Norway was the featured country Sunday afternoon, as the Mostly Nordic chamber music series wrapped up its season with a concert given by two gifted pianists, one Norwegian, one Italian, playing solo or four-hands together.
For the past 18 years at the Nordic Heritage Museum, the concert series has followed its unique pattern with considerable success: five concerts a year representing in turn the Nordic countries of Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway. After each concert most of the audience stays for a smorgasbord of food from those countries.
In the past, concertgoers sat in rows facing the stage of the old Daniel Webster school auditorium, with large round tables behind set for the smorgasbord. After the concert, many willing hands would rearrange tables and chairs throughout the hall. This season, it was decided to have the tables in place and listen to the concert from them, nightclub style. Walking in Sunday afternoon, the appearance was welcomingly festive with the tables set in Norway’s colors.
This concert nearly didn’t happen as one of the pianists became sick recently and couldn’t travel, but Norway’s Inger-Kristine Riber made herculean efforts and found a colleague, Italy’s Alessandra Giorgia Brustia, able to join her both for practice time and to come to the U.S for a mini-tour. Practice time can’t be just a run-through for performers playing piano four-hands. It takes deep communication in sensing how the music should go and complete synchrony between the two players. If these aren’t there, the performance sounds clunky.
It was nothing short of remarkable how close a meeting of minds there was in style, tempo, phrasing, and dynamics between Riber and Brustia, given that they had a scant ten days to achieve this. Their performances of Grieg’s Walzer-Capricen and his Norwegian Dances showed them excellent musicians and collaborators.
Riber performed alone works by two other Norwegian composers of the 20th century, Alf Hurum’s Water Colors and four selections from David Monrad Johansen’s Suite No. 1. Both composers’ works are in similar impressionistic style, with a bow to Debussy and Ravel. Subtle colorations abound, as does well-planned use of pedal, while they are technically quite difficult. Riber had no problem with them, and gave each an appealing performance which should send local pianists hunting for the scores.
Brustia took on a couple of selections from Grieg’s Lyrical Pieces, and also Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s Violin Chaconne in D Minor. In this last, she managed at times to make the piano sound like an entire organ thundering out some of Bach’s most majestic music, and at others brought out the delicacy of incredibly fast runs.
Bach works in just about any guise. I’ve heard Bach sung by the Swingle Singers, or played by a steel band. The absolute essential is that it must be totally clean, completely orderly. There were moments where it felt Brustia was taking parts a tad too fast, bordering on breaking out of that cleanliness and orderliness.
The two performers returned after enthusiastic applause to play five delightful variations on a Norwegian folk song — in the style of Bach, Mozart, Chopin, and Grieg; and in a jazz vein — by contemporary composer Nils Henrik Asheim, which left the audience appreciative and laughing.
