It's obvious to the pianist Kris Bezuidenhuit, who gave a fortepiano recital at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival on Monday, that there's a certain strand of 18th-century keyboard music which is cast in an improvisatory mode. And it's obvious from his performances that his preferred way of treating it is to exaggerate the impression of improvisation to the point where the durations of notes or rests become major variables, and the number of beats in a bar can be stretched more or less as you please.
Bezuidenhout applied his approach to sonatas by C.P.E. Bach and the little-known Johann Gottfried Muthel, as well as Mozart's Fantasy in C minor, K475, and The Sufferings of the Queen of France by J.L. Dussek. The Dussek had something of the air of a vamped accompaniment to a silent movie tear-jerker. The other music bore about as much relation to musical sense as the decadent feast of all-black food in J.K. Huysmans's novel Against Nature does to a typical meal.
Issues of style and interpretation came to the fore during the rest of the day, too. The Florestan Trio treated Beethoven's Piano Trio in E flat, Op. 1 No. 1, with rhythmically pointed and tautly sprung classicism. When they let their hair down for an impassioned account of Schumann's Trio in D minor, Op. 63, the music simply smothered from the overloading.
The Keller Quartet took a rather severe view of late Beethoven in the A minor Quartet, Op 132. Some listeners may well have been disconcerted by an apparent lack of engagement. But the intellectual challenges of the piece were exposed with an unfailing clarity that left one in no doubt as to why the late Beethoven quartets took so long to gain acceptance from the public.
And then there was pianist Joanna MacGregor's cunning coupling of Bartok's Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm with the first book of Gyorgy Ligeti's ╔tudes. MacGregor treated each of these 12 pieces as a world unto itself. In the process, she made the m all her own, without compromising their individual identities. And all the time, she kept her listeners on the edge of their seats.
