Andras Schiff takes us on a voyage of discovery with the ‘variation’ tonight. On Saturday I was told that he played Beethoven ‘Tempest’ Sonata and the Schubert ‘Fantasy ‘Sonata. Maestro Schiff does not like to announce his programmes months or years in advance and prefers to tell us .more personally, from the stage his choice. As he says the public know that he will stick to a repertoire of the great classics where a lifetime is not enough to delve into the meaning of these great works, and so he chooses to leave the Russian school to others!
What a privilege to be able to hear such continual beauty and a simplicity that many search for, but never seem to find .
Music just poured from his fingers that were merely servants for a searing authority and a musicianship of selfless humility .
But there was a great musical personality too that could delve into Bach’s counterpoints and highlight things that we seem never to have been aware of before. I have only ever heard this early Bach capriccio played with such character from Rosalyn Tureck. She seemed to bounce on the seat as the journey was about to begin and her ornamentation was as crystal clear as today. Serkin’s journey, too, seemed much more adventurous and desperate than the gentle joy of today’s happy departure of a beloved brother
But today there was a luminosity where the opening ornamentation could almost have been Rameau such was the character imbued in every note that flowed from the piano with such loving,glowing beauty.
Haydn Variations in F minor were created before our eyes with operatic personalities that entered and exited the stage with exhilarating freshness and astonishing eloquence.
Beethoven’s op 109 was a wave of undulating beauty that had commenced somewhere in the stratosphere and by some miracle Schiff had drawn it down to earth to remind us what sublime beauty was hidden in Beethoven’s soul.
A ‘Scherzo’ where it was the chiming bass that called the tune, before the unusually whispered trio, heralding the return of normality before our ascent into paradise with the heavenly theme and variations of ethereal beauty.
Even in the third variation it was the counterpoints that were given precedence over what is usually rattled off like a Czerny study . Highlighting Beethoven’s audacious descending intervals in what is often played as a call to arms . Here the intervals just glowed with poignant significance before bathed in a whirlpool of magical thematic arabesques. Leading to the disintegration and miraculous reconstruction of the theme on a stream of sounds that were not mundane trills but ethereal vibrations on which Beethoven could at last envisage the peace that would be his before reaching his three score years .
After the interval our genial master of ceremonies announced quite simply that he would now like to share thirty variations with us by J S Bach, probably the greatest variations ever penned.
Words are superfluous as they were with Wilhelm Kempff ( and I imagine with Edwin Fischer who I never heard live) . A kapellmeister where music just flows with humility and beauty as the piano is no longer a box of hammers and strings but a celestial instrument lent to us by the angels to enrich and ennoble us poor mortals in a world where priorities have been lost and forgotten for too long
It was a great privilege to be present tonight and it will be a memory that will remain, enrich, and sustain me for long to come. Amen.
We were not on our knees but everyone in the hall were on their feet, at the end of this simple message of beauty that Maestro Schiff had brought to share with us today.
ChristopherAxworthy-MusicCommentary 