
As it happened, I attended a discussion last month on the place
of recording in today’s musical world, and as Albert Tiu was on the panel,
someone in the audience was able to ask him directly, why he had chosen to
record this album of diverse piano pieces, most of which are already well
represented in the catalogues.
Tiu is an artist who does think deeply about what he records
and why, and he gave a detailed explanation of the thinking behind this
programme, why he had devised it as four thematic sections – Earth, Air, Water
and Fire – and why he had chosen the specific pieces to go into each thematic
group. It was a fascinating insight into
how an artist devises a programme, but it also revealed how an interpretation
of an old favourite is often adjusted to suit a new context without any loss of
integrity.
We have on this disc music by Liszt, Rachmaninov,
Debussy, Scriabin and Ravel which you could find with little effort on any number
of piano discs. But juxtaposed as they
are, and especially spiced up with less common repertory from the likes of Godowsky,
Berio, Messiaen and Griffes, they take on a wholly new dimension. (By a tantalising coincidence, the programme also
includes Ibert’s Le vent dans la ruines which
he wrote in response to his wartime work as a stretcher-bearer on the Somme,
the centenary of which we are currently marking.)
It is intriguing how, for example, the journey from
Debussy to Berio, or from Berio to Mompou, is far less awkward than we might at
first think. Berio’s reflective Wasserklavier merges almost
imperceptibly into Mompou’s El Iago which,
in turn, moves fluidly into the world of Liszt and his Le jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este. This is an intelligently devised
programme, with thematic cohesion, but it is also an intelligently played
programme with interpretative insight which is very strongly flavoured by the
external elements of the programme.
I first heard much of this programme live when Tiu
played it in 2012 at an exhibition of French Impressionist paintings held at
the National Museum of Singapore, and on that occasion one was struck by the musical
relationship with the visual images.
Those visual images are absent here, and somehow the music takes on an
even more potent quality, not so much summoning up visual images as creating
whole worlds of imagery which go far beyond the concept of Impressionism and into
the realms of psychological perception.
I am a little surprised by Tiu’s very masculine, assertive
reading of Debussy’s Le vent dans la
plaine – not, for him, the airy, elusive quality of Debussy the so-called
Impressionist, but more a composer who sees the wind as something which does
not merely pass by, but creates very distinct, almost destructive, physical effects
on the landscape it passes across. And
this kind of strong, assertive performance means that the move into the rather
more hard-nosed harmonic environment of Charles Griffes’ The Night Winds is fluently achieved, and serves to enhance the underlying
message that the wind is something every bit as physical as it is atmospheric.
Taken individually, each performance is technically assured
and interpretatively perceptive, but taken as a whole, this programme is
elevated by what some might see as the external concept of the Four Elements. It is for this reason - that even established
pieces can be viewed in a totally different light according to the context in
which we hear them - that we do have so many recordings of the same music. And thank goodness for that. Albert Tiu’s intelligent and artistically-driven
performances certainly shed new light on this music, and also give us performances
which stand comparison with the very best in any context.
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