“As radical a reimagining of the piano recital as you could wish for”. Michael Dervan’s Review of Kurtág’s Ghosts in Today’s Irish Times
Italian pianist Marino Formenti’s programme at St Peter’s Church of Ireland, Drogheda (Saturday, May 2nd), titled Kurtág’s Ghosts, being about as radical a reimagining of the piano recital as you could wish for.
Formenti’s starting point is the music of Hungarian composer György Kurtág, a contemporary master of the miniature, whose pithiness is often focused on tributes and memorials to colleagues and friends, and also the great composers he admires.
The typical piano recital includes just a handful of pieces. Kurtág’s Ghosts runs to more than 60, presented in two seamless halves, as a kind of montage that blurs boundaries so that pieces and styles that are separated by centuries can flow by as part of the same continuum.
It’s a mesmerising, dizzying idea that ventures fearlessly through seven centuries. The opening moves from Machaut to Kurtág to Stockhausen and Messiaen; the second opens with Purcell and dwells on Schumann and Liszt as well as Kurtág.
Formenti’s playing has something of a Jekyll and Hyde character: all kid-gloves softness in one mode, and rough-edged, fiercely driven energy in the other. The effect on Saturday was to heighten the dissonance of some of the earlier music, and occasionally to soften the contours of more recent work. Formenti’s reconception of what a piano recital might be and might do is musical planning with an unusually explicit agenda. So it’s hardly surprising that the playing itself should conform to that agenda, too.
