From the NYTimes November 10, 2006
Music Review | Hélène Grimaud
Iron Fists Within Those Velvet French Gloves
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Sometimes an alluring stage persona reveals only so much about an artist. Hélène Grimaud, the acclaimed French pianist who gave her first solo recital at Carnegie Hall Wednesday night, is a case in point.
When she walked onstage, Ms. Grimaud beamed with warmth and looked lovely in her stylishly baggy black pants and blouse, a simple headband holding back her wavy hair. By her manner she made you feel that if you encountered her on a sidewalk in Paris, she would be happy to chat over espresso at a local cafe.
But once seated at the piano, Ms. Grimaud tore into Ferruccio Busoni’s tumultuous arrangement for piano of Bach’s Chaconne in D minor from the Partita No. 2 for solo violin. True to form, Ms. Grimaud proved a focused, at times ferocious, pianist who favors a big, steely sound and bold, unsentimental playing.
Her approach suited the Busoni work. This 15-minute score, composed in 1892, is no mere transcription, but Mr. Busoni’s visionary reconception of the music. He reveals the implications of Bach’s keenly dramatic piece, a set of variations on the stern theme in the manner of a chaconne (an early Baroque dance in triple meter). The piano writing is thick with counterpoint, outbursts of octaves, long stretches of chromatically unstable chords and elaborate figurations that spin Bach’s notes into keyboard-spanning passagework. With liberal use of the sustaining pedal, Ms. Grimaud built up stormy clouds of sound in this formidable performance.
The sound she favors, with its sometimes metallic cast, was less suited to two Chopin works. There were moments of grace in her account of the lyrically hypnotic “Berceuse†and impetuous flights in the wistful “Barcarolle.†Still, for me Ms. Grimaud’s playing lacked poetry and transparency. Similarly, she brought an earthy, brass-heavy sound to Brahms’s Two Rhapsodies, Op. 79, though it was exciting to hear her play them with such take-no-prisoners determination.
The performance of the night came after intermission with Rachmaninoff’s Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor, an impassioned, technically daunting piece, more rhapsodic in character than the Brahms rhapsodies. From all reports (and his recordings confirm this), Rachmaninoff produced an uncannily rich piano sound, even when playing full-tilt fortissimos. Ms. Grimaud’s tone was rather flinty. Still, it is easy for this sonata to seem rambling, and Ms. Grimaud made sense of it, bringing cool clarity to its thick textures and vanquishing the technical challenges. I must say that this clear-headed performance was an antidote to the aggressively incoherent playing of this same work by Ivo Pogorelich in his recent New York recital.
Ms. Grimaud was again at her best in three Rachmaninoff encores, which she announced from the stage. I wonder if she chose one of them, in part, so that she could savor saying the words “Études-tableaux†in elegantly perfect French.
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