|
Thin, distracted and very, very intense, Ukrainian pianist
Konstantin Lifschitz gazed left, away from the audience, and
listened. He was playing, of all things, late-Renaissance
organ and harpsichord pieces by Girolamo Frescobaldi. As he
embellished Frescobaldi's oblique lines and modal ruminations,
he softened the textures with keystrokes other pianists might
reserve for much later music; he added sophisticated pedaling,
too -- sometimes quite a lot. The music responded, poked and
prodded from its 17th-century origins into living tissue.
Next, Lifschitz jumped 300 years into the 1950s with five
pieces from Gyorgy Ligeti's "Musica Ricercata." Lifschitz
promulgated their highly individuated polyphony and slippery
meter changes with fabulous touch. Odd voicings shattered
the music's thriving surfaces into bizarre asymmetries eerily
reminiscent of the Frescobaldi we had just heard.
Lifschitz fired three Chopin impromptus with swirling polyphonic
undercurrents that obliterated bar lines and disturbed Chopin's
familiar melodies into new but altogether natural profiles.
Fast-running sixteenth notes were beautifully bound but surged
pistonlike into the musical fabric, which seemed minutely
destabilized and charged with danger. At deliberate tempos
fraught with information, Lifschitz played right through the
climaxes in Chopin's Second Sonata -- no swooning, italicizing
or clangor -- but pulled all four movements magnificently
together into a unified, tightly focused panorama of Chopin's
unique vision.
This astonishing recital was presented Saturday afternoon
at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater by the Washington
Performing Arts Society. Lifschitz donated his fee to a charity
benefiting those killed or injured in last month's terrorist
attacks.
end
|
