While the Cleveland Orchestra was in Miami Friday, pianist Lucas Debargue entertained an audience at Severance Hall with an eccentric recital of works by Scarlatti, Chopin, Ravel, and Medtner.Felix Broede/Sony Classical
By MARK SATOLA
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The young French pianist Lucas Debargue made his Cleveland recital debut Friday night in Severance Hall's Reinberger Chamber Hall.
It was an auspicious event made more special by the narrative that preceded him, one in which a largely self-taught teenage jazz prodigy gives up the piano, goes to work in a grocery store and then resumes his keyboard work, this time with a renowned classical mentor, and rockets right into the fifteenth International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
There, his fourth-place win creates a controversy within the jury, and some members (among them renowned pianist Boris Berezovsky) protest that the young artist should certainly have ranked higher in the final tally.
Friday night in Cleveland, Debargue presented idiosyncratic readings of music by Scarlatti, Chopin, Ravel, and Medtner, all enlivened by his equally idiosyncratic but brilliant technique.
In Moscow, Debargue was criticized for his peculiar fingerings, his showy comportment at the piano and even his wardrobe: an open-collared shirt with no tie under a rumpled suit. In Cleveland, much of this was in place, but with an audience primed to adore him instead of a dour jury sitting in judgment.
It hardly mattered. Indeed, the acclaim he received from the very start of the recital was vociferous and wild, a situation that only increased in intensity by the end of the evening's second encore.
Debargue's Scarlatti, the Sonata in C Major K132, set the tone for the evening, with the artist's unusual but effective keyboard technique creating a wider range of dynamic shadings than might be expected, from tentative whispers to sudden fortissimo outbursts of sound. Interpretively, Debargue played in such a ruminative way that bar lines seemed to dissolve, resulting in a reading that was a hybrid of pre-Baroque toccata style and 21st century eccentricity.
Willful, yes. Anachronistic? Most certainly, but the effectiveness of Debargue's approach could not be denied.
Debargue then launched into Chopin's Ballade No. 4 in F minor before the audience had a chance to clap, and here the pianist's strengths and weaknesses (if they can be called that) became more evident. The same interpretive thoughtfulness gave us a fresh look at Chopin's well-known score, but in the stormy passages, Debargue's youthful passion (he's 26) and his evident delight in his own technique resulted in torrents of sound that certainly delighted listeners who were there for the show, but which also obliterated some of Chopin's carefully balanced inner details.
Ravel's suite "Gaspard de la nuit" is generally considered, rightly, one of the most difficult piano works to play, especially its third movement, "Scarbo" (depicting a malevolent supernatural dwarf). Debargue was really in his element here, and his reading of "Ondine" was beautifully balanced and sonically ravishing. In "Le Gibet" (an evocation of a hanged man against a bloody sunset), Debargue was equally impressive as he delineated the somber thoughts that circled around the insistent tolling bell of the B-flat octave.
In "Scarbo," we were again presented with Debargue's pluses and minuses: a brilliant and astonishing individual technique, somewhat undercut by an unwillingness to rein in his headstrong zeal, resulting in a cataract of sound that, while hard to sort out in the ear, was nevertheless exciting and exhilarating.
One might be forgiven for thinking that Medtner had written his fin-de-siecle F-Minor piano sonata with Debargue in mind. Medtner, a contemporary and friend of Rachmaninoff, created a darkly dramatic score, full of thematic toughness and structural clarity. He also filled it with a torrent of notes, making great demands on the pianist, who must render the daunting counterpoint and harmonic complexities with confidence and clarity.
Confidence is something Debargue has in spades, and his technique was more than up to the demands of the work. Medtner is a composer who has never found a strong foothold in the standard repertory. His music, while perfectly tonal and musically satisfying, has a difficult and unyielding nature that prevents the average listener from wholly embracing it. But if Medtner's music needs only the right champion, then Debargue is the man.
The first of the two encores was Satie's Gnossienne No. 1, which Debargue played so beautifully that he and his audience both seemed in a trance; while the second, Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight," showed off Debargue's impressive skills as a jazz improviser as he traversed a reading that ranged from Bill Evans-like impressionism to an evocation of stride piano that Art Tatum would have enjoyed.
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