If Arcadi Volados
continues
to perform in the way he did last Thursday at Singapore's
Esplanade he will earn himself a place in the pantheon of the
greatest ever to play the instrument. For some he's already
there, purely on the basis of his supreme virtuosity. Indeed
after the chords of his final encore had faded it was difficult
to imagine that any pianist could have demonstrated such
dexterity, such effortless accuracy without in the process
sacrificing musical shape or clarity. And unlike what is often
the case
in the performances of many gifted virtuosi - Lang Lang is a
prime example - the playing was about projecting the music not
the musician's ego.
This projection was aided by some deliberately theatrical
elements: the long wait at the beginning of the concert and
after the interval, the ultra gloomy lighting into which Volodos
emerged from the shadows like a stately rather sombre
apparition, the stainless steel office chair which
facilitated his ostentatious leaning back, most conspicuously
during a prolonged meditation after he first sat down, before
the first octave of the Beethoven sonata opus 26 sounded.
It might have been a revelation that Volodos can play Beethoven
given his reputation as a virtuoso specialising in bleeding
heart romanticism. The worst result would have been for him to
overplay the tragedy of the composer's impending deafness or use
the two sonatas of the concert's first half as a vehicle to
display tonal exquisiteness. He avoided these traps, instead
embarking on a complex emotional journey which by the end of the
second sonata had taken us through the various stages of
Beethoven's frustration and anger through to his eventual
acceptance. Volodos seemed to
be discovering fresh aspects of his interpretation as he played,
displaying an aspect notable in the playing of his great
compatriot Sviatoslav Richter - a sense that somehow the music
is being composed and played simultaneously. Fabulous tone there
was, and rhythmical freedom, particularly in the fugue towards
the end of the opus 31 sonata, but each was used not for
decorative effect but the exploration of meaning.
In the Scriabin that followed Volodos led us into the composer's
explorations of mysticism and sensuality by in a sense
developing the theme of the Beethoven sonatas. Beethoven's
exclusion in a world of silence leads logically to the
examination of the human soul offered by Scriabin. The opening B
minor Fantasia was conceived on the same heroic scale as the two
Beethoven sonatas and played with a muscular expansiveness. But
by the time Volodos had taken us through half a dozen enigmatic
miniatures to the Debussyesque Vers la Flamme, we were in an
abstract place of
impressionistic freedom.
Volodos could have taken us forward to the modernist repertoire
to which the Scriabin naturally pointed. Instead he took us back
to Liszt ending with a tour de force performance of the
Hungarian Rhapsody No 13, transcribed by the pianist. The
arpeggios and thirds were transcendentally rendered with a
remarkable evenness of tone which few pianists either past or
present could equal. Volodos surpassed this with a performance
of another one of his transcriptions - of Mozart's Rondo alla turca - that sent the audience wild with its syncopation,
in which each of his hands seems to be controlled by its own
individual brain.
The short, quiet Scriabin encore that ended the concert was apt.
Volodos had earned his virtuoso laurels but with a programme
that was eminently logical. The miraculous encores were an
extension of the Beethoven and the Scriabin. Perhaps they were
true representations of the visions of Nirvana which had
inspired the Russian composer. And there the usefulness of
Volodos' peerless technique is revealed: he can open up vistas
that the technically challenged cannot. As an audience we came
to realize his complete technical
command, and were able to relax into the meaning of his interpretations.
There was none of the audience anxiety that greeted the memory
lapses and mugging Mikhail Rudy had showed two days before in
his performance of Rachmaninov's third piano concerto. If only
Volodos had been seated in his place.
