Sabina Suciu from the class of Dmitri Alexeev and Vitaly Pisarenko playing at the Royal College of Music for her end of year performance.
Having damaged her hand a few days before there was some doubt whether she would be able to perform today. Lady pianists are in may ways more courageous than their counterparts as she was to to demonstrate today!
Just three works by Granados ,Schumann and Prokofiev showed her fearless mastery and musicianship. Performing in the RCM attic, The Parry Room ,with its wooden floor and sloped ceiling it gave all the appearance of being on a ship. The only thing missing ,of course, was a little breeze !
Playing on a piano of Italian rather than German pedigree, as her mentor pointed out the subtlety of her ‘p’s’ was not always possible, Fazioli being renowned for its clarity and brilliance rather than warmth and resilience.
However Sabina rose to the challenge with a very musicianly performance of dances by Granados. Apparently dances by Spanish or French composers are part of the curriculum and it was interesting for me to hear a work that was completely knew to me until today.
But it was the Schumann Sonata op 22 where Sabina could show us her passionate intensity and technical mastery allied to a musicianship that could carve out the architectural line of a work that in lesser hands can seem very fragmented. The ‘Andantino getragen ‘ based on Schumann’s song ‘In the Autumn’ was played with sentiment but never sentimentality. The ‘Scherzo’ fearlessly played as Schumann’s marking of ‘Sehr rash und markiert’ could not have been a more accurate description of her heroic playing, especially knowing that she was recovering from a sprained hand!
At Clara Schumann’s request, the original finale, marked ‘Presto passionato’ was replaced with a less difficult movement in 1838. Clara considered it “not too incomprehensible,” though she admitted that she would “play it if necessary, but the masses, the public, and even the connoisseurs for whom one is really writing, don’t understand it.”
Sabina played the alternative Rondo which is most usually played today and the one published in Schumann’s lifetime. The original ‘Presto passionato’ was in fact only published in 1981.
However this final movement is still marked ‘Prestissimo Quasi cadenza’ and Sabina played it with a control that did not deny technical brilliance and passionate intensity. One should always remember that Robert was a student of Clara’s father and was forced to stop playing the piano when he injured his hand on a mechanical contraption made to force the fingers to do what nature never intended for them.
The final work in this short recital was Prokofiev’s Toccata. A work that another young lady pianist made famous , and although Sabina does not have yet the range of colour of Martha Argerich she does have a remarkable technical preparation and control allied to a temperament of burning intensity.
It was nice to see a full house of fellow students many of whom I hope to listen to in the near future but three in particular I know well.
ChristopherAxworthy-MusicCommentary 