Do today's concertgoers cherish great debuts the way they used to?
If they did, Benjamin Grosvenor's belated Chicago debut Sunday afternoon should go to the top of the list.
The British pianist came to Orchestra Hall more than a dozen years after he was a star, and such was his combination of poetry and power that at 24 he already seems a seasoned musician.
His conservative program — seven works, all more than a century old — showed high confidence at being able to convey a range of styles that, if at all, is mainly presented by veterans.
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The first half had Austro-German chestnuts: Schumann's "Arabesque," Mozart's Sonata No. 13, K. 333 and Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. Here Grosvenor sounded clean, warm and involved, not just proficient. His Schumann was fundamentally gentle, achieving poignance in the ruminative coda. His Mozart, on the other hand, was more taut than fragile and without lingering. But the finale of the Beethoven, marked "very quick, with excitement," showed everything before to have been reined in, as Grosvenor fairly exploded, his tone becoming clangorous with the composer's many little eruptions.
The second half, of Russian and Spanish music, was something else entirely. Here Grosvenor not only observed niceties of the printed page but entered into the spirit of the pieces by achieving heightened and irresistible identification. Some of this displayed his extreme virtuosity. But a number of young speedsters today play accurately. So the difference was in an apparent ease that left room for rare and telling characterization.
Scriabin's Second Sonata and two excerpts from Granados' "Goyescas" are contemporary with the visual arts style known as Art Nouveau. They are filled with sinuous lines and almost smothering decoration. In the first movement of the Scriabin these unfold in sybaritic languor. In Granados' "Flatteries" and "The fandango by lantern light" there is a serpentine coquetterie. Grosvenor realized such elusive atmosphere while maintaining an almost analytical clarity. He erred only by pushing too hard in the second movement of the Scriabin that became loud and pressured where it is marked "in a quiet voice" and meant to go fast but, almost impossibly, sweetly and lightly.
Liszt's "Rhapsodie espagnole" went from strength to strength. It had dumbfounding keyboard pyrotechnics but also, at times, a teasing playfulness not heard in Liszt since the passing of Georges Cziffra and Vladimir Horowitz. Extraordinary challenges in the music keep most players from creating the illusion of having fun. Not Grosvenor. He even extended it into two encores, Moritz Moszkowski's Etude, Op. 72, No. 11 and Nikolai Kapustin's Etude, Op. 40, No. 3.
Alan Artner is a freelance critic.
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