This summary provides an overview of two contrasting jazz piano performances and reviews of several classical piano concerts in London: Gwilym Simcock's jazz piano performance showed intricate improvisation inspired by classical works, with melodic lines in the right hand complementing the left. In contrast, Jean Rondeau's jazz improvisations on classical pieces lacked musical logic and coherence. Reviews covered concerts by classical pianists including Seong-Jin Cho, who gave an impressive debut recital of Chopin, Maurizio Pollini, Piotr Anderszewski, and others. Arcadi Volodos gave a standout recital in Bordeaux of Brahms and Schubert, showing

1. REVIEWS Concerts
60 International Piano May/June 2016
UK
LONDON
Institut Français Gwilym Simcock; Jean
Rondeau, 19 Mar
Kings Place Dan Tepfer, 13 Feb
Milton Court Steven Osborne, 18 Nov
Wigmore Hall Piotr Anderszewski, 9 Feb;
Alexander Ullman, 28 Feb
Royal Festival Hall Maurizio Pollini, 23 Feb
StJohn’sSmithSquareSeong-JinCho, 11 Mar
Conway Hall Jonathan Plowright, 4 Feb
More and more classical pianists are trying
their hand at jazz, but its demands sort
them out pretty fast: some have a natural
aptitude for music without a score, others
just haven’t. And although there are a
million different ways of playing jazz piano,
there is one golden rule: it must have a
musical logic which is clearly perceptible,
even if it’s not capable of being analysed
in words.
In the sparky little annual festival at
London’s Institut Français entitled ‘It’s All
About Piano!’ we got a sharply contrasting
pair of jazz performers. I’ve long been
dazzled by Gwilym Simcock’s
improvisatory brilliance. To be seated
below stage-level, so that one could see his
hands from underneath, was to learn a lot
about how his music works. It seemed as
though the crazily flying fingers of the right
hand knew exactly what the more repetitive
left hand was preparing to demand of
them; many of his pieces were rapid
perpetuum mobile excursions in intricate
counterpoint.
As he made clear in his running
commentary, Simcock’s classical grounding
is integral to his art as a jazz player: the slow
movement of Grieg’s Piano Concerto, which
he had loved as a boy, now offered an ideal
framework for improvisation. Likewise a
Samuel Barber trifle which he had played
when he was 11 years old formed the
springboard for a dizzily muscular romp.
Chick Corea –‘who makes the piano dance’
– was another of his inspirations; as was the
progressive rock keyboardist Keith Emerson,
in whose memory Simcock played an
affectionate piece. There were times when
his sound was pure Debussy, times when it
was pure stride, but everything was bursting
with melody.
Two hours before, we had heard Jean
Rondeau give a two-part recital: some
Scarlatti sonatas, Rameau’s Gavotte avec
doubles in A minor, and Brahms’s left-hand
arrangement of Bach’s great D minor violin
Chaconne, followed by improvisations on
these same works. The classical pieces were
delivered in a pleasingly workmanlike
manner, if with no great insights, but the
jazz improvisations were woefully lacking in
the aforementioned logic. Most of the time
he was simply floundering, and going off at
tangents to nothing in particular. With his
winsome French accent and his extravagantly
bouffant mop, he’s a marketing gift to his
record label; but without that hair he’s
nothing much. Maybe, as he’s young, he’ll
improve with time.
In 2011 the pianist-composer Dan
Tepfer brought out a CD entitled Goldberg
Variations/Variations, which paired Bach’s
variations with improvised variations of his
own. More recently, at Kings Place, he gave
a recital of this composite work. He
declared at the outset that it was a ‘loving’
reaction to the Bach, in which he would be
seeing how much diversity he could extract
from the basic chord progression; after all,
he said, Bach’s own variations followed the
same pattern as embroideries on a jazz
standard, and he would be reacting to Bach
in his own voice. It all proved a bit of a
let-down, more satisfying for him than it
was for us. Since his straight Bach was
pretty ropey, it was lucky he didn’t play the
repeats; a few of his ‘reactions’ represented
brave stabs at matching the glory of the
originals, but most of them were
pointlessly quirky. On the other hand,
Fastidious sensitivity: Steven Osborne
©BENJAMINEALOVEGA
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2. May/June 2016 International Piano 61
REVIEWS Concerts
Steven Osborne, improvising on
Stravinsky’s Tango at Milton Court, got
infinitely closer to his original, but given
this superb pianist’s fastidious sensitivity to
idiom, that was no surprise.
Back in the realms of world-class
pianism, Seong-Jin Cho’s solo debut in the
Southbank International Piano Series at St
John’s Smith Square was as impressive as
we had hoped. Just 21, and celebrating his
win at the latest International Chopin
Competition, he is both technically
immaculate and instinctively poetic, and
this all-Chopin recital of short and long
pieces was a pleasure from beginning to
end. But with one big proviso: we still don’t
know what kind of animal he really is, and
we haven’t yet heard his unique voice.
There was just one moment of real magic
– the last movement of the Funeral March
Sonata, played so fast and with such
gossamer delicacy as to take the breath
away. Otherwise, everything he plays is too
smoothly efficient at present.
Maurizio Pollini is now at the opposite
pole. At the Festival Hall he scuttled
nervously onstage as is his wont, and
rushed through two big Schumann works
too fast and too anxiously to do either them
or himself justice. Only after the interval
did he relax enough to allow his artistry to
emerge, and Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie,
the third Scherzo, and two majestic Chopin
encores were each exquisitely wrought and
flawlessly delivered. How long will this
great Italian master go on? He’s 74, and one
senses that he’s getting tired; but there’s
such generosity in his performances that
we’ll queue up to hear him as long as he
wants us to.
Meanwhile Piotr Anderszewski was
celebrating the 25th anniversary of his
Wigmore debut with a typically provocative
programme, bookending Schumann’s
Papillons and Ghost Variations,
Szymanowski’s Metopes and two Bach
Partitas. If the Szymanowski emerged as
little more than a sub-Scriabin curiosity,
and if Papillons was delivered with too
broad a brush, the Ghost Variations really
did sound like a cry from the grave, and the
Partitas were full of revelatory surprises. His
final encore was also typical – an entire
Janáček suite, played with the empathy of a
fellow Central European.
In cosy little Conway Hall, Jonathan
Plowright’s Rhinegold LIVE recital
showed what splendours an old and
well-practised hand can create with a
variegated menu of Brahms, Mozart,
Chopin, and Paderewski; the ensuing Q&A
made the evening doubly worthwhile.
Finally, a warm welcome for twenty-five-
year-old Alexander Ullman. The first half
of his Wigmore recital was relentlessly
strident, but when he relaxed he brought
lovely poetry out of Chopin’s fourth
Ballade, and from a medley of Mazurkas
and Nocturnes. MICHAEL CHURCH
Self-effacing virtuoso: Arcadi Volodos
©MARCOBORGGREVE
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3. REVIEWS Concerts
62 International Piano May/June 2016
FRANCE
BORDEAUX
L’Esprit du Piano
Auditorium du Bordeaux Lang Lang, 17
Nov; Arcadi Volodos, 25 Nov
The annual piano festival l’Esprit du Piano
brought 10 keyboard events to the
Bordeaux area last November, bookended
with an opening recital by Lang Lang and a
concluding recital by Arcadi Volodos. It was
a step up from previous editions that have
featured few star players. The series attracted
some 5,000 pianophiles,a significant increase
over attendance in the five previous years,
according to artistic director Paul-Arnaud
Péjouan.
The outstanding performance was the
recital by Arcadi Volodos, the self-effacing
Russian virtuoso making his first
appearance before Bordeaux audiences.
Volodos is a meticulous performer with a
quiet onstage manner. His husky frame
belies a talent for clear articulation and his
feathery touch seemed to impress the
near-capacity Bordeaux Auditorium crowd.
Volodos’s personal profile may be a tier
or two below that of the exuberant Lang
Lang but the music he produced was
decidedly superior. I counted 11 curtain
calls and four encores, including one short
piece from the Catalonian composer
Mompou whom Volodos has recently been
promoting with a new CD.
He held the audience in the palm of his
hand from the first chord of the Brahms
Theme and Variations in B minor Op 18b,
dedicated to Clara Schumann and based on
the original sextet version, composed in
1860. Brahms was only 27 at the time of
completion but his sextet has become one
of the staples of today’s chamber repertory.
The piano version captures the essentials.
The six variations on a simple line develop
gracefully in tone and colour.
He followed Op 18b with more Brahms,
the Eight Klavierstücke Op 76, another study
in styles and contrasts. Capriccio (No 5) is
one of the most challenging of Brahms’s
short pieces and Volodos made the
transition from virtuosity to the lyrical
Intermezzo (No 6) with natural finesse.
The second half of the recital featured
Schubert’s extended B-flat major Sonata
D960, a monument to the sonata form with
familiar, pleasant themes recurring
throughout. Volodos seemed emotionally
invested, swaying freely on his folding chair
(no bench for him) as he brought Schubert
back to life. He imposed his mark firmly on
the second movement, the melancholy
Andante sostenuto, ratcheting down the
tempo radically to allow the harmonics and
resonances to mingle in the air. The effect
was close to magical.
The programme climaxed with four
sparkling encores. He was rewarded with a
standing ovation, rare in this charmingly
provincial city. Volodos’s programme was
especially poignant when viewed in
context of the Brahms-Schubert
relationship. Schubert was never a great
success in his own lifetime, but in the
decades following his early death his work
attracted the support of influential
musicians in Vienna. Among the
champions of his work was Brahms
himself.
Nine days prior to Volodos’s
performance, Lang Lang’s programme was
a disappointment to the audience which
greeted his 45-minute colourless reading of
Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons with lukewarm
applause. He rescued the recital with more
vitality in the second half, playing Chopin’s
Four Scherzos, but even those showed signs
of wear and tear. He has recorded them all
and often includes them in his recitals.
More than a dozen other pianists have
launched the same works on CD.
The l’Esprit du Piano festival enriches
Bordeaux’s musical life considerably. This
year’s edition featured two other
outstanding Russians besides Volodos:
Denis Kozhukhin, first-prize winner at the
Queen Elizabeth Competition in Brussels
in 2010, and Elena Bashkirova, daughter of
the pianist and pedagogue Dmitri
Bashkirov.
Also on the programme were Elena
Mouzalas, Chilly Gonzales, Bruno Rigutto,
Guillaume Coppola, Sandro de Palma and
a video concert by Édouard Ferlet, Axel
Arno and Maurice Salaün. MICHAEL JOHNSON
HUNGARY
BUDAPEST
KURTÁG 90
Budapest Music Centre Arnaud Arbet,
18 Feb
Liszt Academy of Music Tamara
Stefanovich; Pierre-Laurent Aimard,
19 Feb
If there was a recurring leitmotif running
through Budapest’s celebration of György
Kurtág’s 90th birthday in February, it was
pianos: upright pianos, grand pianos,
expensive pianos, cheap pianos, pianos
shoved into small rooms, pianos wheeled
onto grand stages. It probably wasn’t
intended as such, but all these instruments
served as a neat reminder of the composer’s
origins at the keyboard – not as a grand
concert pianist, but as a répétiteur at the
National Philharmonic in Budapest from
1960-68, and later on the piano faculty of
the Liszt Academy.
Kurtág’s life story thus far is similarly
rooted. When everyone else was leaving the
Eastern Bloc in the 1950s, Kurtág was
heading back there from his studies in Paris
– totally committed to the music and
creative life of his adopted Hungary. While
the works of his colleague György Ligeti
became ever more transcendent and
international, Kurtág dug deeper into his
country’s soil in search of a truly original
yet wholly Hungarian voice. His heroes
remained Schoenberg, Webern and
Stravinsky. But Kurtág wasn’t afraid of
getting Magyar mud on his shoes.
It was the piano that reinvigorated the
composer after a period of doubt. In 1973,
the composer wrote a series of piano works
under the titles Games and Pre-Games
founded on the simplest building blocks.
Some pieces explored just a single note or
single gesture (one is based entirely on the
idea of a glissando). The scores were
designed for both children and adults to
play while graphic elements in the notation
were intended to stimulate experimentation
and freedom. They had precisely the same
effect on Kurtág’s oeuvre. Even when his
music is at its most stringent and bleak,
there is playfulness and spirit somewhere
inside it.
Kurtág appeared to personify that spirit
during his birthday celebrations hosted by
the Budapest Music Centre, the Liszt
Academy and the Palace of Arts. He is
physically frail but mentally sharp,
enlivened by in-the-moment creativity. At a
private concert on the eve of his birthday,
he waded in to a performance of a fragment
of his in-progress opera based on Beckett’s
Endgame, unseating pianist Arnaud Arbet
and proceeding to dissect contralto Hilary
Summers’ performance with forensic
attention to detail.‘That’s the special thing
about [his music]’, Summers told me
afterwards.‘He’s got this idea, this image,
and it’s not the norm.’
Perhaps that’s why Kurtág enjoys such a
formidable reputation inside Hungary and
outside it. The country’s prime minister
was due at the main event – a gala birthday
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4. May/June 2016 International Piano 63
REVIEWS Concerts
concert at the beautifully refurbished Liszt
Academy on the composer’s actual
birthday, 19 February. In the end, the PM
was called to Brussels and replaced by
Hungary’s culture minister. One side effect
of this nationalist government’s agenda is
its cleaving to artistic figures like Kurtág;
it’s hard to imagine this degree of adulation
being showered upon any avant-garde
composer, other than perhaps in the Baltic
states.
The concert’s international flavour came
first in the form of a video message from
Sir Simon Rattle, who spoke of Kurtág’s
music in terms of ‘fragments of such
extreme weight, depth and meaning’ while
promising him it remained ‘deep in the
hearts’ of the Berlin Philharmonic. The idea
of ‘fragments’ isn’t just musicological, it’s
geopolitical too: Kurtág was born in
Romania, studied in Paris, enjoyed a
successful career in newly independent
Hungary and now lives near Bordeaux. The
shifting, drifting fragments that make up
his Double Concerto – played here with deep
care and honest expression by Tamara
Stefanovich (piano) and Louise Hopkins
(cello) – speak of a man barely able to look
over his shoulder and notice what elements
of his personal history have already
disappeared.
Straight after that, Pierre-Laurent
Aimard played …quasi una fantasia…, a
short but intense fantasy for piano and
orchestra which felt just that bit too tense
and jittery. Who can blame Aimard, when
the notoriously particular maestro was
sitting a few rows into the audience? It’s
hard not to feel, to some extent, that
performances of Kurtág’s music were stifled
just a touch by his physical presence. But
the crowd was loosened when the video
screen appeared once more, this time to air
a film of the introduction to Bach’s Actus
Tragicus performed by the four hands of the
composer and his wife on a small, tinny
upright piano. Here was the heartbeat that
so often exists in Kurtág’s own music. The
humility and humanity of the performance
said something about why its creator is so
treasured.
ANDREW MELLOR
ITALY
BERGAMO
Bergamo Jazz 2016
Teatro Sociale Franco D’Andrea, 17 Mar
Teatro Donizetti Geri Allen, 18 Mar;
Kenny Barron Trio, 19 Mar
Auditorium di Piazza della Libertà
Markelian Kapedani, 20 Mar
Bergamo Jazz’s main locations – two
wonderful venues in the traditional teatro
all’italiana format, Teatro Donizetti and
Teatro Sociale – saw three concerts by
pianists. We first heard Italian master
Franco D’Andrea and his small group,
Traditions Today. D’Andrea has long been
fascinated by early jazz, and the Louis
Armstrong Hot Five. His trio with Daniele
D’Agaro (clarinet) and Mauro Ottolini
(trombone) offers a compelling
postmodern tribute: a totally empathetic
performance of spontaneous counterpoint,
contemporary freedom, and riffs and
timbres inspired by the jungle-style Duke
György Kurtág presides over his 90th
birthday celebration in Budapest
©JUDITMARJAI
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5. REVIEWS Concerts
64 International Piano May/June 2016
Ellington. The highpoint was the latter’s
Caravan, idiomatically interpreted as jive
misterioso. The trio was supplemented by
drummer Han Bennink – no shrinking
violet; but D’Andrea was the dominant
figure. His grasp of jazz history is so
assured, his playing lucid and compelling.
He is much too little known outside his
native country, and it was good to hear him
live for the first time.
Geri Allen is better known as a trio or
ensemble player than as a solo pianist,
having worked with such masters as Ron
Carter and Charlie Haden. But her concert
presented material from the mostly solo
album Motown & Motor City Inspirations –
Grand River Crossings from 2013. She was
brought up in Detroit, and dedicated the
concert to her mentor, trumpeter Marcus
Belgrave, who died last year at the age of 78.
Allen featured classics from African-
American music, including Billy
Strayhorn’s A Flower is a Lovesome Thing. Yet
mostly these classics were from a later era:
Inner City Blues by Marvin Gaye, That Girl
by Stevie Wonder and Wanna Be Startin’
Somethin’ by Michael Jackson. Jazz
musicians have often wanted to make a
grab for the popular audience that was
finally lost to the music after the hardbop
era – but this post-50s pop material remains
a challenge. Some critics found her album
rather tentative; on the evidence of the
concert, I’d describe the approach as
reflective, its mood angled towards the
most attentive jazz audiences. The hour-
long set was a brave effort by an always
intelligent musician.
More in the jazz mainstream, but classic
too, was the Kenny Barron Trio with
Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass and Johnathan
Blake on drums. Born in 1947 in
Philadelphia, Barron worked with star
names including Dizzy Gillespie and
Freddie Hubbard, and later founded the
quartet Sphere, dedicated to the music of
Thelonious Monk. His magisterial
performance coincided with his new album
Book of Intuition on the Impulse label, also
featuring Kitagawa and Blake. Their set
began with a rather restrained Bebop. Next,
Bud Like, a Barron original, upped the
energy level, with suggestions of Bud
Powell’s Un Poco Loco. It included a festive
drum solo to great applause. Charlie
Haden’s Nightfall was a plangent ballad,
while Thelonious Monk’s Shuffle Boil and
Barron’s own Calypso were a delight. Barron
could be regarded as belonging to the
rather well-mannered jazz piano tradition
of Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan, but
his set was better than that – and it
suggested that his recordings, fine though
they are, haven’t always done him justice.
In the Auditorium of Piazza della
Libertà, Markelian Kapedani’s Balkan Bop
Trio, with Yuri Goloubev (double bass) and
Asaf Sirkis (drums), produced some curious
results – not just because of a doubtful
sound-system.‘Balkan jazz’ turned out to be
a synthesis of Oscar Peterson and the
additive rhythms of Balkan folk music
– surprisingly conservative, when
compared, for instance, with the activities
of New York Downtown Balkans.
Best piano by a non-leader was
Alexander Hawkins, effectively musical
director of Louis Moholo-Moholo’s
wonderful Five Blokes, who contributed
beautifully expansive, ecstatic piano to the
group’s burning free jazz. I’ve long been a
fan of this fine musician whose stylistic
range seems encyclopedic, but his
performance here was a revelation, showing
again the potential for a synthesis of free
and South African jazz. Lawrence Fields,
pianist with the Jo Lovano Quartet, also
impressed, with his sober, articulate and
thoughtful contributions – more in the
modern mainstream than Hawkins, but a
fine prospect.
With packed concerts, Bergamo showed
that it remains one of the Europe’s, indeed
the world’s, most artistically successful jazz
festivals.
ANDY HAMILTON
Geri Allen was on reflective
form at this year’s Bergamo Jazz festival
©GIANFRANCOROTA
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