Empassioned (CD review)

Piano music of Beethoven, Gluck, Chopin, Debussy, and Liszt. Viktor Bijelovic, piano. Kickstarter Limited Edition.

You may not know who Viktor Bijelovic is. He’s a Serbian-born pianist who, according to his Web site, “has already accumulated considerable experience on the concert platform both as a solo pianist as well as a chamber musician, with concerts in France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malaysia and Yugoslavia” and Britain, as well as making several TV and radio appearances. “Viktor came over to London at the age of 11 to go to a specialist music school and then on to the Royal Academy of Music where he did Undergraduate and Masters Degrees. Winner of several prestigious international competitions, he has performed in many important venues, including Sadler's Wells with The Pina Bausch Wuppertal Tanztheater, The Salle Gaveau Concert Hall in Paris and The Kolarac Concert Hall in Belgrade. Viktor was a guest performer at the 2nd ASEAN Chopin International Competition in Malaysia in December 2006. Most notably, he has performed in front of HRH Prince Charles twice--at The Buckingham Palace, to mark the occasion of Prince Charles's 50th Birthday Celebration and in May 2006 to inaugurate the Tent at St Ethelburga's.”

Empassioned marks his second CD album, following the 2010 release of piano music by Chopin and Liszt. We’ll forget for the moment that “empassioned” is not actually a word in English because it’s close enough to “impassioned” for us to know what it means.

We should first, however, get out of the way the somewhat unusual manner in which Bijelovic opens the present program. He begins with a narrative track on which he explains a little about each piece he's going to play and why he chose each piece. The pianist says in the accompanying booklet that he decided to do this because it's the thing he does during live performances. He loves storytelling, believes music is a form of storytelling, and, thus, tells something of the background story of each piece he performs. Well, at least he doesn't do this before every track, just two or three minutes at the outset. It's really pretty interesting information, but once you’ve heard it, I doubt you'd want to play it too often again. Therefore, when you put the disc on to play it subsequent times, you'll have to remember to start with track two. A minor inconvenience.

Anyway, Bijelovic begins the musical portion of the album with Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 "Appassionata." The pianist reminds us that Beethoven wrote it when he was almost deaf and, therefore, the stark contrasts between loud and quiet were his attempts “to push the boundaries of his own hearing." Bijelovic seems to take this information quite seriously, as he does, indeed, play up the dynamic contrasts to the limit. This is not suggest, however, that he exaggerates anything. The first movement is appropriately rugged and heroic, with its quotations from the Fifth Symphony in evidence throughout. The second-movement Andante con moto is straightforward, never dragging, yet moving in its clean-cut way. And the final movement comes across with fire or, as Bijelovic would say, "passion." Yet it's a controlled fire, with exemplary direction.

The second piece, German operatic composer Christoph Gluck's Melody, is actually a transcription by Giovanni Sgambati from Gluck's opera about Orpheus in the Underworld. Bijelovic plays it with a gentle, evocative, poetic touch. It's quite lovely.

Next, we hear Chopin's Ballade No. 1, which sounds wistful in Bijelovic's hands, and Chopin’s Nocturne No. 1, Op. 27, which Bijelovic describes as being "like an old man looking back over his youth." Certainly, there's a degree of nostalgia in the pianist's renditions of both works, a kind of sad longing for something perhaps lost or never attained.

Claude Debussy's "Claire de Lune" ("Moonlight") from Suite bergamasque is among the most familiar piano pieces ever written, and Bijelovic handles it with a sweetly quiet lyricism.

Sergei Rachmaninov's Prelude No. 5, Op. 23 follows. Bijelovic tells us it is an "impassioned and brave work, which came out of hard times for the composer." While the music offers an intentionally sharp contrast with the serene beauty of the Debussy piece that precedes it, again the pianist never overemphasizes the differences, instead stressing the Rachmaninov work's own internal similarities and differences.

Bijelovic concludes the program with Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, a work the pianist tells us he's wanted to play "ever since he started the piano." It, too, is so familiar it hardly needs introduction. Indeed, it may be hard for some of us to disassociate the piece from the Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons in which it has played so prominent a role. Nevertheless, thanks to Bijelovic's fresh playing and the audio engineers' splendid sound, the music comes across with a vigorous new appeal. The entire recital may be overly familiar to some listeners, but Bijelovic's performances make much of it sound new again. 

In a word, says Bijelovic, the theme that runs through the whole CD is "passion," his own passion and the passion within the music. Fair enough; the passion shows.

Audio engineers Adaq and Isa Khan recorded the music at Jacqueline du Pre Hall, St. Hilda's College, Oxford in February, 2013. The sound they obtained is excellent, clean and well focused. It's miked closely enough that we hear a fine clarity and transient response, yet it's not so close that the piano stretches all the way across the room. A very mild room resonance complements the acoustic, never muffling the sound but providing a realistic setting for the music. This is top-notch piano sound.

To listen to a brief excerpt from this album, click here:

JJP