Since coming to live in New York eight years ago, Katya Grineva, a young Russian pianist, has made an annual practice of hiring Carnegie Hall and playing for friends, family and admirers. On Thursday Ms. Grineva returned to a stage that dripped with flowers. The hall was half filled, but the half that was there was more than friendly.
Ms. Grineva has a lovely musical sensibility unsuited to such grand surroundings. She hears music, regardless of the period or style, in just about the same way: with a misty yet resonant sound and a languid, yielding sense of rubato, one given to extremes of acceleration and deceleration. The "Variations on a Ukrainian Theme," by Mozart's son Franz Xaver Mozart, is probably used to crisper definition; here it was smothered lovingly in pedal effects.
"June," "April" and "October" from Tchaikovsky's "Seasons" prospered from Ms. Grineva's intimacy. Rachmaninoff's G major Prelude had a similar reticence, although the famous C sharp minor Prelude it was paired with almost derailed because of unwise surges of speed. Indeed, it was the grand pianistic gestures — the octaves at the end of Liszt's "Vallée d'Obermann" and the rhetorical opening of Marcel Tyberg's B minor Sonata after intermission — that caused Ms. Grineva degrees of discomfort and uncertainty.
Tyberg was Viennese and a victim of the Holocaust. His style might be described as Liszt and Chopin by way of Grieg. Nothing in the grammar reveals any hint of its 20th-century origins, yet old languages can be used to say new things. I wish I heard more of interest in this piece. Tyberg seems to have been an earnest, rigorous and well-organized practitioner of sonata form and, to judge from the florid writing, a good pianist.
Carnegie Hall is understandably a kind of Valhalla to aspiring musicians, but I would so like to have heard this particular one in a smaller space. Her following would have filled it up nicely; the large-scale pianistic fireworks, which Ms. Grineva is not very good at, could be dispensed with, and her considerable appeal exploited. A big, important hall does not constitute a big, important event.
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Post By：2006-6-12 11:00:23 [只看该作者]
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