With this recital of Debussy and Chopin, Tim Horton opened a Wigmore Hall series in which he will present various works by Chopin with music that influenced him and on which he in turn came to influence. It would always be a fitting thing to do, so long as well done, yet somehow it seems all the more so as the musical world continues to mourn the loss of Maurizio Pollini. ‘At seven,’ Horton writes in an intelligent, engaging introduction to the series, ‘my parents bought me Maurizio Pollini’s astonishing account of the Études. I could not believe that the piano could be played, or written for, like this. My obsession with music, the piano, and Chopin has lasted to this day.’ Indeed, with a series encompassing Bach, Mozart, Schumann, Debussy, Ravel, Szymanowski and Stockhausen, Pollini’s ghost might seem more than usually apparent. Once, he spoke of recording Gaspard de la nuit – imagine! – and Szymanowski was said to be a composer he played in private, though never, I think, in public. The others, Chopin too, featured alongside other composers in the five-concert Royal Festival Hall Pollini Project of 2011.
“Yet this recital in no sense imitated, nor even evidently paid homage: it announced a major voice in its own right, one with interesting and instructive things to say about and with this music, which I hope to follow in subsequent instalments.”
Debussy came first, in the guise of the second book of Préludes, whose sense of a whole, tonal centres notwithstanding, was uncommonly apparent, as if the heir to an early keyboard suite. ‘Brouillards’ announced a number of oppositions and relationships that would persist and transform throughout the set and arguably the recital as a whole.
“Melting and muscular, the performance showed that atmosphere and precision were far from opposed, but rather mutually dependent.”
Clarity of thought was paramount and rightly so. Harmonic rhythm and rhythm more generally, sprung yet with telling rubato, played a guiding role in ‘Feuilles mortes’. ‘La puerta del Vino’ intrigued: darker and more dangerous than I recalled, at times verging on the brutal, yet certainly not without charm. Escamillo turned ‘impressionist’, one might say, not unlike the later ‘Général Lavine – eccentric’. There was likewise nothing fey to the fairies in ‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses’. Their light shone brought and colourful rather than flickering. I liked the way Horton’s performance of ‘Bruyères’ drew us in to greater intimacy at its heart, again without sacrifice to colour.
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Hearing Chopin’s twenty-four Preludes after the interval retrospectively brought influence and affinity to bear on our experience. Again, there was great clarity throughout, not only in presentation of the notes but in demonstrating why they were where they were and how. In general, they were possessed with singularity of idea, not so very different from some of the Etudes, whether in the lightly worn yet expressive virtuosity of one sequence of minor-key pieces, or the sadness of some of its predecessors (E minor and B minor, for instance, the latter sharing elements of character with some of the sadder Mazurkas). Expressive qualities arose from the material rather than being imposed on it, the tumult of the E-flat minor Prelude seeming to be summoned by the piano keys themselves. The serene charm of the ‘Raindrop’, in D-flat, and its A-flat companion had them emerge as miniature tone poems, as with all the pieces heard and expressed as if in a single, variegated breath. The simple nobility of the C minor Prelude, movingly shaded, contrasted with an almost Brahmsian, dark-hued passion to the next-but-one in G minor, which in turn immediately contrasted with a leggiero F major, and finally Romantic turbulence and aristocratic pride in D minor.
“As in all the finest accounts of this book, Pollini’s included, tonal and expressive journeys were as one.”