The more records I
hear by this quite extraordinary pianist
the more my admiration for her grows.
Extraordinary, not in the sense of calling
attention to what she is doing and imposing
herself between us and the music, but
in that she always seeks to realize
the particular style of the composer.
If these records had been issued under
a series of pseudonyms, a German name
for the German/Austrian repertoire,
a Polish name for Chopin, a Hungarian
name for Liszt and a Russian name for
Russian composers (I haven’t heard her
in French music so far), I suggest that
few if any would have seen any reason
to doubt that the pianist behind each
name was of that particular nationality.
True, her Tchaikovsky
is not hysterical or neurotic, but as
Nikolai Malko and Rudolf Barshai have
shown, not all Russians are like that
anyway. This is a swashbuckling, no-holds-barred
account. From the opening bars the conductor
makes it clear that he means business
(is this really the same man who did
a just about adequate job of Hatto’s
Brahms 2?) and whatever this orchestra
really is, it’s brazen-toned horns are
the real thing. The introduction swings
along at a pace only a little slower
than Horowitz/Toscanini (but that little
makes all the difference; the music
is allowed to emerge here). When the
real body of the first movement starts,
Hatto is one of the few pianists in
my experience who manages to put sufficient
accent on the first note of each
pair to avoid our getting the impression
that the accent is on the second,
with incongruous results when the orchestra
enters and seems to want to give the
soloist a lesson in how to play the
theme. It’s easy for the orchestra so
they always get it right; it’s dashed
difficult for the soloist and most don’t
seem to try.
I won’t go on to give
a blow-by-blow account; I will simply
record that when I got to the end I
realized that, unusually when I hear
this repertoire that I’ve heard so many
times, I had simply been listening to
the music with sheer enjoyment and delight
in Tchaikovsky’s own genius. Every performance
ought to do this but too few
do. If I wanted to be carpingly critical
I could say that I thought the second
subject in the last movement a mite
heavy-handed (delicacy is not lacking
elsewhere) and that recorded perspectives
seem to shift, with the piano sometimes
alarmingly gargantuan compared with
the orchestra and at others fitting
in with it nicely – and in the last
few pages it veers between the two.
But if you want a performance which
brings the old warhorse up as fresh
as paint, this is it.
The balance is consistently
good in the Prokofiev. Once again it
is the conductor who has to start things
off, and he does so by sounding a note
of strong passion. Sure enough, this
is not one of the performances that
makes Prokofiev seem a 20th
Century Saint-Saëns, for it has
a similar strength and purpose to the
Tchaikovsky, with the addition of flashes
of droll wit and irony. In short, this
performance hits the mark too.
In addition we get
two of the most notoriously difficult
– nay hair-raising – Russian pieces
for solo piano, both brought off with
fine aplomb. I did wonder if the pianissimos
in the Prokofiev might not have been
even softer – not that Hatto barges
through at a steady fortissimo, the
dynamic contrasts are there but what
I miss is a sense of latent power.
The sheer virtuoso
demands of Balakirev’s "Islamey"
have led to it’s being considered a
sort of test-piece for the would-be
world-beater; I suppose it’s to my own
loss that I somewhat doubt if its musical
returns repay the eight minutes spent
listening to it, let alone the eight
hours a day for eight months or whatever
it takes to set up an acceptable performance.
Hatto has all the virtuoso heft to bring
it off, whatever one’s opinion of its
worth.
Christopher Howell
The Tchaikovsky is also coupled to Saint-Saens
Piano Concerto No 4. See reviews by Jonathan
Woolf and William
Hedley
Joyce Hatto (piano) 
