This is only the second album for the relatively young
Armenian pianist Nareh Arghamanyan, her first being a program of Liszt and
Rachmaninov sonatas a couple of years earlier for the Analekta label. Audiences
perhaps know her best for winning a slew of piano competitions over the past
decade, things like the 2009 “Sparkasse Wortersee” Competition in Austria; the
2008 Montreal International Musical Competition; the 2007 Piano Campus
International piano competition, Pontoise; the 1999 Armenian Legacy, First
National piano competition, Armenia; the 1998 International Competition
"Little Prince" for young talents in Zaporozhye, Ukraine; and the
1997 International Frederic Chopin Piano Competition in Yugoslavia. Here, she
makes a good showing in the two Liszt Concertos,
the Totentanz, and the Fantasy on Hungarian Folk Tunes.
Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
started writing his Piano Concerto No. 1
in E-flat Major around 1830 and worked on it for a quarter of a century,
finally committing it to paper in 1849, and premiering it in 1855. You might
say he had plenty of time to perfect it. The fascinating thing about the First Concerto is that even though we
usually hear it in three distinct movements--a traditional opening Allegro, a slow Adagio combined with a vivacious Scherzo, and then an Allegro
finale--the movements are really like one continuous piece, with variations on
common themes throughout.
The First Concerto
begins in a big, grand manner, in the style of Beethoven, Schumann, Grieg, and
Tchaikovsky, and Ms. Arghamanyan, Maestro Alain Altinoglu, and the Berlin Radio
Symphony Orchestra play it in just such a big, grand fashion, plus.
Yet Ms. Arghamanyan is quite sensitive and, of course,
most virtuosic. So she handles both the grand statements and the more-poetic
ones with equal ease. Moreover, Altinoglu conducts with a deft touch, lending a
bravura accompaniment at times and a quiet support when needed. The heroic
opening theme comes through in dazzling style, the lyrical second-movement Quasi-Adagio is as sweet as one could
imagine, and following without a break the Scherzo
and then the Allegro finale proceed
in exemplary fashion.
Unlike my recent listening to another young virtuoso
pianist, Lang Lang, doing Chopin in a manner I felt was more for effect than
anything else, I found Ms. Arghamanyan’s playing searing and soulful. While her
renditions of the Liszt concertos may not be quite up to those of Sviatoslav
Richter (Philips), Alfred Brendel (Philips), or Leonard Pennario (HDTT), they
are close.
Liszt began his Piano
Concerto No. 2 in A Minor in 1839, some sixteen years before premiering the
Concerto No. 1, which is why you’ll
sometimes find No. 2 listed first on
a recording, although not here. The Second
Piano Concerto is more like a typical Liszt tone poem than the First, so it’s a little different from
what most other composers were writing at the time. As Liszt said, “New wine
demands new bottles.” The Second Concerto
is less overtly virtuosic than the First,
and more rhapsodic, yet it displays any number of melodramatic elements as
well. Ms. Arghamanyan again negotiates it dexterously, and aided by PentaTone’s
excellent sonics, she and the orchestra make the most of the work.
The two couplings for the concertos also come up well. The
Totentanz (“Dance of the Dead”),
based on variations of the Dies irae,
sounds appropriately menacing, if a bit softer in spots than I’d like. The Fantasy on Hungarian Folk Melodies will
remind listeners of another of Liszt’s famous works, the Hungarian Rhapsody for Piano
No. 1 (and the Hungarian Rhapsody for
Orchestra No. 14). He believed in getting the most out of his music, and
Ms. Arghamanyan plays it charmingly.
PentaTone recorded the music in both stereo and surround
for this hybrid SACD at Haus des Rundfunks, RBB, Berlin, in April, 2012. They
obtain from the orchestra some of the best sound I’ve heard on a PentaTone
release. The Berlin Radio Symphony displays a wonderful depth, air, and
transparency, not only in the SACD stereo mode to which I listened but in the
regular stereo mode, too, without sacrificing naturalness, smoothness, or
warmth. The slight snag is that PentaTone recorded the piano rather closely,
and it sometimes dominates the rest of the ensemble. While the piano should be
front and center, here it tends to stretch a bit too far across the stage and
can at times overwhelm the orchestral support. Nevertheless, even though the
recording doesn’t always simulate the most realistic balance between the
soloist and orchestra, it does offer a dramatic effect, which in the First Concerto, being as dramatic as it
is, anyway, is not entirely a bad thing. Overall, this is probably the best new
Liszt recording you’ll find.
JJP
