Katowice Culture Nature Festival / Nature and Love / Piano Recital: Seong-Jin Cho - NOSPR

And where is Chopin? – one might want to ask, looking into the programme of the festival recital by the winner of the 17th Chopin Competition (2015). Let us answer as follows: and where is Ravel, whose complete piano works Seong-Jin Cho has just recorded? This time, then, there will be neither Chopin nor Ravel, but there will be Liszt, Beethoven, Bartók and Brahms: truly sophisticated pianistics, yet framed within a somewhat disputatious programme. This is because, instead of the Liszt of his virtuosic “transcendental” fireworks, we will hear the later Liszt, the colorist: the impressionising Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este from the third volume of the Years of Pilgrimage, in a way prophesying Maurice Ravel’s “aquatic” textures in Jeux d’eau or Ondine. As for Beethoven, this time he will not be represented by any of the “titanic”, but by one of the most “gentle” sonatas: the Sonata in D major op. 28, dubbed the Pastoral by its publisher, with the wonderful quasi-balladic opening. Bartok’s Out of Doors (Szabadban) is a cycle marked by extremity, in terms of the concentration of sharp and radical dissonances juxtaposed with archetypal elements of Hungarian folk (“peasant” – as Bartók put it) music. The dynamic first and last piece, titled With Drums and Pipes and The Chase are dominated by the lively rhythmic expression, with the fourth piece, The Night’s Music, poles apart from them, evoking an aura of uncanny mysteriousness. 

The second part of the recital brings Brahms, yet this time it is not the late, intro- and retro-spective Klavierstücke, but the Sonata No. 3 in F minor, full of youthful elan. A huge, five-movement work, in which the composer seems to feel no sense of respect for the great Beethoven. Its most wonderful part remains the poetic (after all, it has a motto coming from a poem by Sternau!) nocturne, the Andante espressivo in the second movement, replete with inspiration. This will be, indeed… big game!

Stanisław Kosz

Concert duration: approximately 90 minutes