Michael Dervanreviews a recent concert in the National Concert Hall, Dublin
Murray Perahia (piano)
NCH, Dublin
Bach – Partita No 1. Mozart – Sonata in F K332. Beethoven – Sonata in F minor, Op 57 (Appassionata). Brahms – Handel Variations.
There’s nothing radical about Murray Perahia’s piano-playing. Unless, that is, you regard adherence to central paths and the general avoidance of idiosyncrasy to have become radical in an age when attitude in musical interpretation is coming back into fashion.
Perahia is not what you would call a commanding virtuoso. He shows little interest in the possibilities of clinical perfection, and doesn’t strive to mask the stresses he can find himself under when the going gets heavy. The variation that results is like a kind of natural texturing, the finish of real polished wood or stone as opposed to synthetic substitutes.
Perahia’s Bach at the National Concert Hall was fluid and clean, the ornaments often tucked away with astonishing neatness, the overall vision always concerned with the clarity of the leading voice, even to the point of downplaying the left hand’s running figuration, around which the right hand leaps with abandon in the closing Gigue.
Mozart's Sonata in F, K332, contains one of the composer's most sheerly beautiful slow movements and most fiery finales, and that's exactly how Perahia communicated the piece, before launching into an always carefully lit presentation of the storm of Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata.
It was good to hear Perahia in Brahms's monumental Handel Variations, a work that seems to have fallen out of favour with Irish promoters and has never been in favour with Irish pianists. Perahia's was a thoroughly engaging account, straight and to the point, apart from some momentary, Cherkassky-like over-emphasis of inner or lower voices in repeats.
There was also, oddly, a not quite adequate feeling of resolution at the end of the closing fugue.
The audience didn’t mind in the least, gave the performance a rousing reception, and was rewarded with a finely burnished account of the first of Schubert’s impromptus in A flat.
