OUch -Sousa FRom NYTimes, by Anthony Tommasini
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was packed on Thursday night, including extra rows of stage seats, for a recital by the Croatian pianist Ivo Pogorelich, his first appearance in New York in 10 years. When he emerged in the 1980’s, Mr. Pogorelich galvanized the concert world with his technically astounding, deeply personal and unabashedly eccentric playing. But in the last decade he has been an elusive and unpredictable figure.
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Forum: Classical Music
How is he faring? His incoherent and interpretively perverse playing defies description. The first minutes of the opening work, Beethoven’s Sonata in No. 32 in C minor, were weirdly fascinating. Before long the performance was just plain weird. And so the evening continued.
These days Mr. Pogorelich, 48, presents himself with the trappings of a cult figure. The hall was nearly dark, except for a single spotlight on the pianist. Those who remember him as a lanky, broodingly handsome young man might have been startled by his current appearance — stocky build, shaved head, glowering glances to an audience he barely acknowledged.
He played using the printed scores with the assistance of a page-turner, an option I support in principle. Yet here his reliance on the scores seemed a compensation for insufficient preparation. How else to explain the many rough passages and overall aimlessness?
In Beethoven’s visionary final sonata, which begins in stormy complexity and ends in mystical bliss, Mr. Pogorelich’s timings were stretched to the point where the music lost forward motion and structural coherence. That a musical passage should have some semblance of a pulse is something that Mr. Pogorelich seems to think only lesser pianists who lack his brave originality concern themselves with. Consider this: the recordings of this work by Artur Schnabel, Richard Goode and Rudolf Serkin each clock in at about 26 minutes. Mr. Pogorelich’s performance lasted 41 minutes.
After this performance, which elicited some lusty boos along with bravos, Mr. Pogorelich’s playing of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 24 was, if anything, stranger. Who could tell slow from fast in this passive-aggressive performance where each phrase, sometimes each measure, inhabited its own world?
As the intermission dragged on for more than 40 minutes, some audience members started clapping in unison to prod him to reappear. Others just gave up and left. I was hoping that Scriabin’s Sonata No. 4 and Rachmaninoff’s Sonata No. 2, rhapsodic works that invite Romantic-styled freedom, would better suit Mr. Pogorelich’s temperament.
Alas, his distortions were only part of the problem. His tone palette had, essentially, two extremes: either he played with almost inaudible lightness, or he slam-banged chords and thumped out voices so brutally you pitied his poor Hamburg Steinway, on loan to the museum from Steinway & Sons for this “Piano Forte†series.
Here is an immense talent gone tragically astray. What went wrong?
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, kissin, Barenboim, Pogorelich, etc, are fall into this category, a musical distortion.
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and Gilels. obviously i’m biased, but this is what I hear 