Word: sonata
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Next of the program was the Beethoven F major Sonata from Op. 10--in my opinion, Perahia's strongest performance of the night. This piece has enormous innate appeal, but certainly does not play itself and Perahia made it dazzling. Perahia imparted to the main theme of the allegretto middle movement the proper sense of graceful ghostliness, and played the living daylights out of the trio, but the real jawdropper here was the presto rondo finale. In an interview with WHRB, Perahia revealed that, studying under Miecyslaw Horszowski, he practiced his Leschetisky method like a good little boy. Nowhere...
...beginning of the Beethoven Sonata in G (Op. 31 No. 1) Ohlsson's fingerwork was troublingly sloppy, at least compared to his voicing; but this may have been a matter of adjusting to the piano. He took the opening allegro a good sight slower than the indicated vivace, but used the broadened canvas to play around with all its quirky syncopations...
...Liszt sonata was another matter. Though not obvious at first, Ohlsson's approach to its many challenges was informed by a tight sense of musical architecture: emerging from all the kleptomaniacal rubati and enigmatic autofermatas was a storyteller's confidence. His fingerings were uncommon, his attack was lively bordering on sadistic, and he seemed to be thinking orchestrally all the way. Here if anywhere, "large and in charge" was the apt phrase--the big man put a whole register in the bass out of tune. Blending the bombastic and the priestly, Ohlsson made the 1854 warhorse sound fresh...
Galway returned to the stage for Couperin's La Pie'montoise, a sonata and suite in fourteen parts, many of them dances. The piece showed the greatest range in terms of mood, shifting from cool elegance to pensiveness to a delicacy evoking spring. Especially interesting was the interaction between Huggett and Galway, a look of complicity between them finding its musical expression in a passage filled with repetition, as the two echoed both each other and themselves in repeating the same passages. The applause was warm after the surprisingly sudden ending, with especial kudos for Galway and Huggett...
...last two pieces brought Galway back onto the stage, his brassy, clear sounds bringing the volume back up again after Marais' Suite. The Bach Sonata in E major was purely a Galway showcase, the other players fading in the background for once as he overwhelmed them with his flawless playing. The Telemann Quartet in D Minor, however, brought the whole group on stage for the finale, and all contributed to the success of the performance of that work. Huggett and Jeanne Galway, especially, shone in this work, Huggett's playing so clear and light that she almost sounded like...