Bach/Busoni, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin: André Laplante (piano), Artspring, Saltspring Island, BC, Canada, 24.10.2006 (MB)

 

 

André Laplante, who opened the Artspring 2006/7 season on October 24^th, has often been compared to Ashkenazy, Horowitz and Serkin; but, as this recital demonstrated, a more appropriate comparison is with Alfred Brendel with whom Mr Laplante shares both a physical resemblance as well as a pianistic one. Brendel has an innate ability to draw one into the music he is performing, and Mr Laplante, sacrificing the more virtuosic programme listed for a near-chronological path that stretched from Bach (via Busoni) to Chopin, revelled in the simplicities and the intricacies of the classical repertoire, much as Brendel has been doing with this music over the past half-century.

Were it not for Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s Adagio in A minor from the Toccata for organ in C, Mr Laplante might have fallen into the trap of opening with Mozart, a notoriously difficult chamber composer to open a recital with. But the stately Busoni transcription, delivered with weight yet tonal balance, proved a neat counterpart to Mozart’s youthful Sonata in E flat, K.282. Balletic the Mozart might have been, with feather-light touch across the keyboard, but it almost sounded too reverential in its delivery – reminding us that Mr Laplante’s first exposure to the piano came via the convents of Quebec. True, there was no heaviness to the opening adagio, just intimacy, but the brilliance of the allegro was perhaps a little too displaced by Mr Laplante’s sense of this music being greater than it is.

Beethoven’s “Waldstein” sonata is part heroic and part ecstatic and Mr Laplante almost achieved that state of balance: the opening staccato chords, played here at a true pianissimo, seemed at first too straightforward, but the swiftness (and grace) of the following three and four note descents were rhythmic perfection. Just the occasional early release of foot from pedal marred the effect of continuity. Equally impressive was the adagio which Mr Laplante brought to life by audibly breathing with the music, a neat contrast to the Rondo with its scales and trills that seemed to strike intuitively with this pianist’s glittering and precise fingerwork.

Schubert’s Moment musicaux Op.94 (performed here incomplete, reminding one of Richter’s tendency to play only some of the Moments), were turned into mini tone poems in Mr Laplante’s hands, an ideal curtain-raiser for the second half’s main offering, Chopin’s B-flat minor Sonata. The sonata’s stormy opening came off well, though perhaps Mr Laplante was slightly underplaying the acoustics of the hall in seeming to hold back on some of Chopin’s fortissimo writing; the second movement’s calmer melodies seemed less relaxed because of this lack of contrast. The sonata’s celebrated Funeral March coaxed some tonally splendid playing from the pianist, but it was left to the fiery presto, with its whirlwind of octaves amid a desert of bar rests or chords, to strike home the ambivalence of this work with its at times unvarying dynamic range, a range not always captured fully by Mr Laplante.

As with so much of this recital, one felt that Mr Laplante was playing safer than he might otherwise do in concert; there were insights to be had, and one was struck by the sheer beauty, even opulence, of much of his playing. But I, for one, would have preferred to hear this fine pianist in the originally listed recital, which included Liszt’s great B minor sonata; only part of the time did I feel that Mr Laplante was living up to his reputation as one of the great virtuosos.

 

 

Marc Bridle

 

 

(This review first appeared in The Driftwood, the newspaper of the Gulf Islands.)