(Andrew
Warburton. Pic by Val Adamson)
Gold standard pianism. (Review by William
Charlton-Perkins)
Andrew Warburton’s PhD recital at Howard
College Theatre in Durban on Friday (August 24, 2018) offered the audience a
concert experience characterized by deeply reflective music-making, coupled
with the visceral extremes of supreme keyboard virtuosity.
To open, the pianist reprised his acclaimed
rendering of Beethoven's taxing group of Six Bagatelles Opus 126, first heard
in this venue during a SASMT gala concert in April. Revisiting this music
proved a masterstroke of programming. I can only return the compliment by
expressing appreciation for the further interpretive insight in evidence here,
following the pianist’s earlier account of what I described at the time as a “miraculous
microcosm of a lifetime's musical outpouring contained in the great German
composer's final music for solo piano”.
Essaying these pieces’s lightening-swift
mood swings, their vast dynamic range both belying their brevity and typifying
the jagged extremes of late Beethoven, enabled the pianist seamlessly to flex
himself and to ease his audience into what proved to be the heart of the
programme, the composer’s Olympian Piano Sonata in E Major Opus 109.
Dispatching with élan the fantasia-like
rigours of the work’s tumultuous opening movement, punctuated by its sudden
dynamic interludes of stillness, Warburton followed with an equally assured
account of the second movement Prestissimo, with its headlong rush of momentum.
The pianist then plunged the house into a profoundly significant interval of
suspended silence, before entering the great work’s spiritual centre - its
third movement, marked Andante moto cantabile ed espressivo.
For posterity to contemplate the miracle of
music of such heart-rending beauty – created in Beethoven’s soundless world of
sheer physical deafness – is to confront divinity. With consummate technical
mastery and deep musical insight, Warburton traced its trajectory from the
simplicity of its opening chords, through the rising elation of its variously
paced variations, before returning to its sublime point of departure.
To have ended the evening thus would have
sent one home on an emotional high. What followed after interval took on the
character of an electrifying display of high-wire pianism, as Warburton sailed
through a bravura steeplechase of concert show-stoppers. Making light of
Ravel’s exquisitely wrought Sonatine, with its enchantingly simple first two
movements, offset by its dazzling Animé close, the pianist vividly brought to
life the same composer’s ebullient evocation of the classical court jester, in
his magnificently descriptive Alborado del Gracioso.
Bringing the audience to its feet,
Warburton rounded his programme off with Granados’s iconic Allegro de Concierto
– the Spanish composer’s winning showpiece submitted for a composition
competition of the Royal Conservatory in Madrid in 1903.
Well worth a second hearing, this
remarkable marathon feat will be repeated when Andrew Warburton appears at next
month’s Hilton Arts Festival, also performing a programme of art songs by
Dvorak, Rachmaninoff and Obradors with soprano Vanessa Tait-Jones, and a programme
of Piano Quartets by Dvorak and Faure with leading string players of the KZN
Philharmonic Orchestra, Violeta Osorhean (violin), David Snaith (viola) and
Aristide Du Plessis (cello). Visit https://www.hiltonfestival.co.za/
- William Charlton-Perkins