Deserved tribute

Concert
Bruno Robilliard, piano
Manoel Theatre

Brigitte Engerer was a very well-known French pianist of distant Maltese descent. In December 2011, she charmed the audience at the Manoel with her formidable performing skills during a concert with the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra.

Sadly, cancer killed her six months later at just 59. For a number of years, Engerer had pursued a significant part of her musical education in the former Soviet Union. Several Russian works became part and parcel of her repertoire, and it was from this rich fount that French pianist Bruno Robilliard chose the works in this tribute offered by the Manoel and the French Embassy.

It must have been a difficult choice, but it was unusual to start with Tchaikovsky’s unique Dumka in C minor, Op. 59. It may be short but it contains a richness of mood and feeling, predominantly of melancholic reflection. However, it is not correct to associate it only with his failed marriage, a shattering experience almost a decade before this work was composed.

Other sad events coloured its composition and the pianist evoked these feelings with a certain dignity because the spirit behind it, while an expression of sadness, is not one of total self-pitying abandon.

In the far better known and amazingly evocative Pictures at an Exhibition by Petrovich Mussorg-sky, Robilliard tapped at his deepest feelings and also his technical prowess to bring alive that series of paintings so well-etched in musical terms by the composer. I always have a very personal problem with this work: does the equally well-known orchestrated version by Maurice Ravel influence my perception of the amazing orchestral effects innately woven in the work’s structure? Does Ravel lurk in my subconscious, I always ask myself?

I never manage to find an answer, so I just listen to this interpretation and enjoy it in full, as did the public whose applause reflected a very well-deserved appreciation.

A touch of Sergei Rakhmaninov (Études-Tableaux Op. 39 & 33) came across in a gorgeously intense and soaring, lush, Romantic explosion. Nothing could be more different from that than Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in D minor, Op. 14. In the opening movement there is a mix of striking dissonances and lyrical touches leading to more serene moments before an upsurge of sweeping energy.

The performer steered the work carefully with deftly-dealt passages that kept up balance and coherence of tempo between sections which could sound rather disjointed. The Scherzo: allegro marcato sounded like a toccata and came across in several clearly contrasting episodes and ended in quite a powerful if abrupt ending. On the other hand, the brief and highly-contrasting Andante ended rather inconclus-ively leading back to a final Vivace, like the opening movement in sonata-allegro form, which also called for some virtuoso playing.

Robilliard’s own Improvisation, dedicated to Engerer, was performed as an encore.