Every music festival needs a little drama, a little tension. Lucerne’s prestigious Le Piano Symphonique has as its main attraction the grande dame of the keyboard, Martha Argerich; stars don’t come much bigger in classical music. This year she had flown from the US after a nasty bout of flu – no fun when you are 83. Would she be well enough to play?
Well, yes and no. Her first appearances – playing Berg and Schubert with fellow pianists Stephen Kovacevich and Mikhail Pletnev; Haydn and Brahms with violinist Janine Jansen and cellist Mischa Maisky – were joyous, mercurial occasions, typical of Argerich’s informal approach as pianiste associée of the festival, bringing distinguished friends along to make wonderful music together. But then the medics took charge and advised her to skip her next two concerts. Could she summon the energy to close the festival? We would have to wait and see.
This classy gathering is only in its fourth iteration and yet has grown hugely in stature, attracting some of the world’s top artists and showcasing rising stars such as 20-year-old Yunchan Lim. In Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto, conductor Michael Sanderling and the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra were much more open to the first movement’s romantic excesses than the soloist, who was searching for the inner emotion of the piece rather than its grand gestures.
Lim was often overwhelmed by the swooning orchestra, but in the calm of the second movement his approach won through, duetting carefully with the flute and clarinet solos and playing with the utmost delicacy, making us hear things that perhaps we have missed in countless past performances of this perennial favourite. That sensitivity also marked his idiosyncratic reading of Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, a musical evocation of every month of the year. This was audacious playing, with liberal interpretations of tempi and dynamics that really worked.
Concerts here can last three hours, so sensibly the 1,000-plus audience can enjoy a bowl of something delicious in the short break before heading back into the hall (something I can’t imagine happening in London). Lim’s youthful vitality gave way to the sage but no less vigorous virtuosity of Argerich, Jansen and Maisky, racing through Haydn’s Piano Trio No 39 in G major with real swagger, breaking the speed limit in the final presto.
Some pianists maintain a steely self-control at the keyboard, channelling all their energy through their fingers. Not Kiveli Dörken. Her body language and facial expressions mirror the mood of the music, adding significantly to the unfolding drama. Her Brahms Ballades, Op 10 were unusually muscular and direct, an approach she also brought to the surviving movement of Gustav Mahler’s abandoned piano quartet in A minor, where Dörken was joined in a scintillating performance by members of the orchestra. However, their enthusiasm got the better of them in Josef Suk’s piano quartet in G minor, taking the allegro energico marking of the opening movement too literally as they skidded along, ever louder and louder. They settled calmly enough into the adagio but were soon back into panic mode as the frenetic, overwrought quality of the presto and finale filled the room with a kind of exquisite unease. An unsettling experience.
For playing as crisp as the weather outside, look no further than Beatrice Rana. A programme of Mendelssohn was perfect for her style of pianism, where everything is about the detail. Her performance of the composer’s first piano concerto in G minor was as precise as a Swiss watch, but not without drama. And Sanderling never let the orchestra off the hook, foregrounding the piano at all times, allowing Rana to display her breathtaking dexterity. She followed the concerto with a welcome series of small Mendelssohn pieces rarely heard in the concert hall today; selections of Songs Without Words and two brilliant scherzos, one in B minor that passed in a single flash of lightning brilliance, and another in E minor so feathery light it almost floated away.
Argerich was absent that evening for Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals and for a repeat performance the next morning, but her grandson, 16-year-old David Chen, was among the players, making quicksilver interjections from one of two pianos. And her daughter, Annie Dutoit-Argerich, appeared as a distinctly quirky narrator, running around the stage, imitating the animals. It was meant to be fun, but some of the instrumental ensemble plainly could not get past their natural Swiss reserve to really let their hair down.
There was another family on stage that night. Lilya Zilberstein was joined by her sons Anton Gerzenberg and Daniel Arkadij Gerzenberg in a dazzling performance of Carl Czerny’s Rondeau Brillante for six hands and Rachmaninov’s monumental Symphonic Dances, Op 45. This was hardcore virtuosity; meaty and pungent, the quotes from Russian church music and Rachmaninov’s own All-Night Vigil ringing out across the hall.
As if all this wasn’t enough to thrill any piano enthusiast, the great Russian-born Evgeny Kissin, an outspoken critic of Putin, devised two sets of Shostakovich recitals of immense gravity and commitment. On the last night Kissin played sonatas with Gautier Capuçon (cello) and Gidon Kremer (violin) before Maxim Rysanov joined him in a devastating performance of the composer’s last work, his Viola Sonata in C major, so desolate it stunned the audience into a reverential silence.
Finally, clutching a hankie, the now-recovered Argerich stepped on to the stage to a huge, relieved ovation and launched into Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 1, eschewing a conductor, with superb concert master Gregory Ahss instead guiding the orchestra in a collegiate, chamber-like endeavour. Many hands had played that piano in the preceding week, but now it seemed a different instrument, transformed by Argerich’s almost supernatural, liquid touch, particularly in the head-spinning allegro. The atmosphere was electric, the audience ecstatic. Plainly, there’s no better medicine than music.
