Keys To Kingdom In Deft Collection

The Age

Friday June 6, 2008

Clive O'Connell, Reviewer

PASCAL ROGE and RITA REICHMAN

Australian National Academy of Music, June 2-3, until June 11 www.anam.com.au

BRINGING together a collection of fine pianists over a fortnight has come about through a deft shaping of circumstances by the Australian National Academy of Music. Alongside well-known locals Michael Kieran Harvey, Geoffrey Lancaster, Rita Reichman with contributions from Ian Munro and the academy's own resident Timothy Young, the academy's board have acquired the services of Pascal Roge, Roy Howat, Emanuel Ax and Boris Berman: all these artists in South Melbourne to lecture, teach, perform - or all three.

Not that the performers are being taken outside their comfort zones. Appropriately enough, fortepiano expert Lancaster played Mozart and early Beethoven; Roge followed an expected all-French line; Howat performed one of his specialties in Faure; Boris Berman has recorded the complete piano works of Prokofiev and plays a wide-ranging sample of them tonight; Ax's program next Wednesday is half-Chopin, a composer well represented on his CDs and at his Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concerts next weekend, but he has also included Schubert: the second set of impromptus and the earlier of the two A Major sonatas.

Roge's Tuesday night program began and ended with Debussy: an idiosyncratic version of the Estampes , markedly elastic in its speed changes and tending to being under-played, especially in Pagodes, where more than a few passages failed to carry; finally, a feat of varied responsiveness in the first book of Preludes, the opening and closing pieces ideally realised and framing a fresh-faced collection in which even well-worn friends held surprises. However, the most arresting moments in this recital came with two of Satie's Gnossiennes and the famous first Gymnopedie, each a gem of balance and articulation.

On Wednesday, Rita Reichman kept to the mainstream, starting with Beethoven's A flat Sonata, an essay where the opening promised much but the mirror-fugues suffered from a few lapses and the usual problem of disappearing lines. Much the same recurred during the last work, Chopin's B minor Sonata No. 3, where the four-square opening impressed for its fluency but the following Scherzo came across as heavy-handed.

More pleasure came in Reichman's account of two famous French water-pieces: Ravel's Jeux d'eau and the rolling sea-voyage that underpins Debussy's L'isle joyeuse . For the latter, the pianist kept to a steady rhythm but powered through the assertive final pages without losing control of the work's impetus, while the Ravel piece was an unalloyed delight.

© 2008 The Age

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