Date: November 17, 2015
Location: The Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall, Hong Kong.
Mendelssohn — Two Preludes & Fugues from Op. 35
Chopin — Barcarolle op. 60
Chopin — Mazurkas Op. 63 No. 2 & Op. 30 No. 4
Chopin — Andante Spianato et Grande Polonaise Brillante
Ravel — Le Tombeau de Couperin
Liszt — Venezia e Napoli
ENCORES
Gershwin — “Love Walked In” (arr. Percy Grainger)
Dohnanyi — Concert Etude, Op. 28, No. 6 (“Capriccio”) from 6 Concert Etudes
Benjamin Grosvenor (piano)
Benjamin Grosvenor, declared by The New York Times to be the Boy Lord of the Piano, is certainly an electrifying pianist. His lightning fingering dazzles with fiendish delight. His treatment of softer passages brims with a nursing attentiveness, while in louder passages he could easily summon a stentorian intensity. His piano output glows with confidence, and he exhibits the rare gift of keeping a steady tempo. In two encores, especially the devilishly impossible Dohnanyi, his hands danced on the keyboard with practically no wrong notes, at an impossibly(!) and consistently(!!) fast tempo, and discharged an air of caffeinated intensity that could handily transform Slowpoke into Speedy Rodriguez. But Grosvenor’s playing lacked any meaningful conversational power. At the start of Chopin’s Grande Polonaise Brillante, just as the chimes of the octaves signaled a heightened level of expectation, the result came crashing to naught. Notes overflowed aplenty, but melodic transmission faded away, as if a telegraph wire couldn’t stop dit-dahing but no meaning came out of it. In the first tableaux, Gondoliera, of Venezia e Napoli, the lyrics of Peruchini’s gondolier song could have offered plenty of interpretative materials: “As I gazed intently / at my love’s features, / her little face so smooth, / that mouth, and that lovely breast; / I felt in my heart / a longing, a desire, / a kind of bliss / which I cannot describe!” Grosvenor’s playing was elegant and precise, but no thoughts could be culled from his playing. His hands created plenty of empirical tonal warmth but also a soulless sink hole. In the Tarantella, clinical precision overshadowed, if not entirely dispelled anything that could have come from his heart. Harmony and emotions were obliterated by the sheer force of perfect technique, which seemed, unfortunately, to be the sole star of the evening. The same can be said of the Chopins, especially the Grande Polonaise Brillante, which came with lots of fireworks in individual notes but very little by way of expressive phrasing. With “Love Walked In”, Grosvenor was more expressive, but still lacked the courage to make meaning out of Gershwin’s words: “One look, and I forgot the gloom of the past / One look and I had found my future at last / One look and I had found a world completely new / When love walked in with you.” The only explanation, whether fair or not, is that he has not an abundance of life’s experience to influence his expression. Grosvenor is a seriously talented musician with perhaps the most immaculate touch among all pianists in his generation (bar none!!!), but only time will tell if the Boy Lord could eventually graduate to become a real Lord of our time.
The Fleeting Spectator 