Recital
Yuri Didenko,Arkadi Zenziper
Manoel Theatre

Performances at the Manoel usually start very punctually. For some unexplained reason this one began almost 15 minutes late. To some it is an irritating factor, others more stoically see it as an unexpected whetting of the appetite for the fare being offered by these two Russian pianists who launched into a two-work concert of music transcribed for two pianos by the composers who wrote them.

The first half was entirely taken up by Brahms’s re-arrangement of his Piano Quintet Opus 34, itself having its roots in an earlier abandoned string quintet.

The result was the Sonata in F minor, Opus 34b with its first movement dominated by a recurring dramatic and brooding theme. The work moved along with all the necessary impact and left no doubt as to the two performers’ mastery of the keyboard. Balanced and complementary one could say that this aspect of the performance prevailed in the Andante un poco adagio.

In the agile and sharply defined Scherzo: allegro there were some disconcerting moments when things did not sound as they should.

This lingered on and off in the concluding movement at the end of which the feeling was that the work had mostly smacked a lot of the academic approach. A bit unexpected because when performing on his own a few days before, this was hardly the case with Yuri Didenko’s delivery.

The interval was even longer than usual and it was apparent what the matter was, at least from the technical point. A fault had developed in one of the pianos and this had to be fixed there and then. Still, one thinks that some kind of official explanation, an announcement, could have been forthcoming even if the reason for the delay was obvious.

With Rakhmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, Opus 45, the same generally academic if correct approach was resorted to.

It is true that the delays had been exasperating, even if necessary. One’s feeling was that one was having a look at the work from the outside and not carried along within it, brilliant but distant. It was almost with great relief that the sole encore was received by the audience when a polka was performed, comparatively trivial but pleasant.

It could be that having a recital dominated by two monumental works such as those chosen for this evening was a little bit too much.

One could have been chosen for the first half and a more varied selection of shorter pieces reserved for the second one.