An Auspicious Debut

Jorge Luis Prats’ reputation precedes him long before his recital debut in Vancouver under the auspices of the Vancouver Chopin Society. I have long admired and enjoyed Prats’ live recording of a recital in Zaragoza for Decca. It was therefore with great anticipation that I attended his recital on yet another wet Vancouver evening.

Prats opens his programme with Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachiana brasileira No. 4, A.264/W.424, the composer’s homage to Bach. Like other great artists, I immediately sense that he conjures a sound from the instrument that captivates, inviting rather than demanding our attention. I appreciate his hushed eloquence in the Preludio of the suite, his captivating playing of the almost jazzy opening of Coral, with its beautiful left hand melody. His beautiful sound comes to the fore again at the beginning of the Aria, with its plaintive melody almost reminiscent of Mussorgsky. Prats’ incredible finger work dazzles us in the colourful and energetic Danza, playing with the dexterity of a Horowitz and the freedom of Art Tatum.

It takes a brave pianist to tackle any part of Isaac Albeniz’s Iberia suite. In his debut recording for Decca, Prats plays the equally challenging Goyescas by Enrique Granados. Indeed, Goyescas is often mentioned together with Iberia as Spain’s greatest contributions to the piano literature, they are vastly different in style as well as substance. Although both monumental masterpieces that tax to the utmost the musical as well as pianistic abilities of anyone, Goyescas nods fondly back to the 19^th century whereas Iberia looks very much forward to the harmonic language of Debussy and Ravel.

Prats’ playing of the Iberia set is truly stunning, as well as pianistically honest – no blurring of texture or “cheating” with over-pedaling. The rather thick texture of much of the score came through clearly from beginning to end. The artist has an innate sense and feel for the underlying rhythm of the music, as well as the mood each piece evokes. In Lavapiés, the avalanche of sound that comes out of the instrument is truly overwhelming.

I enjoyed very much Prats’ Chopin set that comes after intermission. In the Fantasy, Op. 49, there is a sense of motion, a directness and dignity that befit the music. In the Nocturne, Op. 62, No. 2, the pianist plays with, to paraphrase Rubinstein, great sentiment but not sentimentality. In the Andante spinato and Grande Polonaise, Op. 22, Prats makes the piano sing in the Andante, and makes it dance under his finger in the Polonaise. There is lightness as well as a stylistic correctness in the Polonaise that one does not always hear, even from very good pianists. Even in the connecting passages, for instance, the few pizzicato notes that connect the Andante to the Polonaise, so often neglected by pianists, are charged with meaning. My only minor quibble is that the passagework that leads to the conclusion of the piece is slightly messy. Prats does not always play what the composer indicates on the score, but I would have to say that the he certainly plays with the spirit of Chopin, if not completely the letter.

The pianist ends his recital with his own arrangement of Maurice Ravel’s La Valse. He tells the audience afterwards that in his arrangement, he plays his own arrangement of the work, rather than the composer’s own “simple” transcription, because he is striving to recreate the instruments of the orchestra on the piano. Indeed, his playing of this dark and brooding score once again reminds us of this artist’s supreme pianism, as well as acute musical instincts.

At the conclusion of the Ravel, Prats apologizes to the audience for forgetting to play Ignacio Cervantes’ Danzas cubanas, or Cuban Dances Suite, as indicated on the programme. According to the printed programme, the work is supposed to begin the second half of the concert. I personally am glad that he “forgot” to play this until the end of his recital, because it gives us a release from the unbearable tension he conjures up in La Valse. This set of dances is, I believe, a staple of the pianist’s repertoire, and his desire to share something of his Cuban heritage with audiences. I will only say that his playing of this charming music is as beguiling and stylish as one can hope. A most enjoyable “dessert” to a fabulous meal.

In his chat with the audience before his playing of the Cervantes, as well as in the brief chat we had afterwards, Jorge Luis Prats comes across as a charming and friendly man, utterly devoid of airs, someone we would all enjoy sharing a meal with.

Certainly an auspicious beginning to what promises to be an exciting musical year!

Patrick May

From Paris, With Love

In this age of mass-marketing of music, it is refreshing to encounter a performance that comes to the audience from the heart of the musician, and gets into the heart of the music. The latest CD release from pianist Henri-Paul Sicsic, a 2009 live recording from Paris’ famed Salle Cortot, delivers such a performance. The programme includes a generous helping of Chopin, including the Mazurka, Op. 59, No. 1, Impromptu No. 1, Op. 29, Nocturne, Op. 48, No. 1, Valse, Op. 42, and the Sonata No. 2, Op. 42, and continues with Toronto composer Alexina Louie’s I leap through the sky with stars, Maurice Ravel’s Ondine, and Évocation and Triana from Isaac Albeniz’s monumental and fiercely difficult Ibéria Suite.

While each composer challenges the performer in different ways, no composer of piano music is more difficult to play, technically as well as intellectually, than Chopin. Arthur Rubinstein confessed, “I could play a pyrotechnical Liszt sonata, requiring forty minutes for its performance, and get up from the piano without feeling tired, while even the shortest étude of Chopin compels me to an intense expenditure of effort.” The difficulty of Chopin’s music, though, lies within the inherent structure of the music. The many technical and musical challenges in Chopin’s music are never written for the sake of challenging the manual dexterity of the pianist – even though many world-famous pianists treat it as such. To be sure, it takes a virtuoso to play Chopin, but it takes so much more than a virtuoso to bring out the beauty and integrity of the music.

There is a sense of rightness in the style and flavour of Sicsic’s Chopin interpretation that is very much his own. Chopin wrote more than fifty Mazurkas, and they are the most elusive of his compositions. George Sand quipped, not without malice, that there is more music in one Chopin Mazurka than in all the operas of Meyerbeer. Perhaps more insightful is Liszt’s observation that one has to harness a major pianist to play a Mazurka of Chopin. The later Mazurkas are especially intricate to play, and calls for a balance of rhythm, timing and silence. I would agree with Liszt’s comment, and say that Henri-Paul Sicsic is a major pianist indeed. The rest of the pianist’s Chopin group is no less remarkable than the Mazurka performance. In the Impromptu, he captured the elfin lightness of the music. In the Nocturne, the other-worldly beauty of Chopin’s music is made all the more apparent. The Op. 42 Valse is probably the most difficult of the waltezs, and Sicsic once again rose to the occasion, capturing the many shifts in mood as well as the spirit of the dance.

Ever since the work was written, many pianists have attempted Chopin’s second sonata, but there is always room for another valid interpretation. Sicsic’s performance of the great Funeral March sonata is stunning. He takes the opening movement at a whirlwind tempo, which suits the impetuousness that the music calls for. The sounds he created in the shattering climaxes of the movement are overwhelming. There is relentlessness in his playing of the famous (and much maligned) Funeral March, and the lyrical middle section has never sounded more beautiful. In spite of having heard this work so often, the last movement of this work never fails to send chills up my spine. Sicsic’s playing of this movement is spooky indeed, and brings out the weirdness and the death-haunted feeling of this music.

Alexina Louie, no stranger to Canadian audiences, must be somewhat of an unknown quantity to the Parisian audience. Perhaps because of the title of the music, I have often thought of this work as having a very visual quality to it. It reminds me of the paintings of Marc Chagall, with people (and cows!) flying through the night sky. Henri-Paul Sicsic exploits, in the best sense of the word, the large palette of colours the composer put at his disposal, and paints a picture as vivid and vibrant that the music calls for.

In Ondine, the first movement of Maurice Ravel’s tone poem for piano, Gaspard de la nuit, Henri-Paul Sicsic effectively recreates the composer evocation of shimmering waters and its strange and beautiful watery spirit. There are pianists today who can play this difficult music as if it were child’s play, but not everyone can successfully capture the sonic ambience of this music. It struck me, at this point in the recital that Sicsic has, without us realizing it, taken us into a sound world that is so radically different from that of Chopin.

With the two pieces from Albeniz’s Iberia Suite, Henri-Paul Sicsic takes us into yet another realm of sound. This is not the sun-drenched Spain of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, which is a much more descriptive piece of music, or even the Spain of Bizet’s Carmen. In Iberia, Albeniz gives us an evocation of a landscape filled with shadow and mystery. Like the Chopin Mazurkas, there is a real danger of playing this music with a “foreign accent”. This is not the case here, for Sicsic’s playing of these two masterpieces is highly idiomatic, capturing the essence of the Spanish rhythm as well as the ever changing colours, and the lightness and shadow in the music.

Sicsic rewarded this enthusiastic audience was rewarded with an encore – Chopin’s Étude in A-flat Major, the first of the Op. 25 set of Études. The pianist’s playing of this euphonious music brings out the richness and beauty of Chopin’s harmonic and melodic inventiveness.

Henri-Paul Sicsic used to be an active member of the Vancouver music scene, but now teaches at the University of Toronto. One city’s loss, as they say, is another’s gain. I look forward to this wonderful pianist’s next return home.