Festival du Comminges, 06/08/2019
Albéniz - Schumann - Liszt - Tárrega - Ramírez - Falla - Szymański - Márquez
Simon Ghraichy, piano
In summer festivals, which often depend on the vagaries of weather, volunteers, odd surroundings, artists and numerous other variables, it's obvious that there can frequently be an aleatory aspect. However, I've rarely experienced such a complete upheaval of a programme as tonight. "A few changes", the artist announced blandly at the start. I bought a ticket for a piano recital of Spanish and Latin American music. I got the piano recital, but the programme turned out to be something completely different!
The Festival du Comminges has always been good at presenting the emerging artists of the day to its regulars. Simon Ghraichy is another such, a Franco-Mexico-Lebanese pianist whose flair has attracted much attention in recent years. If tonight's programme is typical of his recitals, he has a strong penchant for transcriptions, and likes to show off his admittedly exceptional technique in a haze of repeated notes. His fingers were, at times, almost literally blurring over the keyboard. He presented the (vastly altered) programme to the audience piece by piece, with ease and charm, and he certainly presents an original figure, with his wild mop of curls, and a personal dress code that manages to be flamboyant without being ridiculous. His playing is also original, bordering on idiosyncratic, though, and while that's certainly an option at 34, it's a choice that needs to be backed up by solid musical thinking, of which I wasn't completely convinced, and I don't see this style surviving, say, another 20 years. It's going to need to evolve.
He began with a piece that was on the original docket, Albéniz's Asturias, one of the few pieces tonight that wasn't a transcription. At this point, the extent of the changes was as yet unknown, and I thought he had merely chosen to re-order things, but also thought that this was perhaps not the wisest choice to begin, fingers usually needing a little time to warm up, and this piece demanding a lot of very fast, repeated notes. However, that is, precisely, Ghraichy's 'thing', so to speak, as he demonstrated repeatedly throughout the evening. He also has a rather emphatic way of playing, marking accents very heavily, sometimes too much so for my taste, and this opening number lacked the subtle magic I look for in it.
Give any French concert artist carte blanche in their programming, and I reckon there's a 75% chance s/he will manage to squeeze some Schumann in there somewhere, such is the (musical) nation's idolatry of that composer. I tend to be mildly allergic to Schumann, but Ghraichy at least offered a rarity, the Variations on a Theme of Beethoven, or at least one version of what is usually catalogued as WoO 31. The full title is "Studies in the Form of Free Variations...", and the studies are early works, written from 1831 to 1835, never fully completed. There are three set of manuscripts, and the standard performing version is a compilation of the three, lasting around fifteen minutes. Ghraichy has chosen an abbreviated form, taking about five minutes from the total. It's a curious piece, I was unfamiliar with it, and have to say that it was not until the seventh or eighth variation that I really started hearing Schumann's individual voice in it, but it was still an intriguing work.
The violently pointed 'punctuation' of his playing really became obtrusive in the Hungarian Fantasy, which, in its proper form, is a loose adaptation for piano and orchestra of the 14th Hungarian Rhapsody. So what we heard was a transcription (uncredited) of a transcription of an original piano solo, and frankly it came across as a bit of a mess. Not a comment on Ghraichy's virtuosity, but it would have been better if he had simply played the Rhapsody, because the Fantasy came across as disjointed and awkward, and with sudden, aggressive, harsh rushes of scales and octaves that jarred.
Next came two transcriptions by Ghraichy himself; Tárrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra, and Argentinian composer Ariel Ramírez's Alfonsina y el Mar. The Tárrega came across as heavy-handed, compared to the shimmering delicacy of the guitar original, but the Ramírez, gently melancholic, was nicely delivered. However, Ghraichy again seemed heavy-handed in the Ritual Fire Dance from El amor brujo (and not The Three-Cornered Hat, as Ghraichy announced in a moment of distraction!), another transcription, this time by the composer at the behest of Artur Rubinstein, but it was followed by what was perhaps the highlight of the evening, the Etude No. 2 by Paweł Szymański, written in 1986. Ghraichy described Szymański's work as 'neo-Baroque', Bach caged inside the piano and turning round and round on himself. It was an apt description, a lot of filigree fingerwork high in the piano's register, with phrases clearly evoking Bach emerging periodically, until the piece tumbles to the bass of the instrument to end. I was also reminded of Ligeti's 'clocks and clouds' style of composition, in the sense of the music constantly wrapping around itself in a weirdly calm frenzy.
Finally, another transcription from the orchestral, Arturo Márquez's Dançon No. 2, made popular by Gustavo Dudamel in his early tours with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, and two encores, also Latin-American, a Brazilian tango, whose composer I did not catch, and one of Ernesto Lecuona's Afro-Cuban Dances, all of which made me wish Ghraichy had stuck to his original programme.
I came out of this with mixed feelings. I find quite a lot of Ghraichy's playing very aggressive, however admirable the technique, and not all the transcriptions he seems to favour are of equal quality. Yet there is a real sense from him of wanting to share his passions with his audience, of reaching out to communicate, which is a valuable quality in any artist, and the technique is certainly solid. It should be interesting to see if and how he develops over the coming years.
[Next : 19th August]
Simon Ghraichy, piano
In summer festivals, which often depend on the vagaries of weather, volunteers, odd surroundings, artists and numerous other variables, it's obvious that there can frequently be an aleatory aspect. However, I've rarely experienced such a complete upheaval of a programme as tonight. "A few changes", the artist announced blandly at the start. I bought a ticket for a piano recital of Spanish and Latin American music. I got the piano recital, but the programme turned out to be something completely different!
The Festival du Comminges has always been good at presenting the emerging artists of the day to its regulars. Simon Ghraichy is another such, a Franco-Mexico-Lebanese pianist whose flair has attracted much attention in recent years. If tonight's programme is typical of his recitals, he has a strong penchant for transcriptions, and likes to show off his admittedly exceptional technique in a haze of repeated notes. His fingers were, at times, almost literally blurring over the keyboard. He presented the (vastly altered) programme to the audience piece by piece, with ease and charm, and he certainly presents an original figure, with his wild mop of curls, and a personal dress code that manages to be flamboyant without being ridiculous. His playing is also original, bordering on idiosyncratic, though, and while that's certainly an option at 34, it's a choice that needs to be backed up by solid musical thinking, of which I wasn't completely convinced, and I don't see this style surviving, say, another 20 years. It's going to need to evolve.
He began with a piece that was on the original docket, Albéniz's Asturias, one of the few pieces tonight that wasn't a transcription. At this point, the extent of the changes was as yet unknown, and I thought he had merely chosen to re-order things, but also thought that this was perhaps not the wisest choice to begin, fingers usually needing a little time to warm up, and this piece demanding a lot of very fast, repeated notes. However, that is, precisely, Ghraichy's 'thing', so to speak, as he demonstrated repeatedly throughout the evening. He also has a rather emphatic way of playing, marking accents very heavily, sometimes too much so for my taste, and this opening number lacked the subtle magic I look for in it.
Give any French concert artist carte blanche in their programming, and I reckon there's a 75% chance s/he will manage to squeeze some Schumann in there somewhere, such is the (musical) nation's idolatry of that composer. I tend to be mildly allergic to Schumann, but Ghraichy at least offered a rarity, the Variations on a Theme of Beethoven, or at least one version of what is usually catalogued as WoO 31. The full title is "Studies in the Form of Free Variations...", and the studies are early works, written from 1831 to 1835, never fully completed. There are three set of manuscripts, and the standard performing version is a compilation of the three, lasting around fifteen minutes. Ghraichy has chosen an abbreviated form, taking about five minutes from the total. It's a curious piece, I was unfamiliar with it, and have to say that it was not until the seventh or eighth variation that I really started hearing Schumann's individual voice in it, but it was still an intriguing work.
The violently pointed 'punctuation' of his playing really became obtrusive in the Hungarian Fantasy, which, in its proper form, is a loose adaptation for piano and orchestra of the 14th Hungarian Rhapsody. So what we heard was a transcription (uncredited) of a transcription of an original piano solo, and frankly it came across as a bit of a mess. Not a comment on Ghraichy's virtuosity, but it would have been better if he had simply played the Rhapsody, because the Fantasy came across as disjointed and awkward, and with sudden, aggressive, harsh rushes of scales and octaves that jarred.
Next came two transcriptions by Ghraichy himself; Tárrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra, and Argentinian composer Ariel Ramírez's Alfonsina y el Mar. The Tárrega came across as heavy-handed, compared to the shimmering delicacy of the guitar original, but the Ramírez, gently melancholic, was nicely delivered. However, Ghraichy again seemed heavy-handed in the Ritual Fire Dance from El amor brujo (and not The Three-Cornered Hat, as Ghraichy announced in a moment of distraction!), another transcription, this time by the composer at the behest of Artur Rubinstein, but it was followed by what was perhaps the highlight of the evening, the Etude No. 2 by Paweł Szymański, written in 1986. Ghraichy described Szymański's work as 'neo-Baroque', Bach caged inside the piano and turning round and round on himself. It was an apt description, a lot of filigree fingerwork high in the piano's register, with phrases clearly evoking Bach emerging periodically, until the piece tumbles to the bass of the instrument to end. I was also reminded of Ligeti's 'clocks and clouds' style of composition, in the sense of the music constantly wrapping around itself in a weirdly calm frenzy.
Finally, another transcription from the orchestral, Arturo Márquez's Dançon No. 2, made popular by Gustavo Dudamel in his early tours with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, and two encores, also Latin-American, a Brazilian tango, whose composer I did not catch, and one of Ernesto Lecuona's Afro-Cuban Dances, all of which made me wish Ghraichy had stuck to his original programme.
I came out of this with mixed feelings. I find quite a lot of Ghraichy's playing very aggressive, however admirable the technique, and not all the transcriptions he seems to favour are of equal quality. Yet there is a real sense from him of wanting to share his passions with his audience, of reaching out to communicate, which is a valuable quality in any artist, and the technique is certainly solid. It should be interesting to see if and how he develops over the coming years.
[Next : 19th August]