificial tampering with the overall pulse.Wondrous colours would appear very discreetly in the tenor or thumb register that would be like jewels glittering in this golden paradise.The Andante sostenuto was played simply and beautifully with again flowing tempi that allowed the music to unfold with such naturalness.A central episode like a corteo constantly and respectfully moving forward .

To make a London debut playing Schubert’s last Sonata is throwing down the gauntlet indeed especially here in the Wigmore Hall where only the most serious musicians are allowed to tread.
Ignas came out triumphantly …….But no it was Schubert that came out triumphantly – Ignas was simply the medium between us and the composer!There can be no greater compliment than that for a debut recital!
One knew four or five years ago that here was a remarkably gifted young man.
I am reminded of what Serkin remarked to Richard Good on listening to Murray Perahia :”You told me he was good but you did not tell me HOW good!”
Bravo Ignas you have done justice to your birthright.
You don’t choose to be talented it chooses you and it is a big responsability to give up your youth to create a thing of beauty that brings joy to others.
What better way to finish this recital than to return to the wondrous sound world with which he had opened so we could begin to realise that the magic box of jewels he had shared with us had come full circle perchance to dream once more.

Ignas Maknickas at St Marys.A poet speaks with simplicity and fluidity

Ignas Maknickas at St James’s Piccadilly a great artist in the making

Ignas Maknickas fluidity and romance for the Imogen Cooper Music Trust