MICHAEL DERVANreviews the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition Semi-finals at the National Concert Hall, Dublin.
It fell to the 25-year-old Ukrainian, Sasha Grynyuk, to play first in the semi-finals of the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition at the National Concert Hall on Saturday afternoon. And he enlivened proceedings by opening with three Études by György Ligeti (1923-2006), which vie with works by Australian Carl Vine (happily still living) as being the most modern that competitors are likely to espouse apart from the specially-commissioned, mandatory test pieces.
The Ligeti studies are fascinating mechanisms (the player piano studies by Conlon Nancarrow were an important influence), essays in high artifice which need a certain perfection of pianistic mechanism in delivery to yield their secrets. Grynyuk sounded at his best in flying through the clever layering of their rhythmic intricacies.
Elsewhere he was less inspiring, with the exaggeration in his handling of Chopin’s 24 Preludes turning even the stirring chordal progressions of the C minor Prelude into a kind of show-off.
Like Grynyuk, Soo-Yeon Ham (23, from Korea) chose the test piece by David Byers, A Full Moon. The work, inspired by a poem of Joseph Campbell and based musically on an Ambrosian chant, challenges through the sparsity of its writing. Ham brought shape, contrast and purpose to it in ways that had eluded Grynyuk. She was less persuasive in two Scarlatti sonatas, and her handling of Chopin's Op. 25 Studies was effective, oriented in the right direction, but musically not exactly on the button.
Naomi Kudo (22, USA/Japan) made Schumann's Carnaval sound worn and tired, but brought intriguing suggestions of embedded folk music to her choice of test piece, Siobhán Cleary's Chaconne. Jong-Hai Park (18, Korea) went even further with the Cleary, making it sound almost like a Satie-esque take on the very idea of a Chaconne. He was less successful in penetrating Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentalesand his Liszt Sonata in B minor was in the impressively speedy and blurry mould.
Steven Lin (20, USA) brought a sense of sweep and effective flightiness to Schumann's Carnaval, but showed little feeling for the dance origins of Bill Whelan's test piece, The Currach(arranged from his concerto, Inishlacken), and only managed to make Carl Vine's Sonata No 1 sound emptily garrulous.
Yoon-Soo Rhee (27, Korea) took a strongly modernist approach to the Byers and to Luciano Berio’s Feuerklavier but was foxed by the strange manner of Brahms’s Sonata in F sharp minor, although she did manage some extraordinary touches in the slow movement.
Slawomir Wilk (27, Poland) got better as he went from Beethoven (too often workmanlike in the late C minor Sonata), through Chopin, Bill Whelan (jolly and giddy) before reaching Liszt’s paraphrase on the waltz from Gounod’s Faust, which he clearly enjoyed as whipped- up, vulgar fun.
Eric Zuber (23, USA) sounded much more at home in Chopin's Sonata in B minor than in Beethoven's Waldstein, though the pianistic delivery was at all times highly impressive. And he found moments of inner engagement in the Whelan that eluded everyone else who played the piece.
Soo-Jung Ann (21, Korea) treated Schoenberg's Suite, Op. 25, as modernistically rebarbative, but leavened Byers's A Full Moonwith attractive texture and atmosphere. Her tearaway performance of Liszt's Sonata in B minor was too polarised at extremes of agitation and calm to be musically effective.
Evgeni Bozhanov (25, Bulgaria) decked Toru Takemitsu's Rain Tree Sketch No. 1in the most gorgeous of hues, and found both swing and brilliance in The Currach. In Schubert's late Sonata in B flat he employed the sustaining pedal in a way that created an unusual haze, as if he were trying to emulate the lighter damping of some pianos from the early 19th-century. And he also spent a lot of the time playing uncommonly softly. It was the kind of performance that was provocatively engaging in a way that kept listeners on the edge of their seats.
Emmanuel Christien (26, France) went for sobriety and maturity in Beethoven (the Sonata in E minor, Op. 90), Brahms (the Op. 10 Ballades) and two Debussy Études. In the context of so much vain display from other competitors, the effect was genuinely heart-warming. And his performance of Jennifer Walshe's becher, a dizzying montage of micro-quotations from works familiar and unfamiliar (from her FASTER, FASTER, PUSSYCAT KILL KILL KILL!), was a genuine tour-de-force.
Alexej Gorlatch (20, Ukraine) is a dazzlingly polished player. A few times in his selection of four Debussy preludes he sounded just that bit too eager to impress. But, then, he's got a lot to impress with, although his fluency didn't produce much of a yield in The Currach. His delivery of Chopin's all 12 of Op. 10 Études was awe-inspiringly confident and assured – the first three studies alone were done with a perfection which apparently effortlessly set him apart from everyone else. There are probably arguments to be had about details of his point-making, but none about the singularity of his achievement.
The jury's vote decreed that the finals will feature Naomi Kudo(in Tchaikovsky's First Concerto), Soo-Yeon Ham(in Brahms's Second), and Jong-Hai Park(in Prokofiev's Third) on Thursday; and Eric Zuber (in Rachmaninov's Third), Soo-Jung Ann(in Rachmaninov's Second) and Alexej Gorlatch(in Beethoven's Emperor) on Friday.
