Variety is something we look for in any piano recital.
Last night German pianist Andreas Henkel offered a certain geographic variety
in his programme at Singapore’s Yong Siew Toh Conservatory. There was music celebrating Germany, Austria,
Italy, Spain and Scotland. True, all of
the composers were German (Liszt might have been Hungarian by birth and his Rhapsodie espagnole actually written in
Rome, but at heart he was firmly rooted in the German musical tradition) while
Henkel himself showed his perception of “international” by listing his personal
international credentials as comprising concerts in such varied cities as
Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin and Munich.
Actually, a great many more cities in countries other than Germany were
mentioned, but there was an unmistakably Germanic feel to the whole thing which
went way beyond the repertory choice or the simple window-dressing of a
biography.
Opening with Bach’s Chromatic
Fantasy and Fugue Henkel took a while to settle into the somewhat
impersonal and unresponsive environment of the Conservatory’s Orchestra Hall and
for a time, the Bach did not seem to know where it was heading. Soon, however, it fell on its feet and
started running with an assured purposefulness which revealed the greatest characteristic
of Henkel’s playing; a lucid and fluent technique which came dramatically into
its own in the Beethoven Waldstein Sonata. The Bach,
though, also revealed a certain interpretative unevenness which again surfaced
more obviously later in the programme.
In the case of the Bach, there was never a convincing balance between
stylistic credibility and interpretative licence. When he was in strict, texturally precise and
stylistically confident mode, Henkel delivered some truly outstanding Bach playing,
but it was compromised by occasional bursts of romantic opulence and lavish
tone colour. The pedal – a contentious
issue in Bach performances but one which, under the foot of a completely
convincing interpreter, never prompts doubts – seemed obtrusive as much because
vast tracts of dry, pedalless piano tone were countered by moments when the pedal
went down and stayed down.
Henkel’s transparency of tone created by a wonderfully balanced
technique, abutting a seam of rich but almost reticent romanticism, perfectly
suited the Beethoven. Themes were drawn out
with the clarity and focus of a high-powered telescope and the inner balance of
the texture was so enticingly managed that this was an absolute joy to
hear. On top of that, Henkel’s supreme
sense of the overall architecture of the Sonata resulted in a performance of
rare cohesion. It simply unfolded before
our ears as if it were a delightful, interesting and wholly absorbing journey
by the kind of trains Germany was once famous for; spotlessly clean and running
exactly to time. You knew where you were
going and had no doubts that you would get there safely.
It was the three Mendelssohn pieces which showed up more than anywhere
else Henkel’s somewhat uneasy grasp of interpretative nuance. The Capriccio
in A minor, as well as the Song
Without Words in F sharp minor, were fluently executed and offered a fine
glimpse of Henkel’s fluid and immaculately balanced fingerwork, but in the more
restful and expressive Venetianisches Gondellied
we were not so much gently caressing the waters of the Viennese canals, as
thrust out into the Mediterranean and rocking queasily in a vast, swelling
sea. It lurched from bar to bar like a
cartoon Rubato, and while Henkel drew
the melody out wonderfully clearly from the texture, any singer attempting to
sing the line would have ended up dazed and dizzy from the awkward manipulations
of rhythm which passed here for romantic expressiveness.
Almost everything about the Liszt, however, was admirable. Brilliantly delivered from a technical standpoint,
it had a lovely sense of organisation and purpose, there was colour and
expression and a certain Spanish flair.
Oddly, though, as with everything in the programme, Henkel held back
from the ultimate demonstrative gesture.
Just as the Liszt neared the end, Henkel seemed to withdraw into his
shell and the dynamic faded to end almost apologetically. Just once, at the end of this recital, one
wished he could have let his hair down enough to give us a true and powerful
gesture of expression; it all seemed just a little too tightly reined in.
And what of Scotland?
An encore was offered (when, in a piano recital in Asia, is one ever
not?) and, as Henkel explained, he was continuing the (German) tradition of
presenting a “transcription”. The “transcription”
itself was of a Scottish melody, the Bunessan
Tune which, in Scotland, certainly, is usually sung to the words “Child in
a Manger” but Henkel, and many in the audience,
associate more with “Morning has Broken”. Whatever.
It was not a transcription but a set of variations on a tune which, in
all fairness, offers no real scope for variation; it is so firmly rooted in its
tonality and its melodic shape that it is best left well alone. Henkel superimposed a few pianistic gestures,
ripples of arpeggios, fluid runs up and down the keyboard, but it never went
anywhere or did anything. It was a lot
of effort over nothing. But this encore
did reveal what, possibly, was at the root of Henkel’s approach to
performing. A very obvious Christian
faith seems to have persuaded him that personal display and self-aggrandisement
is secondary to musical and personal sincerity.
All very good and commendable, but pianists need to be a little more
extrovert, a little more egotistic, a little more open with their emotional involvement
in the music if they are to be wholly convincing, and much as every moment of
this recital was enjoyable, it had an overall sense of restraint and reticence
which just blunted the sort of wide variety of moods many of us look for in a
piano recital.
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