A favorite with Seattle audiences for years, French-born pianist Hélène Grimaud returned to Seattle on November 1 for a solo recital at the University of Washington’s Meany Hall. The performance was part of the UW’s President’s Piano Series. Known for her idiosyncratic style of musical interpretation, Grimaud brought a fresh and exciting perspective to her program, which included works by Mozart, Berg, Bartók, and Liszt.
The evening’s diverse repertoire highlighted Grimaud’s masterful sense of timing and drama, resulting in many breathtaking moments, especially in Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor. One of the composer’s most monumental works for solo piano, the Sonata depicts a wide range of emotions, flickering rapidly between ecstasy and hopelessness. The piece is considered to be one of the most difficult in the classical piano repertoire.
Grimaud tackled the Sonata’s technical and interpretive challenges with aplomb. In the most dramatic moment of the piece, Grimaud played a series of plodding, sonorous notes at the low end of the piano, her head drooping over the instrument. One by one, the notes trailed grudgingly down the keyboard, a vivid illustration of despair.
Grimaud’s bold performance of Mozart’s Sonata in A Minor captured the work’s personality without a strict adherence to traditional performance styles. Her rendition of the energetic first movement contained a few Romantic Era touches, especially her use of rubato. Despite these unconventionalities, Grimaud’s interpretation was both convincing and captivating. The contemplative second movement and lively third movement were more straightforward, but still impeccably executed.
The other two works on the program, Berg’s Piano Sonata No. 1 and Bartók’s Román népi táncok (Rumanian Folk Dances), were both composed in the 20th century. With the Berg Sonata, Grimaud painted an emotional landscape of peaks and valleys. The piece weaves between tension and release, an ideal playground for Grimaud to demonstrate her skillful sense of timing. Like her performance of the Mozart, Grimaud brought a subtle Romantic touch to the Berg Sonata, lending a sense of epic drama to the ebb and flow of musical emotions.
For Grimaud, Bartók’s Rumanian Folk Dances were studies in expression. These six short dances build dramatically towards the whirling final movement. Grimaud’s performance accentuated the vast difference in character and mood between each of the dances, highlighting the flow of energy from movement to movement.
