Ravenous adventures in nirvana: Gabriele Strata at the Guildhall Wigmore Prize Winner’s Recital
The twenty-three-year-old Italian pianist pinned his name onto posterity in a performance of perfected creativity at Wigmore Hall.
Gabriele Strata at the keys. Credit: Antonio Rasi Caldogno
Drenching dreams in reams of raindrops, regents in the realm of grand piano produce rhapsody: not paeans to a theme by Paganini like Rachmaninov’s rapt piece or Gershwin’s garish riffs festooning jazz but epic poems: opuses whose pulse surrenders punishment and pleasure, pleas and leisure to euphoria. Harmoniously roaming over melomanic hammers, malleable music in the instrument invites its keys’ intruder to denude dense sentiment of its pretence and tender truth: that ruth and rancour, rifts and tiffs are not regrettable, but life.
Blending blurred strokes into bleary tears with every print of a motif, Italian pianist Gabriele Strata – winner of this year’s Guildhall Wigmore Recital Prize – makes the case for the separate profession of “music descriptor”. For he is a painter, a cinematographer, a designer, performer, enricher, composer; a stenographer of the soul. At twenty-three he has secured terrain in the intransigent domain of concert hall dominion.
Vignettes vie to be visible in his invincible arrays of daze-doused memories; of captured ruptures, lapsed liaisons and lost selves. Exchanging Couperin’s routinely humdrum chords for corpulent explosions of expression, Strata steered ‘Les barricades mystérieuses’ from the composer’s Pièces de Clavecin into long loops of timid trills amidst Parisian scenes of puddle-plundered days. Grave chords were plods of horse-drawn carriages then carried burdens borne by passengers; past passages of life paled at the notes’ dilution into diffident diminuendo. Staccato springs inspirited ‘La visionnaire’ with pomp and pageantry while scrambling chases made a game of cat and mouse addictively enticing in ‘Le tic-toc choc’.
Reticence reticulated Chopin’s Ballade No. 2 in nifty tints of pauses; intervals for self-reflection intricately calculated. Notes ennobled by an honourable deference deftly faded into fads of near-obscurity whilst coarser chords remained despotic. The prelude to Bar 47’s frenzied flurry of enfevered chords – that well-known repetition of a solemn ‘A’ – was here a memorable, mournful, would-be fugitive from the tyrannical tirades to come. Through clambering chromatic chords the left hand hammered home harangues disdaining decadence in the rambunctious right: the age-old battle between liberty and stateliness; restraint and freedom.
Stampeding into twentieth-century dissonance – Messiaen’s Première communion de la Vierge – the craftsman dealt the French composer’s disharmonious drops voluptuous flamboyance. Strata’s aptitude at the surrender of a note – both sudden and hard-earned – is an assiduous accomplishment that lets its echo croon into the hall: a feat that fed this work’s conclusive chords an extra radiance. Erratic repetitions of some chords entrenched them in the fraught intensity of someone trying to smack a buzzing wasp out of their shoulder – only to be followed by the limber application of faint chords as careful as an artisan handpainting chocolate.
Emboldening the famed first chord of Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 with an unbridled burst of self-announcement, Strata led a slew of shunted right-hand notes as its response: a pitiable brigade that paved the way for an unmanageable reconciliation. At this creator’s hands the ballade broached a love story; a plaintive right hand pleading for forgiveness in its uphill climb of broken chords relentlessly reined in by the brash left’s harassing harness. The fearful former scurried between supplication and self-censure in its endless series of chromatic scales until both parties parted with resentment to succumb to the renowned slow waltz. At Strata’s helm this too became a contest as the left hand crested in crescendo, stomping over its shy partner’s more persistent chords. Chromatics crumbled into cravenness as both descended into resignation, prompting an exquisitely delectable delay between the work’s penultimate blunt chord and its unmitigable climax.
Flair outfitted the Trois Gymnopédies of Erik Satie with insatiable tailorship, intoning seesaw cadences with playful paces. Every angle of the work emerged both consummately measured and precisely shaped.
Slippers slid across a ballroom at the birth of Chopin’s Ballade No. 3, whose tentative acceleration mimicked frolics of shy feet. The pianist’s distribution of dynamics was unmatched and mirrored chords were seamlessly immersed in triumph. Unravelling Debussy’s 1881 Nocturne, L. 82, Strata unleashed the lilts of lilypads splashed carelessly by leaping frogs. Desperation met demureness once again as plosive imploration in the right hand pined for peace-filled times.
Veiled avenues were ventured into throughout Chopin’s Ballade No. 4: a work that called upon the limitless creator’s archaeological musicality to lay bare bars too often kept oblique. Entrancingly as Strata stressed the left hand’s premonition-tainted chords amid the right hand’s protests he synchronically unsealed motifs, brisk turns and scales that frequently remain inhibited in the work’s rendering; layering the ornaments with the illumination of an enviable legato. Unorthodox was this approach that highlighted the hands’ litigiousness; their stumble on the way to armistice paved by voraciously long pauses. But it made for a magnetically consumable delight.
In most recitals’ encores pieces chosen suffer from a mode of afterthought. Here Strata dappled Schumann’s “In der Nacht” with drizzled winds and dusky clouds in a tableau of dawn: the limpid treasures of autumnal might amidst imminent winter.
Emotion here escaped the frame of man’s entrapment. Freed from the shackles of both subjectivity and time in Strata’s hands, it sinuated into the celestial strata; ratifying transitory souls in deathless art.