khatia buniatishvili

I heard Khatia Buniatishvili in concert tonight playing Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, one of my favorite compositions. I have never been a great fan of her playing, ever since I watched her performance of Chopin's Fourth Ballade on YouTube years ago. I think her tendency to substitute extreme tempi for passion frequently ruins pieces that she otherwise might have started out nicely. Tonight, however, she was great. The taut tempi in the introduction, in the passage right after the first chords, so similar to Rachmaninoff's own recording, evoked just the right image of a ship rocking in tempestuous waters that I associate with it. Many pianists treat it like a study in the slower tempi, as if they were in a race for last place. Both Buniatishvili and the Seattle Symphony rushed the ending of the first movement, but it was nevertheless leagues better than the Rach 2 that Nicky and I had the misfortune of hearing back at GT, where, having fallen asleep during the Dvorak Symphony, we were rudely awoken by the Georgia Tech Symphony Orchestra missing every note they set their heart on.

I learnt tonight that the seats in the balcony overlooking the stage behind the pianist, while they may afford an excellent view of the keyboard, are the worst seats in the house in terms of acoustics. The stereoscopic quality of real-life sound was entirely lost where I sat, and the sounds of the less important instruments in the orchestra were amplified at the expense of the principal ones, including the piano. There was also a painful absence of echo where I sat, which gave many of the instruments a muted and one-dimensional quality that I found rather jarring as someone who expected to be treated to a greater rather than a lesser experience of the music than listening to a recording at home on YouTube. Never making that mistake again.

Khatia Buniatishvili returned for her encore to remind us that she hadn't entirely lost her gift for abusing tempi by launching into the friska of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody 2 with a crazed vigor that had the effect of mashing the entire piece into an unintelligible blur of notes. I was nevertheless able to make out, with the smug satisfaction of one who has a connoisseur's rather than a dilettante's appreciation of such things, that the version she was playing was Horowitz's 1953 arrangement of the piece.

I suppose at the end of the day I have a better opinion of Buniatishvili as an artist than I had before, though I will think twice before I ever listen to her Chopin again.