Khatia Buniatishvili review rash, immature playing | Classical music
Classical music This article is more than 8 years oldReviewKhatia Buniatishvili review – rash, immature playing
This article is more than 8 years oldWigmore Hall, LondonThe jury is out on whether Buniatishvili can ever be a serious artist after a shapeless Pictures at an Exhibition and Liszt as a low-grade circus act
There’s no doubting Khatia Buniatishvili’s talent. The Georgian pianist has an imposing technique at her disposal and, when she puts her mind to it, the ability to produce moments of insight and refined sensibility. She is in her late 20s now, at a time in her life when most pianists are turning early promise into real achievement, but to judge by the rash, immature playing in her latest London appearance, Buniatishvili is still some way from doing that.
Her programme – Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and a sequence of Liszt – was clearly designed for effect, and to have her fans on their feet and cheering at the end; predictably, they obliged. Pictures, though, had no shape at all, with the slower movements ponderously slow – Il Vecchio Castello was interminable – and faster ones lightning fast, so that they became trivialised, and Buniatishvili kicked up such a storm in The Hut on Fowl’s Legs that the dramatic effect of the segue into the final Great Gate of Kiev, one of the clinching moments in the whole work, was fatally undermined.
That tendency to extremes – the thinking that ever faster, ever louder, is automatically the best way to go – ran through the Liszt pieces too. Three studies from different sets, La Leggierezza, Feux Follets and La Campanella, at least allowed everyone to admire the pearly evenness of Buniatishvili’s fingering, but apart from a rather unconvincing Liebesträume to begin, around them were pieces that encouraged her to be as noisy as possible: the first Mephisto Waltz (not insidious, just rowdy), the Grand Galop Chromatique (turned into a low-grade circus act) and the second Hungarian Rhapsody – played, of course, in Vladimir Horowitz’s version, which adds tweaks and further elaborations to Liszt’s original. The good news is that the piano survived it all intact; the bad is that on the question of whether Buniatishvili can ever be a serious artist, the jury is very much still out.
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