IN THE aftershock of the standing ovations, the roars of the nearcapacity crowd, and the reverberation of the electrifying encores, it seems madness to dare suggest that the performance of Siberian pianist Denis Matsuev with the RSNO on Saturday night might not have appealed to all tastes.
But for those who like to hear interpretations of Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto that are essentially dark and mellow, Matsuev's powerhouse playing, with its thunderous volume and hammered clarity, might have seemed to originate in the clatter-and-batter school of Russian pianism.
Except for one thing. Matsuev tempered his power-lift playing with levels of poetry and delicacy that were almost exquisite: at the outset, in the slow movement, and in the beautiful duets with flute and horn in the finale.
Whatever your taste, it was a staggering feat of pianism, topped by Matsuev's madcap version, for his climactic encore, of Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, spraying lunatic clusters, dissonances and wild glissandi all over the audience, which then brought the house down.
It consigned to oblivion the attempt by conductor Jun Markl to make something weighty out of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, which made only heavy weather of the bracing piece. But it did not eclipse the top-drawer RSNO performance throughout Stravinsky's Petrushka, better-paced by Markl and characterised by colourful, zesty and bitinglyrhythmic orchestral playing.
One striking feature of the Petrushka performance, in passing, was this: I cannot think when the auditorium last sounded this alive to the sound of the RSNO, notably in the wallop at the end of the Shrove-tide Fair and the pounding reprise of the Coachmen's Dance. Food for thought?
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