Alessio Bax.
Currently on a tour of Australia and New Zealand, Italian concert pianist Alessio Bax performed an impressive solo recital on Monday evening at the City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney. There was an Italian thread throughout the program with a keyboard arrangement by Bach of an Oboe Concerto by Venetian composer Alessandro Marcello, Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Modernist composer Luigi Dallapiccola’s Quaderno musicale di Annalibera (Musical Notebook of Annalibera), composed in 1952, and two more familiar works by Franz Liszt: St François d’Assise: La predication aux oiseaux (St Francis of Assisi’s Sermon to the Birds) and his Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata, known in English as the Dante Sonata.
It quickly became clear that Alessio Bax has an unusually wide command of style, with rhetoric as clear in the Bach as it was in the Dallapiccola. His ornamentation and phrasing of the Bach was historically informed and there was strong attention paid to voicing of parts, touch and weight in his playing. Nothing here was flamboyant nor superficial. I noticed not a single technical fault throughout the recital.
The first movement Andante e spiccato of the Bach Concerto was nicely articulated, though to my taste over-pedalled. The serene Adagio was exquisitely voiced, avoiding any sense of sameness in its careful lyricism, with the final Presto vivacious. The Rachmaninoff Variations are in fact not on a theme of Corelli, but on the traditional melody La folia that Corelli used in his Sonata for violone and keyboard in D minor. Bax’s performance emphasised narrative, from the poised and elegant opening through to dreamy and Romantic, grotesque and lumpy, spritely, agitated, awkward, awesome and grand before retreating at the last to the composer’s familiar cloak of moodiness and melancholy. This carefully managed playing, however, occasionally broke into unrestrained exuberance, the soloist rising from the piano stool in elation.
Influential teacher and composer Luigi Dallapiccola’s comparatively dry and somewhat acerbic Musical Notebook of Annalibera received an exquisitely detailed performance. This succinct and evocative work in six movements was reminiscent of Webern in its crystalline precision and clarity. The performance provided a spaciousness, with everything given sufficient time and air to speak.
Franz Liszt’s St Francis of Assisi’s Sermon to the Birds sang from the outset with breezy delicacy and grace. With it and the Dante Sonata both demanding tour de force virtuosity, thunderous weight and grandeur along with gossamer fragility, this proved to be a memorable recital.
Rating: 4 ½ stars ★★★★☆Presented by Sydney Symphony Orchestra
25 March 2019
City Recital Hall, Angel Place
