Midsummer Dreams - A Piano Recital by Pål Eide
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David Hackett29. June 2024
Concert Review:
Pål Eide - Piano
Musikhuset, Copenhagen
Wednesday 26th June 2024
A handsome Georgian mansion located just off Vesterbrogade, Copenhagen’s Concert Hall (Musikhuset), is a venue for both classical and jazz chamber recitals. Performances take place in a stylish, chandeliered room on the upper floor, where tall, broad windows, reaching almost from floor to ceiling, flood the little auditorium with bright sunlight.
On the warmest evening of the year, around forty of us had gathered to hear a recital given by veteran Norwegian pianist Pål Eide, entitled Dreams. An accompanying programme note explained that “based on beauty... the pianist finds original musical connections in dreamy music that takes us all the way to the present day, and he wants to make the concert a state he shares with the audience.” The point of departure was the “Belle Époque" of around 1900, “one of the most exciting periods in Europe. Beauty is in focus, along with a whole new freedom, and creativity explodes in all art forms.”
Well I can certainly say that for the first three quarters of the concert, Eide managed to make a wide-ranging selection of music written between the 1880s and 1990s sound uncannily like a single composition. The points of connection were a late romantic sensibility, an expressionistic angst and a certain visionary beauty.
Eide opened with Franz Liszt’s inventive and original La Lugubre Gondola II (The Mysterious Gondola) from 1885, a vision of death on a Venetian boat written in the composer’s old age. This was followed by Aleksandr Scriabin’s 5 Preludes op. 74 from 1914. Composed at a time when the likes of Schoenberg and Stravinsky were rocking the very foundations of western music, Scriabin’s highly chromatic, experimental fragments make their own bold statement. These are evidently mood pieces, to judge from their expressive directions (in French), ranging from Douloureux déchirant (heartbreaking, painful), to Lent, vague, indécis (slow, vague, undecided) and Fier, belliqueux (proud, fearless). Eide rendered each and every one of them with insight and empathy.
After this came the modern-day premiere of the Piano Sonata no 1 by Leopold van der Pals (1884-1966). Van der Pals’ national identity is not easy to sum up in a few words – his father was Dutch, his mother Danish, he grew up in St Petersburg but spent most of his life in Switzerland. He also wrote prolifically and progressively (initially at least), although his unwillingness to join the avant-garde currents of post First World War Europe was eventually held against him. His music has since fallen into some neglect.
The newly unearthed Sonata from 1919 showed great vitality and variety. The first movement, built around an insistent, percussive motif, was the most dramatic. By contrast, the second was much more contemplative, with a touch of Ravel in its delicious, jazz-tinged harmonies. The third, perhaps the least interesting, seemed to combine elements of both preceding movements. A secondary, modal-sounding theme became an important focal point, before the tensions of the sonata finally resolved into a flurry of diatonic triads.
After a twenty-minute interval, Eide resumed with Edvard Grieg’s 1891 Klokkeklang (Bell-Ringing), from his Lyric Pieces, op. 54. Not being familiar with work beforehand I found it a revelation, not least with its echoing open fifths and modal (sometimes bitonal) inflections. And while appearing to suggest the world of Claude Debussy and French Impressionism (quite different to Grieg’s usual style), it was composed at a time when Debussy himself was still barely into his creative stride.
After this came the centrepiece of the concert, the Ten Dreams by Russian born pianist and composer Lera Auerbach (b. 1973). Although a relatively early work for its composer, the various dream-evoking movements (variously subtitled “mystical”, “foggy”, “mysterious”, “nostalgic”, “like a nightmare” or even “frightening, grotesque and vulgar”) demonstrate a wide range of neurophysiological states, while making superb use of the piano’s sonorities. In Pål Eide, Auerbach had a sympathetic interpreter, not least for a style of music that often reached deep into imaginary and esoteric landscapes.
After Auerbach’s Dreams the recital appeared to take a decisive step towards calmer ground. There were gondolas again in Felix Mendelssohn’s lyrical Gondola Song from Venice. A beautiful translucence characterised both Still Waters (2018) by Danish composer Ejnar Kanding and the “soft, light and transparent” Bagatelle (2005) by the Ukrainian Valentyn Sylvestrov.
Just before the end of the concert we travelled to South America to hear a rendition of the ever-popular Danzas Argentinas (1937) by Alberto Ginastera. Filled with pulsating Latin rhythms as well as life-affirming exuberance, the three movements comprise Danza del Viejo Boyero (Shepherd's Dance), Danza de la Moza Donosa (Dance of the Beautiful Girl) and Danza del Gaucho Matrero (Dance of the Mysterious Cowboy). Although Eide played them all with great assurance, and especially caught the slow-burning, sultry ambience of the Moza Donosa, I wonder whether he might have slackened the tempo slightly for the Gaucho Matrero. Neither the sonorous power of the piano nor the intimate acoustic of the hall could quite accommodate his terrific speed, and some of the crisp, jazzy syncopations that make this movement such a delight were difficult to pick out.
But it was in all a deeply imaginative and musically satisfying recital, one that had more than achieved Eide’s stated aims, not least as an artist who continually reaches below the surface of the music he performs.
A he himself puts it, “the beauty of music touches us, makes us listen and then disappear into the subconscious – as if in a dream.”
To read more from David Hackett, go to www.musicbytheyear.com
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