Marco Arcieri who I met earlier this year in Rome at Martha Noguera’s recital at the Circolo degli Esteri and heard from him and others of his undying love for Chopin . A love he has shared only with intimate friends whilst he built up a very successful engineering career.
Now deciding that his love for Chopin is stronger than his expertise in engineering I was happy to see his Chopin recital announced in Fou Ts’ong’s favourite London venue, St John’s Smith Square.
Ts’ong had been awarded the Mazurka prize in one of the first Chopin Competitions to be held in Warsaw after the war. How could someone not Polish understand something so innately nationalistic?! Schumann called them canons ‘covered in flowers’ and they are fifty nine or more miniature tone poems of vibrant nostalgia and folkloristic vigour encompassing the poetic soul of the Polish people. Ts’ong whose father had been a specialist in Chinese poetry knew that the sentiments of the mazurka and Chinese poetry are human elements that share a great similarity. The soul knows no frontiers!
From the very first notes of the Impromptu there was a beauty of whispered sounds that were to be the key to Marco’s intimate relationship with Chopin. A timeless freedom to the central mellifluous episode where Marco took a leisurely look, stopping and staring in wonder at such beauty.
Of course twenty years were spent engineering and not the hours necessary to create fingers that could command the more demanding passages in the great works that Marco also presented . The G minor Ballade, the Second Scherzo and even the Polonaise Héroique were fearlessly presented with accommodating tempi and a helping gloss of pedal But even here Marco’s deep love and search for beauty was what came across more than a lack of dynamic drive or passionate intensity of fearless abandon.
The two nocturnes op 15 were played with radiant beauty and if the central episode of the F major lacked weight it was given an unusually persuasive voice just as he gave a whispered glistening sheen to it’s partner in F sharp major, a nocturne that Artur Rubinstein made very much his own .
Marco also offered three studies including Chopin’s ‘Aeolian Harp’ op 25 n. 1. described so beautifully by Sir Charles Hallé when he heard the composer himself play it in Manchester in the last year of his short life. Waves of beautiful shifting harmonies on which the bel canto melody is floated just as Marco showed us today. The famous ‘How sweet are my dreams’ op 10 n 3 was where Marco preferred the slower tempo of tradition rather than Chopin’s own rather faster indication . It gave Marco all the time to allow the melodic line to swim and breathe wallowing in a sea of seductive beauty . And if the central episode risked drowning in too much pedal it was courageously rescued and brought back to the paradise that Marco had envisioned. Finishing this group of études, with another of Rubinstein’s favourites op 10.n 4,it was evident that Marco’s engineering skills had taken precedence over those of his ‘fingerfertigkeit’. He compensated by imbuing it with a glowing warmth only rising to a dynamic drive and passionate intensity on the final page.Rubinstein at this point would rise from the red hot piano seat where Marco preferred to sit much more comfortably. Maestro Arcieri included only one Mazurka and Waltz in his programme for his London debut that concluded his recital.
One of Chopin’s earliest Mazurkas op 6 n. 1 which he played with glowing gasping beauty just as he had the opening of the G minor Ballade . And the Walz in A flat op 34 n. 1 that followed was given a radiance and beauty where scintillating jeux perlé and excitement would be left to others .
A large gathering in this most beautiful edifice where in the past I have heard both Cherkassky and Fou Tsong many years ago . Another Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini teenage winner of the Chopin Competition and a heroic figure in Italy as was Cliburn in America when he triumphed in Russia at the time of the Cold War . Here I had heard Pollini play the ‘Hammerklavier’ in the lunchtime series the BBC used to transmit live from this stage. A sumptuous feast was always waiting in the crypt for the artists after their lunchtime triumphs!
Marco by great request returned to offer what was to be the jewel in his crown.
The Nocturne in C sharp minor op posth was imbued with the whispered heartfelt love for Chopin that has been the raison d ‘etre of an engineer with an undying love for the greatest poet of the piano the world has ever known.
We look forward to Marco Arcieri’s return to remind us again of his great love of beauty in a world where brutality and quantity take precedence over beauty and quality.
https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/12/05/ileana-and-joan-3rd-december-2023/
