In his latest concert, Michelangelo Carbonara let his audience have a glimpse at another facet of his musi-cal personality: Carbonara the composer.
The pianist played at the Kempinski Hotel, San Lawrenz, in aid of two charities: The Friends of the Sick and the Elderly in Gozo and Happy Moments Kenya.
The pianist has magic at his fingertips, no matter what he plays. Carbonara delved into each work with full commitment and spirit, ever mindful of style and always delivering with utmost good taste.
While fully able to be a wildly tempestuous virtuoso performer, he is equally capable of mustering a very tender depth of feeling and utterly poetic lyricism.
Mendelssohn’s Variations Sér-ieuses served as a fine introduction, warming up gradually to a short climax but retaining a sober but not too sombre mood.
This contrasted with the dazzling brilliance of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, Op. 65, which much as it sets the blood racing is a fine concert piece not meant to be danced to.
For further contrast, Chopin’s Ballade No.1, in G minor, Op.23, came across as a heroic statement mixed with emotion and warmth.
The more brilliant and difficult passages and the irregular rhythmic structure underlying the various changes of mood added the spice and colour which the pianist evoked and elicited.
The full, yet gentle force of Brahms’s autumn years was almost tangible as the Three Intermezzi Op. 117 wafted across the hall.
Restrained but not restricted, they followed a course of sad introspection with the gentlest of all being No.1 in E flat, its andante con moto giving way to No. 2, in B flat minor which came across as the epitome of a special bitter-sweetness. No. 3, in C Sharp Minor, the longest and the one where for a while tends to voice some dissent from the previous moods gradually faded away.
If Carbonara needed giving further proof of versatility, he did so brilliantly in Joseph Vella’s perky, unusual and uncharacteristic Rapsodija Maltija.
About the only of his works di-rectly inspired by Maltese folk music, Carbonara brought alive Vel-la’s musical painting written in his own personal style and made short shrift of some very difficult passages.
His virtuoso playing and a mix of poetic reflection and introspection came to the fore with Liszt’s Valle d’Obermann.
After having played all the above music from memory, he performed a number of his own arrangements and fantasias of well-known themes from opera: performing to a score joking that he forgets his own music.
First he performed the world premiere of what he calls his Fantasia Moderna on Bellini’s Casta Diva from Norma. With another Fantasia on Verdi’ Va’ Pensiero from Nabucco, he opted for a Ravelian type of habanera, which at times briefly sounded rather bizarre but grew on one, as did the mostly fast and furious Fantasia on Di Quella Pira from Verdi’s Il Trovatore.