The history of the keyboard study stretches back at least as far as Purcell. But The Art of the Étude, Tamara Stefanovich’s hugely ambitious survey, confined itself to exploring the ways in which composers have taken the form in the last 100 years or so, after Chopin and Liszt had established it as a musical genre in its own right in the 19th century. Her hugely demanding recital, almost three hours of music taking in 50 piano pieces, started with Scriabin and ended at the present day.
Only the first of the three parts of Stefanovich’s programme was more or less chronological, taking in the iridescent chromaticism of Szymanowski’s 12 Études Op 33, and pieces by Scriabin, Debussy and Bartók, as well as less familiar music by Nikolay Roslavets, Arthur Lourié and three of Grażyna Bacewicz’s 10 Concert Études. Her mastery of the technical challenges in every one of these pieces one quickly took for granted, but the textural imagination she brought to every piece was a constant delight. She ended the sequence with Messiaen’s Ile de Feu I, one of his Quatre Études de Rythme from 1949.
The second part was devoted to studies by living composers, many of them written specifically for Stefanovich. Pieces by Unsuk Chin, John Woolrich, George Benjamin and Hans Abrahamsen were preceded by the first performance of Milica Djordjević’s Role Playing 1: Strings Attached, which doesn’t involve the keyboard at all, instead using EBows to create a delicate, resonating web of sounds directly from the piano strings. A group of Vassos Nicolaou’s Études followed, which use the sostenuto pedal to create haloes of resonance around the intensely pianistic figuration.
It’s hard to think of other pianists today who play contemporary music as convincingly as they play core repertoire, and even fewer who would programme Rachmaninov and Ligeti together as Stefanovich did in the last part of her marathon, alternating six of Rachmaninov’s Études Tableaux, two from his Op 33 set, four from Op 39, with six of Ligeti’s late studies. Her approach to the Rachmaninov was refreshingly unsentimental, her playing of the Ligeti pieces dazzling, with the towering, terrifying 13th Étude, L’Escalier du Diable, as the coup de grace. Conceptually, musically and technically, the whole recital was a magnificent achievement.
