THE PLAYLIST: MASOCHISTIC PIANISTS

Satanic climaxes, perilous fireworks, duelling fencers: there's nothing quite so seductive to piano students as a nearly unplayable piece of music. Irving Wardle finds some models on iTunes ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2009

Piano students tend to be difficulty snobs for whom nothing is worth playing unless it’s unplayable. It’s a thrill akin to bull-fighting to look down at a page of Liszt and then observe some reckless newcomer or leathery old slogger heading into the minefield of double-flats, octave marathons, multiple time-signatures, and copious droppings of demisemiquaver fly-shit. If some music arises from this collision, so much the better, as in the following gladiatorial items. If they do not shatter your iPod, they may melt your heart.

LIGETI: ETUDES Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Sony Classical 1996)
Proceed to Track XIII, “L’escalier du diable”, and surrender to those deadly feet coming up the ladder again and again until they reach the top with a satanic climax which ebbs away into the longest dying fall in piano literature.

LUTOSLAWSKI: VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY PAGANINI FOR 2 PIANOS Martha Argerich & Nelson Freire (Universal 1997)
There is no technique to beat Argerich, but for Freire she still raises her game. In this perilous firework (outdoing Brahms and Rachmaninov’s transcendental fun and games with the same tune), they are two fencers duelling on the edge of an abyss.

ALBÉNiZ: IBERIA ALICIA DE LARROCHA (Decca 1988)
Amateurs get enticed into Albéniz’s perfumed intros, only to perish in his swampily arpeggiated interiors. The more notes, it seems, the less music. De Larrocha is the opposite: the more overloaded the figuration, the more passionate the song. Put yourself at the mercy of the duende-drenched “El Albaicin”.

GERSHWIN: VIRTUOSO ARRANGEMENTS FOR PIANO BY EARL WILD MARTIN JONES (Nimbus 2006)
Jones has so much talent that he can splurge it on transcriptions of fiendish complexity and zero content. Not here: this fine Wild set mobilises Chopin and Liszt into a continuation of Gershwin by other means. Listen to Jones stretch “Fascinating Rhythm” and you’ll never want to hear the original again.

CHOPIN: ETUDES OP 10 ARR GODOWSKY Boris Berezovsky (Warner 2005)
Chopin’s studies once set the benchmark, then Godowsky came along and made them twice as hard. Berezovsky’s account of the whirlwind, hand-spreading No 4 is a scorcher.

SCRIABIN: ETUDES Piers Lane (Hyperion 1992)
Scriabin invented a new harmonic system and planned to launch a new world, which led to unheard-of demands on his pianists. From wrist-wrecking tremolandos to runs in 9ths, Lane has all the keys to open Scriabin’s secret box and release its ecstasy and black magic.

TCHAIKOVSKY: THE NUTCRACKER OP 71 Philip Fowke (Danacord 2007)
It’s not the notes here but the quality of sound. From Fowke’s box of hammers arise all the colours of the orchestra. In one bit of alchemy he evokes the Sugarplum Fairy by transforming the piano into a celesta.

Picture Credit: gagilas (via Flickr)

(Irving Wardle was theatre critic of the Times from 1963 to 1989. He is now a piano student. See past playlists for Island Records, Motown, Alfred Brendel and Leonard Cohen.)