Luca Lione is back in town with Warren- Mailley Smith’s Grand Tour of Italian piano music.
Two Waltzes by Rendano and Puccini were enough to set the scene in the intimate candlelit space of St Mary Le Strand. “Piccolo Valzer” was published in September 1894 and the inspiration for the work was suggested by the rocking of a boat on Lake Massaciuccoli, where Puccini loved to go fishing. It was subsequently re-elaborated by the composer and became one of the best known opera arias, Musetta’s solo “Quando me n’vo” in “La Bohème”. Played with glowing radiance and warmth by this young Italian pianist already on his third visit to London and now a fully fledged Professor at the Trapani Conservatory in Sicily.
This was combined with a contemporary of Puccini , Alfonso Rendano with his Valzer Triste that was more elaborate than Puccini’s but no less heartrending and exquisitely played by Luca a fellow Calabrian. The warmth and intense emotions are very much part of the Italian operatic make up as Luca showed us today with playing of whispered ravishing beauty and he was happy to play by great request the Puccini once more as an encore.
The concert had also included three Sonatas by Scarlatti with some scintillating playing in K 322 and 455 with its intricate repeated notes played with jewel like brilliance, contrasting with the unexpected intensity of the early K.77.
Of course no visit to Italy would be complete without a visit to the magical city of Venice and it was with Chopin’s Barcarolle that Luca was able to show us the mastery and poetic beauty of perhaps the greatest work of Chopin, with it’s continuous outpouring of song floating on the gentle undulation of the waves in a lagoon that was of Chopin’s dream of a city that he never actually visited.Luca paired it with the longest of Chopin’s Nocturnes ,op 48 n. 1, that is a true tone poem, where the bel canto of Bellini is transformed into a dramatic outpouring of passionate intensity and poetic inspiration. It was in these two works of Chopin that Luca could reveal his mastery and commanding authority allied to a sensibility of glowing beauty and simplicity.
Of course he chose to close his Grand Tour recital with the turbulent Sonata in F sharp minor op 26 n 2 by Clementi. Clementi an Italian transferred for most of his life to London where he developed a piano bequeathed to the world by Bartolomeo Cristoferi and transformed it into an instrument that had a range from the human voice to the sounds of a full orchestra. Clementi was not only a piano manufacturer and publisher but a virtuoso pianist and composer of over one hundred Sonatas.His Gradus ad Parnassum is still the diet for so many aspiring young pianists who wish to learn the tricks of the trade! And it was the tricks of the trade that Luca was able to show us with the scintillating brilliance and masterly control that he brought to this Sonata that brought this short visit to Italy to a brilliant close.
ChristopherAxworthy-MusicCommentary 