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Pianist Arghamanyan focuses on her own links to composers in her appearance
Philadelphia Inquirer
Friday, October 26, 2012
By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Classical Music Critic
Ghosts of performers past stand guard over standard repertoire, and it
takes a ruthless individualist to wave then off. But Nareh Arghamanyan
never seemed to consciously repudiate her predecessors in an
extraordinarily charismatic Philadelphia Chamber Music Society
appearance Wednesday night at the American Philosophical Society.
Rather, it was as if the 23-year-old Armenian-born pianist had never
encountered them at all, and was interested only in her own personal
communions with Bach, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff.
What this meant in the oft-played Fantasiestücke was the declaration
of Schumann as a composer not completely of his contemporaries, but
apart. That she underlined the two contradictory sides to the man
referred to as the "prince of art" - the imaginary characters
Florestan and Eusebius - was just the start. She had a direct line to
the essence of each of the eight movements, consistently making the
unobvious choice.
Time signature and note values became casual advice in the first
movement, "In the Evening," whose gauzy left hand against a crystalline
right blended into a half-remembered summer twilight. Phrases ended in
question marks, or at least ellipses. Frantic, sputtering, silent,
thundering, the second movement managed to be volatile without growing
overwrought. The third, "Why?" was an exercise in time suspension.
The sense of grandeur in the last movement wasn't from the massing of
sound other pianists use, but from regal pacing and the space she put
around certain rhythms. By endowing the material with dignity,
Arghamanyan preserved Schumann's own ambiguity over whether these are
wedding bells or a death knell.
The entire second half of the program was turned over to Rachmaninoff,
whose Opus 33 Études-Tableaux (Nos. 1-6) was dominated by a stunning
performance of the No. 6 in E Flat Major that highlighted, with
scherzo-like touch, perhaps the composer's furthest outlier from
traditional tonality. But the Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Opus
42, told us more about Arghamanyan than any other piece on the program
(which also included a wonderfully detailed account of Bach's Partita
in C Minor, BWV 826). The theme is a short one (not actually written
by Corelli), and manages to invoke a half dozen or so other
Rachmaninoff works (a piano concerto, the Paganini variations), and so
the piece was a window into Arghamanyan's approach through a wide
swath of material. You could almost hear a cimbalom in the handling of
a variation with Hungarian harmonies.
Her extreme sensitivity to subtle voicings came through in
Rachmaninoff's "Elégie in E Flat" from Morceaux de fantaisie, where
the melody moved to the bass while the soprano turned pale. The extent
of the player as a determining factor was even more evident in the
"Prelude in C Sharp Minor" from the same piece. With the liberties
taken by Arghamanyan, you might never have known how four-square those
opening chords look on paper. And if the agitated storm in the middle
section startled some, it struck me more as revelation than disregard
for any
Philadelphia Inquirer
Friday, October 26, 2012
By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Classical Music Critic
Ghosts of performers past stand guard over standard repertoire, and it
takes a ruthless individualist to wave then off. But Nareh Arghamanyan
never seemed to consciously repudiate her predecessors in an
extraordinarily charismatic Philadelphia Chamber Music Society
appearance Wednesday night at the American Philosophical Society.
Rather, it was as if the 23-year-old Armenian-born pianist had never
encountered them at all, and was interested only in her own personal
communions with Bach, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff.
What this meant in the oft-played Fantasiestücke was the declaration
of Schumann as a composer not completely of his contemporaries, but
apart. That she underlined the two contradictory sides to the man
referred to as the "prince of art" - the imaginary characters
Florestan and Eusebius - was just the start. She had a direct line to
the essence of each of the eight movements, consistently making the
unobvious choice.
Time signature and note values became casual advice in the first
movement, "In the Evening," whose gauzy left hand against a crystalline
right blended into a half-remembered summer twilight. Phrases ended in
question marks, or at least ellipses. Frantic, sputtering, silent,
thundering, the second movement managed to be volatile without growing
overwrought. The third, "Why?" was an exercise in time suspension.
The sense of grandeur in the last movement wasn't from the massing of
sound other pianists use, but from regal pacing and the space she put
around certain rhythms. By endowing the material with dignity,
Arghamanyan preserved Schumann's own ambiguity over whether these are
wedding bells or a death knell.
The entire second half of the program was turned over to Rachmaninoff,
whose Opus 33 Études-Tableaux (Nos. 1-6) was dominated by a stunning
performance of the No. 6 in E Flat Major that highlighted, with
scherzo-like touch, perhaps the composer's furthest outlier from
traditional tonality. But the Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Opus
42, told us more about Arghamanyan than any other piece on the program
(which also included a wonderfully detailed account of Bach's Partita
in C Minor, BWV 826). The theme is a short one (not actually written
by Corelli), and manages to invoke a half dozen or so other
Rachmaninoff works (a piano concerto, the Paganini variations), and so
the piece was a window into Arghamanyan's approach through a wide
swath of material. You could almost hear a cimbalom in the handling of
a variation with Hungarian harmonies.
Her extreme sensitivity to subtle voicings came through in
Rachmaninoff's "Elégie in E Flat" from Morceaux de fantaisie, where
the melody moved to the bass while the soprano turned pale. The extent
of the player as a determining factor was even more evident in the
"Prelude in C Sharp Minor" from the same piece. With the liberties
taken by Arghamanyan, you might never have known how four-square those
opening chords look on paper. And if the agitated storm in the middle
section startled some, it struck me more as revelation than disregard
for any