Emanuel Despax is well known not only as a soloist of distinction but also as a regular collaborator in chamber music. His recital at the Bechstein Hall may have been a solo performance, but it very much demonstrated the full range of his talents – his hugely impressive technique to be sure, but also a rare gift for balancing and layering sonorities that comes from careful listening and habitual adjustment to other instruments. His characteristic position at the keyboard, sitting with his head cocked to one side to judge the aural effect of his work, is almost like a piano tuner as much as a player. With the full, rich resources of the Bechstein piano at his disposal, like a painter with a loaded palette, he used imaginative pedalling to set up a glowing foundation of sound onto which many colours and lines were delicately placed with exquistely differentiated touch. In the precise acoustic of the Bechstein Hall it was particularly welcome to hear final chords left to resonate for a long time so that we could appreciate the full range of overtones.
This approach was absolutely in the service of the programme where description, together with dramatic evocation, were central. He has made something of a speciality of resurrecting or creating his own concert paraphrases of well known operas and musicals, and we were treated to one of these, sandwiched between Ravel’s Miroirs and Gaspard de la Nuit, two of the most technically and interpretatively challenging works in the repertoire.
There are five highly contrasted pieces in Miroirs, each with its own distinctive mood. We enjoyed the atmospheric flutterings of moths at night, melancholy bird calls in an Amazonian forest, and bells tolling across Paris, each with its own separate sense of sonic spaciousness. But the severest tests are reserved for ‘A Boat on the Ocean’ and ‘Jester’s Aubade’. Despax conjured up the shifting, majestic swell of the sea deftly, but this was a gentler ride than some I have heard, with the insistent trills less fierce than usual as though there was perhaps a stiffness and resistance in the action at the top of the keyboard. However, the Spanish cross-rhythms and syncopations of ‘Jester’s Aubade’ were brilliantly dispatched.
Before we reached Gaspard we enjoyed a poised and quite classical performance of Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’, more Watteau than Monet; and also the pianist’s own arrangement of a famous Fauré chanson. But the main palate cleanser was the pianist’s elaboration of themes from The Sound of Music. This was very much in the torrential style of Liszt and Rachmaninov, but several of the familiar tunes regularly rose through the seething surface of notes. The elaboration of ‘My Favourite Things’ was particularly well worked through, and I wish only it could have been a bit longer, perhaps with a guest appearance from a lonely goatherd, or a climactic treatment of ‘Climb Every Mountain.’
Each of the three pieces in Gaspard de la Nuit is hugely challenging, and intended to be so by the composer. These tests are as much aesthetic as technical. ‘Ondine’ needs to tell a story as much as evoke a watery dream world of nymphs and knights. This was a finely graded, carefully paced performance, which did not peak too soon or sacrifice narrative to shimmering surfaces. In ‘Le Gibet’ we were taken inwards through the mesmeric tolling of a B flat bell into a deserted village with an execution by hanging at its centre. The stillness in the hall at the end registered how far Despax had drawn us into this imaginative zone. ‘Scarbo’ is a brute of a piece, in its quirky, craggy and fragmented outbursts, depicting on the surface the antics of a goblin, but actually pushing at the boundaries of pianistic technique and meaning. Despax found a plausible shape for a work that will always to an extent fight the performer.
As a more comfortable and indeed comforting conclusion, we received a serene, flowing performance of Ravel’s ‘Pavane’, an ambiguous elegy that always seems to me of a piece with with wistful, elegant chivalric world of Le Grand Meaulnes. Altogether an unusual and very rewarding programme, leaving us both satisfied and wishing for more.
Bechstein Hall
Emanuel Despax
7 March 2025
2 hrs with interval
Photo Credit: Benjamin Ealovega