Jan 17th 2015

Hélène Grimaud: a stunning recital in Bordeaux

by Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. 

Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.

Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.

You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:

“Portraitures and caricatures:  Conductors, Pianist, Composers”

 here.

French pianist Hélène Grimaud returned to Bordeaux Friday night (Jan. 16) after a five-year absence, offering a program notable for its concentration on 20th century music.  She is expanding her repertoire ever closer to present day composers and her fan base is loving it. 

Her last appearance in Bordeaux ended dramatically when she bolted from the stage, claiming hallucinations during a Beethoven piece. If the packed Auditorium (just under 4,000 capacity) hoped for another drama, they were perhaps disappointed. In its place, however, they were captivated by nearly two hours of bravura playing in the Grimaud mode – vigorous, extreme dynamics overlaid with a dazzling technique that throws caution to the four winds.

Hélène Grimaud by Michael Johnson, the author

I found her performance exhilarating, as did the wildly enthusiastic audience, some of whom gave her a standing ovation, a rarity in France. She rewarded the crowd with several curtain calls and two lovely encores. 

Ms. Grimaud is a spiritual, introspective and cerebral pianist whose programs  – unlike so many random concert pairings these days – are structured to cohere in musical terms. Her sober stage presence is in welcome contrast to the leaping theatrics and frightening coiffures of many younger pianists. This control has helped her win a cult following, much in evidence at this recital. When she strode onstage in white trousers, white shoes and a white cape-like top, some audience members audibly whispered “Angelic”. At first I thought “Night nurse”, but I gave in to the intended effect.

The first half was built around ideas of water, unexpectedly appropriate given the evening’s rainy weather.  Piano repertoire does not lack for waterflow, dancing fountains and glimmering oceans as inspiration and so she had much literature to choose from. 

She opened with the third Encore of Luciano Berio’s Wasserklavier, a contemporary evocation of liquid sounds, broken up with a pleasant dissonance. Other highlights in the first half were Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II, composed in homage to Olivier Messiaen and artfully marrying sounds of east and west.

Next she tackled the Isaac Albeniz Almeria from the second of four volumes of his Iberia Spanish sketches. Almeria, capital of Andalusia, is a Mediterranean port city, hence the water dimension. A sparkling Franz Liszt Les Jeux d’eau de la Villa d’Este, a Grimaud showpiece, was executed with her trademark ebullition. 

And finally came an eerie rendering of Claude Debussy’s dreamy La Cathédral engloutie, so evocative that one could not mistake the underwater image near the end. I found it even more sensitive and certainly more suggestive than Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s classic recorded version.

But all this music was a mere prelude to her signature piece, the monumental Brahms Sonata No. 2 in F sharp minor, actually intended by the youthful Brahms to be well beyond the pianistic abilities of women performers. She clearly feels at home with this composition. Re-entering the stage after intermission, her hands hit the keyboard before her derrière hit the bench. 

Daunting octaves and trills, violence in heavily dramatic passages, exhaust even the most athletic performers. But Ms. Grimaud, Martha Argerich and a brace of young Chinese young women such as Wei Yung Chang have long since proven modern pianism is not a man’s world after all.

It is a commonplace to say that Ms. Grimaud is not to everyone’s taste. She speaks her musical mind and is far too much an individual at the keyboard to win a piano competition today. She is equally herself in her personal life, down to her choice of wolves as a species needing protection. 

Some critics have roasted her playing, including one prominent Frenchman who, she recalls in her book Wild Harmonies, described her a few years ago as a “little goat with no taste, good only for jumping about onstage”. Later in her career he changed his mind. At first her critical reception was “a nightmare” but now, she says, “I take the decrees of the press in stride.”

Ms. Grimaud was not available for an interview during her Bordeaux stopover but this extended conversation in English covers most of the questions I would have put to her.

 

Ms. Grimaud spoke of her lifelong love of Brahms in her book. She said she found “pain bordering on ecstasy” in his works.

“Brahms composes the way a sublime shooting star writes its dizzying arc, she wrote. He is bound to nothing, and answers to no demand If he finds an impediment in his way, he smashes it and returns to his heavenly abysses.” She believes Brahms describes, “note after note”, a life “voluntarily lived apart and devoted exclusively to the essential”. 

During her recent stay in Germany she discovered the largely forgotten artist and sculptor Max Klinger, a Brahms contemporary, who produced a collection of 41 engravings interpreting Brahms’s oeuvre under the title Brahmsphantasie. His engraving of the Brahms song Alte Liebe seems particularly well-conceived.

Partly through her Klinger research, she found a way to relate music and art, a convergence that helped her explain her love of Brahms. Klinger illustrates “the solitude of the artist and his (or her) profound joy in the torment of the elements”.

In her second passion – the protection of wolves, she draws parallels between wolves and women. They share “certain mental characteristics: sharpness of senses, playfulness and an extreme sense of devotion”, she writes in her book. 

Hélène Grimaud’s strength has always been her individuality. Music-lovers who enjoy being surprised, who appreciate an artist’s effort to make every concert and recital a new experience, will continue to line up for her recitals and concerts.




To follow what's new on Facts & Arts please click here.



     

 


This article is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Facts & Arts neither receives information about you, nor of your donation, nor does Facts & Arts receive a commission.

Facts & Arts does not pay the author, nor takes paid by the author, for the posting of the author's material on Facts & Arts. Facts & Arts finances its operations by selling advertising space.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Music Reviews

Sep 11th 2022
EXTRACT: "When I try to understand my life as a critic in the dazzling world of piano music, I am at a loss. We have inherited so much over 300 years that I feel overwhelmed. There is no obvious focal point. What is at the heart of piano world? -- Personally I could not make it through the day without the stimulation of piano performance. My home resounds with music all my waking hours, constantly renewed from the thousand-odd CDs I have accumulated." ----- Picture: The author, Michael Johnson.
Jun 21st 2022
EXTRACT: "This novel is nothing short of a Tolstoian epic.   Author Lawson, a true polymath, is up to the task. He is an accomplished pianist and composer, retired archdeacon of the Church of England and author of some 14 books." ---- "Rounding out his career, Lawson is also a trained psychotherapist who has worked with several pianists, including child prodigies." ----- "I know of no other writer who can draw on such a varied and pertinent background and weave them into a single tale."
Dec 18th 2021
EXTRACT: "......, I read all the time in Russian, French and English. Right now I’m finishing the new book of my favorite Russian author Ludmila Ulitzkaya. Of course, I have read most of classics to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Pushkin, Akhmatova. I think it’s important to read Russian literature to understand Russian music, to understand the suffering and the spirituality of the characters of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Bulgakov in order to feel the depth of Rachmaninov’s music. I also read a lot in French and English. For me, it’s important to go from contemporary writers to the classics and back."
Dec 9th 2021
EXTRACT: Q: "Your new CD is a turning point. Why is it so important to you?" ----- "A: It is all Brahms. I really wanted to do it this way. It is very important to me because it is my first solo CD. I’ve been spending a lot of my time working on Brahms, especially the Brahms Paganini Variations and the Handel Variations. I almost grew up with them. "
Dec 3rd 2021
EXTRACT: "A musical theatre legend has died. Stephen Sondheim, the greatest composer-lyricist of his generation, passed away on November 26 at the age of 91. His dramatic genius combined a rare blend of elements, that of an astonishingly versatile and sophisticated composer, and an incredibly witty wordsmith. His extraordinary output includes a staggering 16 musicals as composer and lyricist, a further three as lyricist alone, as well as four musical revues featuring compilations of hit songs from his shows."
Nov 27th 2021
EXTRACT: "Most important  to him, he explained, is maintaining his individuality in interpretation. He feels it was a mistake in his past to pick and choose bits from different teachers and combine them into a finished performance. He has decided to create his own perspective, and 'go for it'."
Oct 28th 2021
EXTRACTS: "The 16th International Beethoven Piano Competition came to a rousing climax in Vienna on 21 October with first prizewinner Aris Alexander Blettenberg’s lyrical rendering of the Beethoven Piano Concerto No 1." ---- "The other two finalists, Austrian Philipp Scheucher and South Korean Dasol Kim, played Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth Concertos respectively."
Sep 21st 2021
EXTRACT: "Top prize, worth 22,000 euros, went to Jae Hong Park, a flamboyant, emotive player with and a firm grasp of Rachmaninov, and second prize went to Do-Hyun Kim, who played Prokofiev’s second concerto with some considerable verve. Placing third was Lukas Sternath, a young Austrian who performed Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto with cool charm -- the opposite of Park’s style."
Jul 9th 2021
EXTRACT: " .....I have to give everything in these concerts,.... "
Jun 26th 2021
EXTRACT: What do you want to be known as? --- As “Stewart Goodyear, composer and pianist”.
Mar 15th 2021
EXTRACT: Denis Pascal, founder of the French Trio Pascal: ".....recording studios began working again. We recorded our Schubert trios at the end of September. And musicians everywhere are finding that the crisis allows time for a certain introspection and questioning into the way music is performed. Music will play a much more important role after the crisis."
Feb 12th 2021
EXTRACTS: "She began her piano training rather late in life – age 8." ..... "I want to contribute a sense of joy by discovering atypical works that might surprise an educated public. I have great experience and am inclined to share them with anyone who can appreciate them, or as André Gide wrote, anyone “who has an open mind”."
Jan 31st 2021
EXTRACTS: "A new recording of Franz Liszt’s piano compositions presents ten carefully balanced pieces in a double-CD album aptly titled Between Light and Darkness, launched by Piano Classics. The pianist, the veteran French virtuoso Vincent Larderet .... Larderet opens his CD with a moving exploration of Après une Lecture de Dante with a tortured lyricism unmatched by many of his contemporaries who play it. I was stunned the first time I heard his performance. In our interview below, he describes lyricism as “an essential facet of my musical conception. The piano must be able to sing like the human voice.” "
Jan 16th 2021
EXTRACT: "Jack Kohl is an American pianist and writer with three novels and two essay collections to his credit. His new collection, From the Windows of Diligence: Essays from a Standing Pianist, has drawn critical acclaim in the U.S. and Europe. In these reflections, he examines the power of ‘hack pianism’, the metaphor of running vs. the piano, and the ‘hidden gift’ of the Covid virus pandemic on solitary practicing. Robert Beattie spoke to Kohl about his music training and how he made the transition from pianist to author. (This edited interview was first published on www.Seenandheard-international.com and is reproduced with permission.)"
Dec 17th 2020
EXTRACT: "Freedom in Beethoven’s music takes many, frequently overlapping forms. There is heroic freedom in the Eroica (1803), freedom from political oppression in the Egmont Overture (1810), artistic freedom and innovation in the Ninth Symphony (1824). Today, Beethoven’s music remains deeply connected with a true humanism, which has the principles of freedom and self-determination at its heart. The composer’s music grew out of the age of European Enlightenment, which located human reason and the self at the centre of knowledge......"
Nov 27th 2020
EXTRACT: "One of the most durable tales in Western civilization – the legend of Faust – is brilliantly rendered in a piano adaptation, performed this week by the multi-talented Australian musician of German/Slovenian parentage, Ashley Hribar. A new recording of the music, now available digitally, will appear as a CD in the New Year. Hribar calls his recording, “Faust: A Mortal’s Tale”.  It is a personal musical reflection on the Faust story, loosely based on the 1926 silent film by Wilhelm Friedrich Murnau."
Aug 6th 2020
EXTRACT: "For 60 minutes, my mind was clear, the air was clean and the sound heavenly. It was my honor and privilege to have been there."
Jul 25th 2020
EXTRACT: "Scarlatti sonatas are enjoying a popular surge in recent years, tempting pianists –Europeans, Americans, Asians -- to try to master their broad range. Margherita has some advice: “Don’t be afraid to slow down, to speed up, to play the truly singable melodies with a quasi-Romantic feeling.” "
Jul 18th 2020
EXTRACT: "The dizzying output of John Cage the musician, the poet, the writer, the thinker, the artist, was so prolific that one of his sidelines – his interests in wild mushrooms -- has been almost overlooked. A new a two-volume set of books, beautifully designed by Capucine Labarthe, packaged in an elegant slipcover, seeks to fill this gap."