Just a month on from his previous recital at St James’s Piccadilly there has been a transformation of a pianist from a promising student to a mature artist. Winning a scholarship to continue his studies with Norma Fisher at the RCM together with a confirmation of his talent with an award from the Weir Trust via the Keyboard Trust, are all things that have given this young man a sense of authority and conviction that is apparent from his interpretation of the Beethoven Bagatelles op 126.
Over the past month they have grown in stature and with a maturity that is quite astonishing. A trip to France to play in the En blanc e noir Festival seems to have ignited in this young artist a burning sense of conviction that before seemed more on the surface. Playing now with real weight and having acquired a considerable technical mastery from his studies with Jan Loefller his recital today in St James’s was a revelation of how talent of promise can flower. I am sure that with the guidance of Norma Fisher it will blossom into an artist of considerable stature.
Very mature and deeply felt introductions to the works he played were mirrored in performances of great depth and profundity. His playing of Messiaen I had noted at the beginning of last month with a deeply moving account of ‘Le Baiser.’ Today he played an early Prelude by Messiaen : ‘La Colombe’ with the same luminosity and questioning dialogue of etherial mystery. It was played with a knowing weight and authority with a kaleidoscopic range of sounds of radiance and beauty.
Liszt’s ‘La lugubre gondola’ was given a deep brooding intensity of continual uncertainty .Played with a sensitivity of balance as this is a young musician who listens to himself playing with a poetic soul that delves deeply into the mood of the piece and it’s significance. Technical considerations are not questioned as we are propelled into a world of a burning insistence of passionate innermost intensity that ends in a state of oblivion that is shocking as its is harrowing.
It was an orchestral colour that he brought to ‘Bénédiction’ as his whole body was moving with the music as though riding on a continuous natural wave of musical sounds. I have often been amazed by Arcadi Volodos of how the physical shape of his movements mirror the sounds and shapes that he is conjuring in music. It is rare to see a young artist free to move in such an undemonstrative way because it is so natural and unaffected. A natural impulse like trees rooted in the ground but with the branches free to move as the wind catches them. Poetic playing of radiance and flowing beauty with washes of sound on which the melodic line floated with passionate intensity. Always a deep anchor in the bass that gives such strength to the structure and architectural shape of a work that can sometimes appear so fragmented. There was an aristocratic control at the climax that was really of great maturity. Rarely have I heard this beautiful work played as one as this young man showed us today.
The clapping had stopped but Max with a burning desire to communicate came back on stage determined to share with us Ravel’s ‘Pavane’ that was part of his overall conception of a programme that he had envisaged as ‘virtuality and transcendence’. A performance of glowing beauty but above all of simplicity and poetic complicity.
Winner of The Liszt Society International Piano Competition and the Junior Wales International Piano Festival 2025, Max Walsh has completed his studies at Junior Royal Birmingham Conservatoire with Head of Keyboard Jan Loefller.
Max has been awarded a full scholarship to study Piano and Composition at the Royal College of Music, studying piano with Norma Fisher. Christopher Axworthy praised his “youthful burning passion,” describing him as “a young man born to play the piano… at only 18, his potential is enormous and may know no bounds.” Max is funded with the generous support of Dr K.R. Weir’s legacy through the Keyboard Charitable Trust, where he is a new artist. He is also supported by Talent Unlimited. Max has performed as a soloist at London’s Regent Hall, St Mary’s Perivale, and Montpellier’s Un piano sous les arbres festival. He has benefitted from masterclasses with Boris Giltburg, Joanna MacGregor, and Julian Lloyd Webber. Max was also one of five finalists of the 2025 BBC Young Composer competition. Presented in association with Liszt Society
Messiaen Préludes (Preludes) are a 1928–1929 set of eight pieces by French composer Olivier Messiaen , which were written when the composer was 20 years old and studying at the Conservatoire de Paris. He considered it to be his first work of any value. The compositions are based on Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition that are modes or scales that fulfill specific criteria relating to their symmetry and the repetition of their interval groups. They also betray an influence of Debussy’s preludes
They were premiered by the composer in a private performance at the Concerts Durand in Paris on 28 January 1930.
Liszt La lugubre gondola S 220/1
Liszt’s idea for the work came from seeing the funeral processions on Venice’s Grand Canal from his window at the Palazzo Vendramin, where he stayed as Richard Wagner’s guest during the winter of 1882/83. Wagner was already ill at the time and would die from a heart attack that coming February, and as Liszt noted himself his musical preoccupation with the funeral gondolas during his stay was as if in premonition of Wagner’s own journey on the canal only six weeks later. As with many of Liszt’s compositions from the 1880s it’s written in a harsh, barren musical language, which in of itself seems to be born out of death and decay. It differs from the mighty Funérailles for instance from 35 years before in that the music is descriptive rather than expressive, and has an unbroken narrative arch. Liszt’s vision is clearly given, yet personally I fail to see a worldly event in the piece. It seems to take place in a misty dreamworld, and the scope of it is such that it rather brings the thoughts to Hades than Venice.
Ravel Jeux d’eau
In 1901, Maurice Ravel was aged 26 and had yet to make an impression on the French musical scene. He had failed to win any prizes as a student at the Paris Conservatoire and was expelled on that account. As a former student he was permitted to attend the classes of his teacher Gabriel Fauré, who thought highly of him and encouraged him. Ravel dedicated Jeux d’eau and his String Quartet “à mon cher maître Gabriel Fauré” Perlemuter commented that the piece “opens up new horizons in piano technique, especially if one remembers that Debussy’s Jardins sous la pluie was not written until two years later, in 1903”. The first public performance was given by the pianist Ricardo Viñesi n a concert presented by the Société nationale de musique on 5 April 1902, at which Ravel’s ‘Pavane pour une infante défunte’ was also premieredRavel’s biographer Arbie Orenstein comments that among the other critics and the public the Pavane was found elegant and charming, but Jeux d’eau was thought to be cacophonic and excessively complicated. “It now appears that the Pavaneis a minor work, as the composer himself acknowledged, while Jeux d’eau is firmly established as an important landmark in the literature of the piano”.
Franz Liszt Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude—the third piece from his 1853 piano cycle Harmonies poétiques et religieuses—is considered to be one of his most significant works for solo piano, but its roots in the eponymous poem by Alphonse de Lamartine have yet to receive full consideration. Scholarship on the Bénédiction and the Harmonies as a whole has tended to focus more on the cycle’s convoluted twenty-year genesis than on the poetic cycle that inspired it. This omission is consistent with the persistent belief that Liszt was haphazard in his application of programmatic titles. However, Liszt’s Bénédiction closely corresponds to Lamartine’s poem in its content and form, showing the composer’s indebtedness to French Romanticism. This article reveals connections between sacred and pastoral tropes in Lamartine’s poetry and Liszt’s music, as well as between long-breathed poetic and musical phrases. In its sensitive interpretation of Lamartine’s poem, Liszt’s Benediction stands as his most successful meditation on the poet’s work as a whole. The broader ramifications of these findings suggest a reevaluation of Liszt’s approach to program music, and of program music in general.
https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2024/03/20/christopher-axworthy-dip-ram-aram/
. Un piano sous les arbres
ChristopherAxworthy-MusicCommentary 