A barnstomer

In a festival that has contained quite a number of literally extraordinary musical experiences, yesterday afternoon0s concert by six young Russian virtuoso pianists – almost four hours long – was, in some ways, the most extraordinary of all.

Playing almost non-stop – apart from one short interval – and following each other on to stage in relays, the young lions and lionesses of keyboard managed to get through every significant piece that Stravinsky composed for the piano, including the major adaptations he made himself for keyboard of his large-scale orchestral ballets.

Only two important items were missing from the programme, the Piano Rag Music and the Tango, and even they were added during the course of events.

But to start at the end, has there ever, in the history of recitals in the Queen’s Hall, been a performance like that of The Rite of Spring with which this astonishing display concluded?

Stravinsky arranged it for a piano duet. Yesterday, George Vachtnadze and Vakhtang Kodanashvili, the two most physically powerful men in the group, split it between two pianos – one keyboard would not have been enough to contain these two; and using two keyboards also gave them the opportunity to do a bit of doubling, increasing even further the amazing sonorities they produced.

Not only did they produce a sound that almost had your hands over your ears in self defence, they fully captured the spirit and wildness of the orchestral version. It was mad, bad, and dangerous to hear; it was utterly electrifying, pinning you to your seat. The pale Vachtnadze, on the upperpart, got paler and paler with intensity, while, storming away in the engine room with almost incredible pianistic force, Kodanashvili was puce with the effort.

In the other two big ballets, Maxim Mogilevsky swashbuckled his way through Petrushka – not the tidiest version I’ve ever heard, but this lad knows all about going for it in a live performance – while his wife, the apparently demure and rather poetic 20-year-old Svetlana Smolina showed her teeth and her muscles in a huge performance of one of the most interesting pieces of the long afternoon: a very rare outing for a one-piano arrangement made by Stravinsky, strictly for rehearsal purposes, of a suite from The Firebird.

Earlier, Mogilevsky and Vachtnadze – the two lads who’d won a Herald Angel on Saturday for their heroic eleventh-hour rescue of a concert where another artist had cancelled – gave a thunderous and strictly anti-classical account of the Concerto for Two Pianos. Stravinsky wanted this one bone-dry and devoid of emotion. Yesterday he swirled in his grave as these two gave it the full-blooded treatment (which it withstands without protest).

That attitude – the humanising of the machine – seemed in fact to represent the criterion of the afternoon. Everything brimmed with vigour, life, vitality, and wit, barnstormingly delivered by the class of ’97: Ivana Bukvich and Tea Lomdaridze flowing, lyrical and, expressive in the Sonata for Two Pianos. Svetlana Smolina irarch-Romantic form for the Four Studies, and Kodanashvili and Lomdaridze barnstormingly through the early F sharp minor Sonata.

At the end all six – disciples of the grand master, the unorthodox Indiana-based Russian pianist, Alexander Toradze – trooped on to share the ovation. They summoned the godfather, and on he came kissing them all, electing Mogilevsky to play the Tango as an encore while the others all stood and listened.

They’re all from the Toradze mould: physical strength and no holds barred at the keyboard. It’s highly controversial , but, my God, you know you’re alive listening to this highly volatile bunch. A memorable visit.


Pounding their way through Prokofiev

For anyone who thought Prokofiev was all wit, charm and lush Romanticism, the past weekend in Edinburg will have been a rude awakening. While the concert repertoire concentrates on a handful of listener-friendly works, the three-concert series by Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra at the Usher Hall gave a rate insight into the composer’s more experimental and confrontational work, dating from Prokofiev’s enfant terrible years of the First World War and the Twenties.

Prokofiev is the Kirov Orchestra’s bread and butter, from its work as the pit band for the Kirov Opera and Ballet, and it was the pieces with the closest connections to the stage that came across with most conviction: biting accounts of the Scythian Suite (which began life as a ballet) and the Third Symphony (with music from his opera The Fiery Angel), as well as a searingly intense concert performance of the Romeo and Juliet ballet. In the pit and out, the orchestra is now surely up there with the great Russian ensembles.

The Third Symphony was preceded by the Second, which begins with a movement of such relentless fortissimo and punishing rhythmic drive that one feared for the players’ survival to the end of the concert. But there they were, more than two hours later, pounding through the equally strenuous writing if the finale to the Third.

They had had a degree of light relief in between, with the Second of Prokofiev’s lyrical violin concertos. The 24-year-old Russian Sergei Levitin was the eloquent soloist here, missing only the extra oomph needed to give the drunken finale its full power.

The same could hardly be said of the soloist in the two piano concertos, Alexander Toradze. Toradze is a bear of a man, whose big hands career manically around the keyboard, looking as if they could never be hitting the right notes in the right order; but, miraculously, they do.

As a pendant to these orchestral concerts, a handful of Toradze’s piano pupils from his class at the Indiana University South Bend (he defected to the West in 1983) gave a marathon recital of all Prkofiev’s piano sonatas. There was some powerful pianism here, worthy of Toradze himself. A third Sonata played by Vakhtang Kodanashvili and a Second from Maxim Mogilevsky were particularly dazzling.

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