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HAMILTON - If words were adequate to express all that's in the human heart and soul, we wouldn't need music.
That we need music and should, in a worthy and intelligent life, use far fewer words and a great deal more music, was a wisdom brought home with stunning effect by pianist Jan Lisiecki in Mohawk College's auditorium, last night, in a concert with Boris Brott and the National Academy Orchestra.
Lisiecki played a killer program.
To mark the 200th anniversary of Frederic Chopin's birth he played Rondo a la Krakowiak - full of Polish dances and songs - and Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise Brilliante and that was just in the first half.
The second half was Chopin's Piano Concerto No.1, a piece that normally would have been considered a night's work by any and all of the great pianists of this age and any other.
At the end of it and after a thunderous standing ovation, throughout which some brayed thoughtlessly for an encore, in a hall that was literally packed to the rafters, Lisiecki thanked us for coming and allowed he was really pleased to have been able to play so much piano for us in one night. He failed to add without being carried out on life support by EMS.
Jan Lisiecki takes the stage for a performance of Chopin's First Piano Concerto
I've been trying to think of a word that would sum up Lisiecki's performance and have settled on consummate - meaning complete, perfect.
It was complete in the sense that every touch of a piano key seemed totally intentional - by that I mean that every subtle increase in tempo or volume, every shaded color and inflection was exactly what Lisiecki meant to do. It was perfect, in that as an enthralled listener, it was easy to imagine that we were hearing a person achieving his dream of how the music should sound.
Have I mentioned yet that Lisiecki is just 15 years old?
No. Well, I really don't think it has anything to do with the music. It adds a sensational oooh! of course and Brott opined that in his opinion Lisiecki was "Canada's next Glenn Gould."
I wish with all my heart he doesn't follow Gould's path and absent himself from live performance for remote, technologically achieved moon-landings of music from some hidden and lonely lair.
However long I babble on I can only faintly convey what happened at this concert. But those who were there, live, barely breathing and totally in tune with this superb musician had a connection and an experience few will forget. Lisiecki was, let me add, surrounded by the young and also superb musicians of the National Academy Orchestra.
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Jan and his mother Anita at a post-concert reception hosted
by the Polish Canadian Women's Federation, Hamilton Branch
Boris Brott conducted the orchestra for the Concerto and his always superb accompanying reached a zenith of sorts allied as it was by the orchestra's ability to listen so carefully and musically. The piano's first entry in the Romance, the second movement, was actually a true pianissimo and as clear and as clean and as sweet and true as could be imagined. All the while sitting luxuriously on a soft velvet cushion of full string tone. A thing rarer than blue diamonds.
Genevieve Leclair conducted the Rondo, in which Lisiecki's tempi overtook a woodwind or two, with aplomb and understanding. Samuel Tak- Ho Tam had a far more trying job in the Grande Polonaise.
The orchestra is so much on the periphery in this piece it is often played without the benefit, if benefit it is, of orchestra at all.
And it is very hard to come off the bench and hit full stride at once, which made the first pizzicato end of the orchestra's first tutti a little dazed but all was well managed after that.
Brott, as is right, reserved for himself the conducting of his father's piece, Oracle, which opened the program. Composed in 1939 it is a foreboding shudder of musical agony at the declaration of World War II. Amongst the fright, panicked scurrying and brassy alarms there is a touching but monumental resolve. I don't mean monumental as anything big but immovable. A lone, terrified soul facing with valour what no one knew at the time would become perhaps the deepest abyss the human race has ever plunged itself into.
Lest I forget. From the Brott to the Concerto the playing of bassoonist Spencer de Man - not mentioned in the program and if I'm wrong I apologize - was just ravishing. In tone and sophistication of phrase it was one more thing that was consummate in a glorious evening of music.
Oh yes. Did we get an encore? We did. A ravishing Nocturne that effectively pulled the blanket over the canary's cage and sent us all off to bed. It was a real privilege to hear the music, but next time just yell "Bravo," OK? Lisiecki had worked his fingers to the bone already.
--July 29, 2010