Word: pratt
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...Pratt, who debuted at Carnegie Hall a couple of weeks ago and got three standing ovations, enjoys an already fruitful performing career and an even brighter future...
However, there were plenty of empyrean moments. At first the great Magyar thirteenth variation seemed in danger of being too subdued, but then a gust of forceful, mordent arpeggios stirred one back to sense. Pratt's deliberation over the chromaticism of variation 20 was delicious, and his energized attacca of the fugue was stupendous. This is not your grandfather's Brahms--Wilhelm Backhaus was. Wilhelm Backhaus did not have dread-locks...
...performances of the individual "pictures" were so engaging that whenever the waddling Promenade theme urged us on to the next exhibit, it was like a pushy security guard at closing time. Pratt's technique was dazzling in the "Gnome," sustaining a fine sense of balance in a texture (and a context) like that of Ravel's "Scarbo...
Mussorgsky's response to Hartmann's "The Old Castle, "Il vecchio castello," was revelatory under Pratt's clarity of musical thought: the piece presented itself as motivically similar to much of Chopin's third Ballade, and later seemed like the genesis for the inverted figures of "Bydlo." These discoveries would never have emerged from one of the many orchestrated versions of "Pictures...
...Pratt's confidence in "The Hut on Fowl's Legs" was beyond belief. It sounded as if he had been playing this piece for twice his age. But what made the entire performance of "Pictures" truly great, as good as the golden Benno Moiseiwitsch recording, was his huge sound at "The Great Gate of Kiev." The audience was completely under his spell. And his choice of encore, the Schumann-Liszt "Widmung," sent everyone home smiling...