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Sunday, October 7, 2007
Russian Pianist Opens Spivey Hall Season
RECITAL REVIEW Polina Leschenko, pianist. Saturday at Spivey Hall. www.spiveyhall.org.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Polina Leschenko, a formidable young pianist who until now had been known only within the inner sanctum of the music biz, opened Spivey Hall’s 17th season Saturday night.
She’s a perfect fit for the classical music calendar at the 400-seat jewelbox theater, about 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. Spivey is consistent in booking a range of esteemed classical artists at the peak of their careers — and also consistent in discovering the next generation of esteemed classical artists, still on the rise.
A photogenic 26-year-old Russian, brimming with life and virtuosity at the keyboard, Leschenko is in the latter group.
Trained in her native St. Petersburg and in Belgium, her first international exposure came as a protege of the willful, exacting, legendary Argentine pianist Martha Argerich … and any friend of Martha’s is probably worth knowing.
For her Atlanta debut, however, Leschenko’s program felt weirdly out of balance. She placed a growling monster of music at the end, Franz Liszt’s B minor Sonata. While the piece is only about 30 minutes long, its hulking presence loomed from the start.
After striding to the keyboard and tossing back her long brown locks, she was barely seated (on a plain upright chair) when she launched into the first of three transcriptions, Bach-Busoni’s Chaconne, a pure and cosmic violin tour of earth and heaven reworked for the more metaphysical piano.
At the start, she coaxed a rich, delicate, crisp sound from the Steinway, going easy on the pedal. And as the Chaconne shakes its earthly bonds and spirals up into the stratosphere, her played became elastic, almost improvisatory, pushing and lingering and rushing and pulling. It wasn’t so much an original interpretation as a personal one.
That none of this seemed forced or mannered suggested Leschenko is a true stage animal, a virtuosa with a knack for storytelling, for drawing in the audience. I was completely on board.
Yet she seemed to be having problems either with the piano itself or, more troubling, with her right hand. In a largo by Bach-Feinberg, the upper reaches of the instrument were underpowered, which interrupted the singing line and threw the harmonies a little out of whack.
It got more noticeable after that. In Liszt’s “Paganini” Etude No. 6, she blurred several hyper-difficult passages. Under her fingers, she made Chopin’s “Andante spianato et Grande Polonaise brilliante” sound like an especially tricky and regal puzzle, made to be solved rather than as a means to heart-felt expression. Still, it was impossible to resist her lyricism and the wispiness of filigree passages.
At intermission, she asked to change instruments — a rare request for a visiting pianist — swapping Walter for Emilie. (Spivey’s two grand pianos, each with unique traits, are named after Mr. and Mrs. Spivey, the hall’s benefactors.)
Liszt’s monumental and monumentally strange Sonata, from 1853, is more abstract and nonlinear and hallucinogenic than almost anything written before — in short, it’s a visionary masterpiece that still challenges even the most complete of pianists.
Leschenko had the measure of the music, at turns grandiloquent, demonic, full of bombast and tenderness. Wonderfully, she seemed to be making up the music as she went along, capturing the ferocity of the opening themes and peeking inside the slow andante section with equal intuition. (In concert, she’s much more spontaneous-sounding than on her new CD of the Sonata, on the AvantiClassics label.)
Yet her performance, for whatever reasons, never congealed into a convincing whole, a pity since this young pianist showed flashes of the sort of brilliance and musicality that should propel her from unknown to rising star.
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