- Mouvements perpétuels
- Improvisations (extracts)
- Intermezzo No. 3
- Presto in B flat
- 3 Novelettes
- Suite
- Gaspard de la Nuit
- La Valse
Poulenc's piano music, of which there is a great deal, is sadly neglected, save by one or two specialists in the genre. Part of it is Poulenc's image as a perpetually light-hearted, rather frivolous composer, but while there is certainly frivolity in his music, it's far from the only element. What makes the piano music hard to interpret, especially the lesser pieces (which include many of those heard tonight), is that while it is music that certainly wears its heart on its sleeve, at the same time it's a sleeve of many colours. Poulenc at the piano is a musical Pierrot, comical, witty, sentimental, foolish, a little surreal, melancholy, nostalgic and sometimes even heart-breaking, and you have to be able to touch every chord, and hint at almost all of them simultaneously.
Rather appropriately, Kana Okada is the 2013 winner of the (relatively new) Francis Poulenc International Piano Competition, and some of the music selected tonight was almost certainly on her programme for the qualifying rounds. As mentioned, few of these pieces rank amongst his best - some of the Nocturnes, for example, would have been welcome - and the 3 Mouvements perpétuels made for a rather perfunctory start. The Improvisation No. 6 also seemed rhythmically rather clunky, but the lyrical No. 7 began to reveal more promise. The 3rd Intermezzo, the latest of the piano compositions presented had a lovely flow, while the first Novelette was an elegant reminder that Poulenc too went through his neo-classical phase.
We were on rather more familiar territory with the Ravel, but that also meant that Okada had to contend with the memory of every other pianist any of us have ever heard play Gaspard, and there have been many. Ondine started a little hazily, but then the water-patterns clarified; most striking, though, was that moment of stillness just before the last glittering cascade, powerfully evocative of the mortal's realisation of the impossibility of his attraction to the elusive water nymph. Le Gibet began with a similar stillness, but could not keep it up, and if the virtuosity was there in Scarbo, the malevolence was not.
Her reading of La Valse, on the other hand, was excellent, a well-chosen tempo from the outset, an easy flow from one waltz in the sequence to the next, flexible and poetic rubato and an impressively cataclysmic climax, Okada practically standing up at the keyboard to achieve the full-span glissandi required. She did give an encore - as I've said before, if you're not required to give an encore at a French concert, then it's a flop - but it was a rather noisily virtuosic and very tongue-in-cheek paraphrase of the Schubert Marche militaire (not the Liszt one) which didn't strike me as particularly felicitous, so I prefer to retain as my last memory of tonight's recital the doomed swirl of a very fine La Valse.
[Next : 6th September]
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