BY LAWRENCE A. JOHNSON
Posted on Sun, May. 06, 2007
As in the broader classical-music world, the Miami International Piano Festival's guest roster has been dominated by male musicians -- somewhat ironically since Giselle Brodsky, a woman of no small ambition or energy, runs the event.
Yet a year ago, Ingrid Fliter provided not only the festival's highlight but also the most memorable musical performance of the year. The Argentine pianist showed staggering bravura and poetic insight to rival Arthur Rubinstein in music of Chopin.
This year the festival marks its 10th anniversary with plenty to offer local pianophiles. A two-night tribute to Rachmaninoff will serve up three of the Russian composer's concertos performed by Ilya Itin, Alexander Gavrylyuk and Misha Dacic, and two gifted Germans, Martin Stadtfeld and Severin von Eckerdstein, will be heard in their first Miami appearances.
Yet it's entirely possible that a female pianist will once again steal the show, when French teenager Lise de la Salle makes her local debut in music of Mozart and Prokofiev Thursday night at the Lincoln Theatre.
Just 18, de la Salle has already received accolades for her series of recordings on the Naive label, and she is increasingly in demand outside her native France where she enjoys substantial celebrity.
Yet with her increasing fame, de la Salle finds the recital form a challenge, though it is one she relishes.
''You need very strong concentration from the beginning to the end,'' she says from Paris. ``You're completely alone on stage, and you need all of your brain to keep control. I love it, but everything depends on you. It's very intensive work.''
ARTISTIC MATURITY
Her efforts are already paying great dividends. To listen to de la Salle's recordings is to encounter an artistic maturity far beyond her years. Her Bach displays elegance and poise with striking contrapuntal clarity in the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. And she draws an otherworldly expression and luminous tonal coloring from Liszt's enigmatic late piano music.
Her new disc of Mozart and Prokofiev shows a similar wide-ranging interpretive command. Her Mozart is graceful yet with a firm spine, as shown in her delightfully witty rendition of the Ah, vous dirai-je Maman variations. And in Prokofiev she brings daunting mechanistic fury to the Toccata and the Piano Sonata No. 3, as well as extraordinary delicacy to the tender excerpts from Romeo and Juliet.
Thursday night's Miami Beach program will replicate the Mozart and Prokofiev works on her new CD, following the organizing principle of contrasting composers in de la Salle's series. But the idea is not just to create a program of facile dissimilarity but also to find common ground between divergent musical worlds -- though, she notes, ``For Mozart and Prokofiev, it's maybe a little bit more difficult to see the links.''
''With Mozart you have the smiling, charming spirit, and you can imagine the beautiful dresses of the ladies,'' de la Salle says. ''And then two bars after you have the Don Giovanni spirit where it's very dark, powerful and very sad.'' She finds a similar, if more forceful, type of dichotomy in Prokofiev. ``You have something violent and implacable with a lot of staccato. It's like the Industrial Revolution machinery with a lot of steel. And then you have a very lyrical aspect, like in Romeo and Juliet, where you can really feel the power of human love.''
AN EARLY START
De La Salle hails from a substantial musical lineage. Her maternal great-great-great grandmother knew Tchaikovsky, and her mother sang in several Parisian choirs, including that of the Orchestre de Paris.
Born in Cherbourg in 1988, de la Salle began studying piano at 4 and gave her first concert, broadcast on French radio, at 9. She recalls her mother's taking her to orchestral rehearsals.
''I was very young, and so I wasn't conscious of everything,'' she says. ``But seeing all the musicians in an orchestra was impressive, and it was very, very important, like a lesson, to see their way of working with music.''
For someone who has been performing in public since childhood, de la Salle confesses to a bit of nerves whenever she steps on the concert stage.
''You can learn a good way to be concentrated and be nervous,'' she said. ``Because stress can be very, very positive and a big motivation. It's not so much how nervous you are but how you are nervous.''
ROLE MODELS
Oddly, for a keyboard artist, de la Salle takes her inspiration from several musicians better known for distinguishing themselves in other realms. Among them are French violinist Ginette Neveu, who died at 30 in a plane crash in 1949. ``I find she has a very plain, honest sound, and it's very intense and very strong and powerful.''
De la Salle also admires Leonard Bernstein for his vitality and charisma. ``He gave such a positive energy. You can really see it. He loved music, and he gave all of himself in the music.''
Most of all, though, she appreciates the art of Maria Callas. ''What fascinates me is that she is so human,'' de la Salle says. ``You really feel the human feeling in her voice. When she sings something like Tosca, you really feel what the music means. Sometimes the sound is not so beautiful, and it's not technically perfect, but the feelings and emotions are so moving, we are fascinated by the power of her expression.''
The pianist, who turns 19 on Tuesday, confesses she finds it necessary to remove herself from the piano for extended periods.
''You can easily spend all your days and all your nights at the piano,'' she says. ''So sometimes I stop and go somewhere else,'' she says, adding that a break is just as important for the music as it is for the musicians. ``Because the music is not like a science, where you work in a laboratory. Music needs you to have a life, and it needs to be filled. And you come back fresher and with new ideas.''
De la Salle lives in Paris and tries to keep her concert schedule to fewer than 45 dates a year since she still needs substantial time for study and learning key repertoire, including the works of Brahms, Schubert and Schumann, composers she has yet to explore.
''This life needs a lot of work and a lot of time with the piano and the music,'' she says wistfully. ``I think everything depends on the organization of your life. If you know where your priorities are, and you know what you want to do in your day it becomes easier.
''I like to have time for my life with music and my life without music. But,'' she adds with a laugh, ``it's really the same.''
