Classical Music Review: Cliburn pianists let down their hair in Bass Hall performance

11:26 AM CDT on Wednesday, March 18, 2009
By SCOTT CANTRELL
The Dallas Morning News
from here

FORT WORTH – In just two months, Bass Performance Hall will be the center of the pianistic universe, as 30 young musicians compete for one of classical music's highest-visibility prizes. In the meantime, four past winners of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition were showing off Tuesday evening – in all the best ways – in a concert aptly billed as "Gold Fingers."

The players, in various pairs and sometimes all four together, were Olga Kern and Stanislav Ioudenitch (who both took gold medals in 2001), Jon Nakamatsu (1997) and José Feghali (1985). With two big Steinways nestled cheek to tail, there was plenty of musical personality as well as flashy fingerwork. By the concert's second half, which involved a good deal of cutting up onstage, the audience response ranged from smirks to guffaws.

For purely musical virtues, one highlight was the Schubert F minor Fantasy (D. 940). In a performance that reminded us how much quieter pianos were in Schubert's day, Nakamatsu and Ioudenitch really probed the music's emotional subtleties.

Feghali and Kern gave a brilliant account of the Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski's Variations on a Theme by Paganini. The theme is the same used in Rachmaninoff's famous Rhapsody, but here the treatments are more aggressive and harmonically tart, but engagingly so. Their performance of the Waltz from Rachmaninoff's Second Suite for two pianos was sometimes too notey to suggest an actual waltz.

Dismissing one another in increasingly stagy skits, the three guys took turns partnering Kern in four of Brahms' Hungarian Dances. Both physically and musically, Kern and Nakamatsu got all moony with each other in moony passages of one of the dances, to entertaining effect.

Ioudenitch and Nakamatsu took the first movement of Darius Milhaud's saucy Scaramouche too fast – made it a blur of notes rather than a dance – but the rest was quite fetching.

It's hard to be subtle with four pianists playing at once, and subtlety wasn't exactly to the fore in the eight-hands arrangements of the Liszt Rákóczy March, the Waltz from Gounod's Faust, Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee (here a formidable swarm) or Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever. But, hey, they were great fun. Nakamatsu stood up and marched in place while playing the Sousa's piccolo descant, and then all four pianists stood for the last strain.

This would be a show worth taking on the road. Especially if Kern packs her steamer trunks with all four of the dresses she showed off in turn this time. The red-finned number was a knockout.