C.U. Music hosts a variety of concerts through a semester. Garrick Ohlsson recently performed at Bailey Hall. The following is a review of his performance.
There are many good ways to appreciate a classical concert, but sitting back with your eyes closed when Garrick Ohlsson is the performer is not one of them. Traditionally, one goes to these concerts to listen, but watching Mr. Ohlsson’s nimble and precise fingers racing over the keyboard provided a spectacle on Tuesday last night that nearly matched that of his unbelievably virtuosic sound.
Mr. Ohlsson’s dexterity was immediately evident when, without a breath of delay, he walked onto the stage and thrust himself into Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 2, a piece of such variety and demanding such technical ability that it perfectly suited this pianist’s strengths. He seemed most at home in the exaggerated Scherzo movement where his fingers literally danced in a most mocking manner on the detached notes whose coldness was almost palpable.
In the second half, his exuberance and ebullience bubbled forth to even greater heights of musical pyrotechnics. These began with Rachmaninoff’s challenging “Variations on a Theme of Corelli,” where Mr. Ohlsson displayed his enormous versatility by playing variations of every twisted shape and metrical form in such quick succession that is surely made some unsuspecting audience members a little dizzy. But the concert only became more spectacular as the Scriabin began: five etudes and a poem for piano. These pieces were a good choice by Mr. Ohlsson, as they allowed him wonderfully to exhibit his technical strengths.
What energy and force drove him in his wild tapping and pounding of keys is not known to me, but what I do know is that by the end of one piece, the musical poem, the intensity finally caused him to leap up directly from touching the last key in a breathless state like a child first learning what a heated stove feels like.
His concert at Bailey Hall undisputedly showed Mr. Ohlsson’s incredibly virtuosic talent at rendering technically forbidding works with a graceful ease that leaves little to fault.