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Piotr Il’yich TCHAIKOVSKY
(1840-1893)
Piano Concerto no.1 in B flat minor, op.23*
Sergey PROKOFIEV
(1891-1953)
Piano Concerto no.3 in C major, op.26*
Toccata, op.11
Mily BALAKIREV
(1837-1910)
Islamey – Oriental Fantasy
 Joyce Hatto (piano)
National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra/René Köhler
Recorded in the Concert Artist Studios, Cambridge, March 3rd 1997
(Prokofiev), March 5th 1997 (Tchaikovsky, Toccata), March 16th
1999 (Balakirev)
CONCERT ARTIST/FIDELIO
RECORDINGS CACD9195-2 [67.31] |
The Tchaikovsky Concerto has previously been
available on a Concert Artist disc coupled with Saint-Saëns Fourth Concerto.
Interested readers should look at my review of that disc for comments on the
former -
MusicWeb Review: CACD-9086-2
Here it’s fashioned in the context of an
all-Russian disc and takes as a discmate another bedrock concerto,
Prokofiev’s much played Third. Much played, yes, but not so often played as
it is here. Superficially this is a relatively slow interpretation – and
Hatto is certainly not known as a slowcoach in this area of her repertoire.
Take a look at the insert timings and you can see that she is nearly two
minutes slower in the Adagio than Kissin and a minute and a half slower than
Katchen. She is a minute slower than Argerich (though Argerich has been
slowing up in this concerto over the years – 9.01 with Abbado and 9.39 with
Dutoit) and roughly the same amount vis-a-vis Demidenko and Katchen. This is
not to mention Prokofiev’s own celebrated, blazing sword recording with the
LSO (on Naxos).
How best, in spite of crude matters of timings, to characterise Hatto and
Köhler’s interpretation? Well in his own recording the composer was nervous,
electric, quick, cultivating huge contrasts and laconic profiles, grotesque
and urbanely thrown away in equal measure. Hatto and Köhler are very
different: slower, yes, but also subtle in their interplay and crafting.
This is especially so in the Theme and Variations second movement where we
find something remarkably Gallic about the pianism, about the orchestration,
about it all. I confess I was taken aback by the Ravelian inheritance that
becomes exposed here. I’d never considered the Concerto in that light
before, blinded as I generally have been by the infectious virtuosic swagger
and unremitting energy of it all. Here, suddenly, I see the it in a
different light. Whether others will share this more subdued, multi-hued
Gallic vision, an interpretation which is not anti-virtuosic but which
promotes tints and colours above mere rhetoric, will remain to be seen. In
its determined way however it has subtly shifted my perception of the way
the piece can sound.
As a bonus – infelicitous word for these two notoriously devilish pieces –
we have Prokofiev’s Toccata, lighter and more full of shade than usual,
though not stinting on the leonine drama. And there’s Islamey, a remorseless
trial of technique, which sounds evocative and sensitively shaped. It is
rather more musically involving than usual in this performance – it seems
here co-opted firmly to the more sensitive wing of Lisztian inspiration.
These are perceptive and thought-provoking performances. They avoid all
hints of routine and casual run-through parochialism. Instead these readings
are welded to recreative imagination and technical surety. I’m sure the
Prokofiev Concerto, in particular, will be the cause of some challenging,
fruitful debate.
Jonathan Woolf
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