Reviews

Conrad Wilson, The Herald

Star Rating: ****
Russian Genius was the right title for Gusztav Fenyo's Summer Music at Paxton House this year. Each event in this country-house weekend of chamber music contained a Russian masterpiece, and the Kesh Piano Duo gave us two. Neither Stravinsky's Rite of Spring nor his Three Pieces from Petrushka in their four-handed versions can yet be said to be fully established in the piano repertory, yet musically they are utterly authentic Stravinsky and they were dispatched with keen-edged bravura by Heejung Kim from Seoul and her Edinburgh-born partner Esther Sofaer.

Four hands on one keyboard can look like a lot of hands, and disentangling them in these works has been developed by these young players into an art form. Here was a feat of sight as well as sound, the clashing chords of the Rite reverberating round the room as sensationally as when they are hammered out by a vast orchestra in a full-size concert hall. Their impact was terrific, and nobody in the audience could have felt short-changed by the resultant performance, in which the softer passages were as riveting as those that revolve like a concrete mixer.

Stripping the Rite to its essentials, with Stravinsky himself as the stripper, is undoubtedly an act of Russian genius, but the sheer exuberance of the Petrushka pieces proved no less impressive. More familiar in their two-handed reduction, for which Arthur Rubinstein paid the composer 5000 francs, their dissonances seemed even more striking when crammed together by two players. Ravel's Mother Goose suite in its gleaming original version, and Mozart's inspired (but little known) Variations, K501, the fountainhead of all four-handed piano music, aptly introduced this enthralling programme.

Kesh Piano Duo at The Purcell Room, by Peter Grahame Woolf, Musical Pointers

The distinguished composing life of Kenneth Leighton (1929-1988) was celebrated in Blackheath when he would have been 70, and now by the Park Lane Group, in their Anniversary Series, to note what would have been his 75th birthday.

The programme was shrewdly built, concentrating on his writing for keyboard (he was a masterly pianist) and for cello. John Woolf's recruiting flair brought four pianists to the platform, plus Maggie Cole with her harpsichord to give a major London premiere. Andrew Zolinsky revived the large scale Fantasia Contrappuntistica, which the young Maurizio Pollini had premiered in 1956, winning the Busoni Prize.

The second half raised the temperature. Raphael Wallfisch and John York revived two hgihly expressive pieces, Alleluia Pascha Nostrum, Op 85 (1981) having been written for Raphael Wallfisch. But the biggest ovation was reserved for two young duo pianists who gave a wonderfully sensitive account of what must surely be one of the best of all major works for piano-four-hands, Leighton's 1985 sonata, unaccountably languishing unheard. At the same time, the Kesh Duo was giving us a foretaste of PLG's Young Artists week in January; if many of the selected musicians prove to be of like calibre, it will be a feast indeed! Leighton's sonata solves all the problems of the tricky medium; the two players have parts that allow for individual display, both of virtuosity and of delicate shading in quieter music, and the texture is never cluttered with too many notes in the middle register. Esther Sofaer had told presenter Stephanie Hughes that she and her partner Heejung Kim hope to have opportunities to bring this unaccountably neglected masterwork to audiences everywhere.