{TABLE} Sonata in F K533/494 ...................... Mozart Sposalizio ............................... Liszt Il pensiero .............................. Liszt Mephisto Waltz ........................... Liszt Waltzes .................................. Schubert/Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet (exc) ................... Prokofiev Sonata No 4 .............................. Prokofiev {/TABLE} PAVEL Nersessian, who took the top prize at the 1991 Dublin International Piano Competition, has had nothing like the public exposure in Ireland of the competition's first winner, Philippe Cassard.
Having Nersessian's breath taking 1994 performance of Prokofiev's demanding Second Concerto as my freshest memory of his playing, his approach to Mozart at the RDS last night came as something of an unpleasant shock. In the last of the composer's sonatas in F he used his panoply of pianistic resource to tease the music rhythmically, dynamically, timbrally into any shape but one which sounded convincingly Mozartian. The impression here was of a musician not so much playing the piece as playing around with it.
The grand virtuoso manner was altogether more hospitable to the two pieces from Liszt's Annees de Pelerinage and the Mephisto Waltz barnstormed invigoratingly.
At the start of the second hall, the suite of waltzes Prokofiev arranged from Schubert yielded but little of the charm inherent in the originals. The second half of Prokofiev's 10 Pieces from Romeo and Juliet, however, was done with inventive colouring, as though or chest rally conceived, but that reference to the actual orchestral originals.
Not all of the ambiguity was caught in the subdued opening movement of Prokofiev's Fourth Sonata, a work that's gained in popularity with performers in recent years. But the brio of the finale was infectious, and the best was yet to come, in the second of the, two encores, Chopin's Study in F minor, Op. 25 No. 2, fluid and fleet and shaped with masterly ease. In spite of its, brevity, for me, as music making, it transcended everything that had gone before.
