Pavle Krstić Keyboard Trust and Robert Turnbull Piano Foundation Italian Tour

Original:

‘Refined artistry and mastery‘

"Some refined piano playing from Pavle Krstić who had just driven down from Salzburg ,where he lives and teaches, to play a programme that turned out to be a celebration of Artur Rubinstein.

Pavle was unaware that he had chosen all the works of Chopin that were particularly associated with the greatest pianist I have ever heard. He also added an encore of the Ritual Fire Dance that one of the audience remembers hearing Rubinstein play in his last appearance at La Scala.

The temple of music that is just a stones throw from the Flagship Steinway that with Maura Romano at the helm is fast becoming one of the most important cultural centres in Milan .
The choice of programme may have been a coincidence but his playing of refined aristocratic elegance was of the same musicianship of simplicity , intelligence and artistry.

From the very first notes of the C minor nocturne there was the same unmistakable golden sound, that with his superb sense of balance resounded around this hall full of pianos and a much larger audience than usual. A glowing beauty of refined music making of the true bel canto with the same inflections as the human voice.

There was a political rally just outside in the square that after Pavle’s masterly performance of the Polonaise Héroique decided that they had had enough and we could see the military police stacking away all the barriers and driving off with the magnificence of Pavle’s playing ringing in their ears . ‘Make music not war’ as Barenboim and Said were desperately insisting on demonstrating with otherwise inconsolable disputes.
Rubinstein whose ashes were scattered in his homeland of Israel and whose memory lingers on in so many poignant ways. Finishing his first Chopin group with the Scherzo in B flat minor played with ravishing beauty and a musicianship that recreated afresh this much abused masterpiece.The sumptuous beauty of the sound and a central episode played with whispered confessions that gradually were built up with supreme mastery and control into a climax of exhilaration and excitement.It brought spontaneous cries of approval from an audience that was not expecting such a feast of music today .
This was in fact the last work that Rubinstein ever played in public. It was a concert that he had been asked to play in 1976 to save the Wigmore Hall from developers ! He was partially blind and stopped half way through the Scherzo after having played Schumann Carnaval, Beethoven op 31 n3 and much else besides, it was just his vision in this piece that betrayed him. He played instead some Chopin studies that we had never heard him play in public before. A triumph and he made a speech saying he had started his career in 1904 in this hall and was happy to finish it in 1976 but please don’t let them demolish it . The hall since has been reborn and is now the major chamber music hall of worldwide renown and much loved by the greatest musicians of our time.
Rubinstein was 90 and Pavle just 27 and like Rubinstein at that age could hold his public with playing of mastery and simplicity. Pavle, like Rubinstein, looks at what the composer has written on the page and does not rely on the so called Chopin tradition of distortion and vulgar crowd pleasing rubato. There is the same strength to Pavle’s playing that is of startling originality as he allows the composer to show him the way.

Of course Pavle also has the charisma of a performer who can hold his public, never leading them astray but taking them directly to the heart of a composer that was always in his his homeland that he was destined never to see again.
Stravinsky had written Piano Rag Music for his friend Rubinstein which just added to their difference of opinion about the piano being a percussion or singing instrument . Rubinstein never played it in public and to make amends his dear friend Stravinsky wrote a piano transcription of three of the movements from his ballet suite Petrushka dedicating it with impish glee to his friend. Rubinstein loved it and played it in many of his concerts worldwide with a freedom sanctioned by the composer that was never recorded for the stale studio. This for Rubinstein was pure theatre and he was not going to spend hours in note picking accuracy to play crisp and cleanly one of the most transcendentally difficult pieces ever written for piano ( there does exist a pirate performance that Rubinstein gave during his ten historic recitals in Carnegie Hall ,the proceeds of which went to charities, and was Rubinstein’s way of thanking America for giving him a home when Europe was under siege in the Second World War)
Pavle today not only played all the notes but he brought a sense of dance and character to each of the three episodes that belied their technical difficulty .
The ‘Dance Russe’ that just jumped for joy as the printed page became dancers before our very eyes . ‘The house of Petrushka’ played with poignant significance and the hussle and bussle of the Semaine Grasse just burst into a joie de vivre of scintillating exhilaration and excitement .

A superb Steinway D piano for the concert

Masterly playing and an audience that would not let him go .
He sat at the piano one last time and struck up the frantic boiling trill of the ‘Ritual Fire Dance’.
Naked passion and dynamic drive but no copy cat Rubinstein arm movements, but in the central episode boiling sounds of ferment out of which arose the passionate cry of the flamenco dancer. Two Moments Musicaux by Rachmaninov were the bridge between the two Chopin selections.

The nostalgic elegie of Rachmaninov’s homeland that he fled as the Russian hierarchy were so cruelly eliminated .Played by Pavle with a legato that was so perfect that it seemed like a human voice in anguished yearning. The second was n .4 usually played as a ‘tour de force’ of pianistic gymnastics but that Pavle, with his acute sense of balance, played with quite extraordinary mastery that could let us appreciate Rachmaninov’s total mastery of the keyboard and his passionate feeling for colour.

Pavle Krstić drove to Florence for the repeat performance in the ‘Room with a View’ on this all too short Keyboard Trust tour. A recital in the Harold Acton Library of the British Institute where Simon and Jennifer Gammell had arranged a Gala Concert for their special guests of friends and sponsors of the Institute. Pavle completing the magic with playing of Mozart . The sublime second movement of the concerto K 488 ‘ dictated by God’ and played without any added ornamentation but allowing Mozart’s notes to speak with purity and beauty from the hands of a poetic master."

— Christopher Axworthy, Christopher Axworthy Music Commentary (May 17, 2025)

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