Alexandre Tharaud’s repertoire ranges across the piano literature, from Couperin to the present day, including brand new pieces. Three of the piano concertos he has introduced in the last seven years are brought together here. The three works are very different from each other, but all showcase the fleet brilliance, tonal variety and clarity of Tharaud’s playing.
Hans Abrahamsen’s Left, Alone, requires only the pianist’s left hand; it was, he says, “not written for a pianist with only one hand, but rather by a composer who can only play with the left hand” (Abrahamsen was born with restricted use of his right hand). But while there are distant echoes of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand in some of the solo writing, the title has a double meaning.
In the first five of the concerto’s six short movements the piano seems isolated, alone, its spare melodic lines struggling to assert themselves against the ticking, tumbling instrumental clouds surrounding them, and a reconciliation of sorts with the orchestra is only reached in the finale, which is almost as long as the previous five movements together.
The other two concertos, by Gérard Pesson and Oscar Strasnoy, are more straightforward single-movement works, though both come with elaborate extra-musical connections. Pesson’s Future Is a Faded Song borrows its title from a line in one of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets (and has a mysterious connection with a concerto that Mauricio Kagel, who died before realising his ideas, planned to write for Tharaud), while the music is a web of fast-moving allusions to a whole range of musical genres and stereotypes, especially dances – waltz, tango, bossa nova. Strasnoy’s Kuleshov takes a pioneering Soviet concept of film editing from the 1920s as the guiding principle for what is essentially a gigantic rondo, though much of the piano writing is disappointingly conventional.
This week’s other pick
Transformation (Sony Classical, two CDs) collects together some of Luciano Berio’s arrangements, played by the Sinfonieorchester Basel, conducted by Ivor Bolton, with soprano Sophia Burgos, baritone Benjamin Appl, and clarinettist Andreas Ottensamer. It’s a heterogeneous selection, ranging from a relatively straight realisation of the final, unfinished Contrapunctus from Bach’s Art of Fugue, to baroque treatments of four Beatles numbers (Ticket to Ride, Yesterday, and two versions of Michelle) with harpsichord and cello continuo. There’s more substance in the light-fingered orchestrations of Manuel De Falla’s Seven Popular Spanish Songs, a group of Mahler’s early songs, and a dark-hued expansion of Brahms’s F minor Clarinet Sonata. It all provides a revealing sidelight on one of the outstanding composers of the second half of the 20th century.
