Houstoun’s bleak view of sonatas
Review of recital given for WCMS on 13 July, 2008
Appeared in DominionPost on 17 July, 2008
Reviewer: Lindis Taylor
Michael Houstoun has been a leading artist in Wellington’s Sunday afternoon concerts since the beginning in 1983, bar the few years of his neurological problem.
Testimony to his victory over that was clear in Sunday’s concert in which he undertook the entire set of Rachmaninov’s 13 preludes Op.32, with their multifarious technical and artistic challenges, and even more, the not-often-played 8th Piano Sonata of Prokofiev, the last of the three sonatas composed during World War II - the War Sonatas.
The first movement starts calmly, detached, but evolves with increasing disquiet into nightmarish passages that Houstoun played with unusual ferocity. At his hands, the more lyrical slow movement acquired a hardness of tone that offered a view of the work that was perhaps more bleak than necessary.
I have always felt Houstoun was a pianist who approached interpretation in a classical manner, avoiding personal intrusion, giving primacy to the music itself. This afternoon, perhaps not helped by the piano’s voicing, I sensed a reluctance to allow the music to sing softly, to find calm beauty in music written during the war, but instead to expose the harshness and horrors that the Russians were suffering.
In fact, along with many other prominent Soviet artists, Prokofiev hardly suffered, evacuated to the safety of Central Asia.
Rachmaninov’s set of 13 preludes, Opus 32 (the odd number to complete the magic total of 24 from the 11 previously written), stands in the distinguished line from Bach through Chopin and Debussy.
Here, in their wide variety, Houstoun could capture sudden mood contrasts with wonderful sensitivity. From the flowing, extrovert No.3, the charming lyricism of No.5, the rhapsodic No.9, to the fleet, staccatoesque No.4 and beautiful and optimistic 13th prelude with its heroic peroration. Yet certain of the feelings I had about the Prokofiev applied: where was the breathless, magical poise of No.10?
The odd one out was the unfamiliar (to me) Tchaikovsky variations, Op.19, No.6. Obviously an early work, it gives the impression of uncertainty, of “What’ll I do with this tune next?”, yet Houstoun brought a certain coherence to the rather arbitrary succession of variations, if not uncovering any characteristic Tchaikovsky qualities.
Nevertheless, no concert from Houstoun fails to offer revelations - either into less familiar music or a fresh insight, an uncompromising honesty into the well-known.
COMMENT: Can one really say "Prokofiev hardly suffered" in the war just because he was evacuated? As if he had no fellow-feeling in him, as if displacement was of no account, as if he never absorbed the appalling effects of war going on all around him? MH