Lyrical Local Debut

Anatole Leikin on May 1, 2007
The Russian-born, British-based pianist Nikolai Demidenko made an impressive Bay Area debut on Saturday afternoon. His recital at the Florence Gould Theater, under the aegis of Chamber Music San Francisco, showed him to be a serious, sincere, intense, and engaging pianist of diverse repertoire. In the first half of the program, Bach's ebullient Italian Concerto was bookended by Bach's G-Minor Fantasy and Fugue (transcribed by Liszt) and by Liszt's colossal Variations on a Theme From Bach's Cantata Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen. With an assured deftness, Demidenko moved from dense, organ-inspired sonorities to a harpsichordlike crispness and back. His fortissimo, never harsh, made the hall reverberate the way a great Baroque organ makes the air inside a cathedral — and indeed a listener's whole essence — quiver. The quiet moments in the outermost pieces had distinct reedy flavors reminiscent of organ stops, while the Italian Concerto sparkled with brittle harpsichord timbres. Demidenko played all three movements of the ever-popular concerto faster than we are accustomed to. But the ease with which he negotiated all the polyphonic intricacies, lacework embellishments, and a motley chain of events helped make a compelling argument for faster tempos. These speeds cranked up the exuberant festivity of the work, especially against the backdrop of more ponderous surrounding pieces. The concerto's slow second movement was particularly stunning. Demidenko opened it with a spectacular contrast between a dryly punctuated, austere accompaniment and a free-flowing, imploring melody. Then, toward the end, the accompaniment softened and became more and more gentle, as if gradually yielding to the entreaties of the melody. This fascinating and unexpected reading of the slow movement bears a striking resemblance to the unusual slow movement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, the famous "Orpheus Pleading With the Furies." Did Demidenko have Beethoven's Andante in mind when he played Bach's Andante? I don't know, with any degree of certainty. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but then the pianist did play Gluck's Melody from Orpheus as an encore ...

Instantly Engaging Performance

The second half of the program consisted of only one piece — Schumann's humongous, nearly unmanageable Sonata in F-sharp Minor (Op. 11). By this time, the artist's main strengths had became apparent: deeply felt lyricism and great structural solidity, even monumentality, with each piece of music seeming as if hewn from stone by an insightful sculptor. These qualities helped Demidenko pull together all the wildly divergent strands of the sonata and create something approaching a powerful monolith. The only missing attribute was, in my opinion, tempo flexibility. It is not that Demidenko's playing lacked rubato, but it was a rubato in the modern sense, as a synonym for ritenuto, or a sudden holding back. In Schumann's time, the tempo was supposed to be flexed both ways. We don't have any recordings of Schumann's own performances, of course. But we do have the example of a composer-performer, born less than 40 years after Schumann's sonata was written, whose works were in many respects close to those of Schumann: Alexander Scriabin. The music of both Schumann and Scriabin is marked by similar nervous excitement and exaltation, similar flights into fantastic otherworldliness — and similar abundance of reiterated "square" phrases. And in his 1908 and 1910 recordings, Scriabin shows how to deal with such apparent repetitiveness. For instance, the score of his Prelude Op. 11, No. 2, is awash with repetitions. In the course of the prelude, these repetitions grow increasingly exasperating in most of today's performances, even though the prelude lasts less than two minutes. In Scriabin's hands, however, it becomes a different piece entirely. The tempo indication in the score says that one beat should equal to 138 on the metronome scale. Scriabin flexes the tempo so much that the length of each beat differs widely, from 36 to 257. As a result, the repeated phrases never sound the same; they are either compressed or stretched, and therefore always fresh and impulsive. Amazingly, the average tempo of Scriabin's performance comes to exactly 138 per beat, although not a single individual beat is played at that pace. The score of Schumann's sonata is likewise extraordinarily repetitive. It is conceivable that the only way to avoid the impression of excessive repetitiveness is to treat rubato in the 19th-century sense, as a continuous give-and-take rather than an occasional give. But who would dare to play in this style now? Apart from this matter, Demidenko's Schumann was intense and involving. And Demidenko's artistic personality revealed another facet that shined suddenly at the very end of the concert, in two of his Scarlatti encores: brilliant lightheartedness and wit.