Word: sonata
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Kissin’s performance of Robert Schumann’s Sonata No. 1 in F-sharp minor was much more convincing. The work was written during the white-heat inspiration of Schumann’s tumultuous courtship of the brilliant pianist, Clara Wieck, whom he would later marry. While the work does not quite reach the desperation and pathos of other Clara-obsessed compositions (such as the Fantasy in C Major), it shares many of the features of other Schumann compositions from the same time period, namely capriciousness and extremity of emotions (from the heroic Eusebius to the introspective...
...turned this experience into what amounts to his own harsh Strindbergian Ghost Sonata remains a mystery. One can easily imagine someone less guilt ridden than Bergman regarding the incident more as a youthful folly than as a life-shaping event. The facts of the matter are mundane enough, as he says in his book. In 1949, Bergman and a journalist named Gun Hagberg, both unhappily married, entered into a passionate affair, beginning with a long tryst in Paris, and continuing after their return to Sweden, where she discovered she was pregnant with his child. A bitter wrangle with her husband...
Wild's still omnipotent fingers transform the instrument into a source of marvels. He can electrify audiences with an impossibly demonic performance of Liszt's Mephisto Waltz, move them with an achingly tender account of a Sonetto del Petrarca by the composer or do both with the Manichean Sonata in B Minor...
...20th century composers are Barber, Hindemith and Stravinsky. Barber's sonata and Hindemith's third sonata present formidable interpretive and technical challenges. Yet Wild--who learned Barber's thorny score, with its treacherous final fugue, for this recording (in his 80s!)--tears into them with a scintillating blend of rhythmic acuity, dynamic and coloristic shadings and sustained dramatic power. He finds fresh charm in Stravinsky's opus by eliciting its whimsy and dancelike qualities. The 21st century sonata, Wild's own, is a virtuoso work--energetic, eclectic and flamboyant--that he plays with great panache...
Ferruccio Busoni's Second Sonata was the only really dull part of an otherwise excellent concert. The work opens and ends with a harmonically adventurous succession of chords, but everything in between, even when played beautifully (as it was), lacks in substance and fails to create a strong impression. I admire Schulte for his programming of obscure works, but perhaps he can concentrate his efforts on more deserving pieces...