Stylistic Glitches: Boris Giltburg’s Urgent Preludes at Wigmore Hall
Strapping Chopin and Rachmaninov into his seats of personal aesthetics, the supremely skilful pianist lost track of the composers on the ride.
Boris Giltburg in a live stream of the concert reviewed below. Credit: Wigmore Hall/YouTube
Asplatter like split tinctures of spilt paint on canvas, vacillating light ignites a puddle turning purple, periwinkle, black and gold till night takes hold. In contrast ignorant of Apollonian order, it is nature’s protest against pixilation: chromas indefinable. Adobe or its sister programs will assign a number like “FF142X” but unlike those computer-generated blocks these unlocked hues will change too often to retain a name. They will resist the attributes of pigments, words and notes.
Experimental pianist Boris Giltburg enmeshes melody with comparable ambition; crossing through slurred chords and turbo-charged chromatics to convey the ecstasy of the Romantics. It’s a style intriguing and inimitable; doubtlessly the craftsman’s trademark. Yet it often loses sight of the creators it invokes.
Tenuto notes stayed stubbornly sustained as the performer forayed pacily into the opening of Chopin’s Op. 28, the first of twenty-four vignettes. To Giltburg’s credit, slurs abound in this and other preludes of the set – relaying rhythm’s distribution to the whims of its executor. Where other takers have delayed some of the prominent right hand, the almost overconscientious Giltburg hammered out the melody in proclamation.
Lapses between notes zapped hastily throughout the second prelude in A minor – making for a speedy shift between the quaver B and semibreve of D at the beginning. Later on however pauses stretched out into markedly suspenseful gaps as the left hand accelerated tempi. The third work saw eminent diminuendi while the fourth – notoriously dubbed the “Suffocation” prelude – melted left hand notes into obscurity as loud, incorrigible tones rang in the right.
Chopin’s “Mazurka” prelude gradually evolved into a too excited exercise as certain chords sprung out of undiscerning grips. Giltburg’s technique presents a mastery unquestionably intricate – but his especial finishes can circumvent its merits. Such a paradox was obvious as he embarked on Number 8: incessant demisemiquaver figurations squeezed in between notes four times their length. Their flurry ushered in euphoria of entities inseparable as raindrops melded indistillably; erasing individual pitches till the crowd resembled serial acciaccaturas.
Stinting on distinction in the choppy left hand of the twelfth instalment, Giltburg – in a manner interesting yet eerie – made the chords’ enunciations scarily identical. Schoenberg’s sensibilities crept into a discreet display from time to time; arresting multiple arpeggios in the next work with the same monotony.
In Giltburg’s undertaking of the “Raindrop” Prelude every limpid beam emerged emphatically elucidated in the right hand - shedding drizzle’s delicateness. Tempests’ uproar later bore into its leadenly repeated chords with an impressive misery befitting of the piece nevertheless.
Effecting deftness at the debut of the seventeenth prelude in A flat major, Giltburg
patterned lyrical anaphora once more with 20th-century compulsiveness: a varnish simultaneously at odds with yet enriching Chopin’s music. Stark staccati in its sprightliness-enthused successor buried scales between their leaps in a stylistic move reflective of the work’s unhinged persona.
Majesty injected Prelude No. 20 in C Minor with unnecessary triumph; bumping the first chords with an unprecedented forcefulness that routed the last part into demure diminuendo. Its gallantry seemed dissonant in Chopin; pinning to one’s mind a picture of a Holy Roman Emperor being pressingly saluted in procession. Presentation took the place of poignancy.
And yet the lightness of the twenty-first – a limber virtuosity intuiting balletic feet at play without their heavy pointes – graced listeners with a percussive prancing.
Insights that had teasingly arisen in this first half of a short recital seemed to shun its other. Scrambling busily across a cursed arpeggio race in Op. 32 – Rachmaninov’s own preludes – Giltburg nixed the master’s wily lyricism in its opening adventure in C major. Descents of broken chords whipped up the second into swirling whirlpools while a posse of suspenseful pauses chaperoned the third. Fractious left-hand chords across the fourth appeared to blot out the right’s integral motifs.
Dizzying zeal sealed the fate of the sixth prelude: overcompetitive tempi that almost compressed notes escaping our ears. Belaboured intervals made valleys in the guise of elongated silences in the tenth whilst strong attacks of the left hand in the eleventh stumped the right.
Crunching chords grew indistinguishable in the final outing of the thirteenth in D flat despite their player’s crisp finesse. Intrepid in their parallel realisation, the clone copies sometimes brought to mind a string of equine idiosyncrasies.
Extremes put valuable experiment at risk in this recital; coming to the fore again when Giltburg launched into his second encore, Rachmaninov’s Prelude in G Minor (Op. 23): an overloud assumption loaded with aplomb. Absconding with the two composers’ scores, the pianist escorted us on some enticing expeditions but left Chopin and Rachmaninov too often out of earshot.