|
Reviews
There exists no pianist of deeper sensitivity.
Peter Katin's ravishing cantabile and stylistic assurance makes this repertoire work convincingly
on an 180-year-old piano. An ear-tickling recital of rare and familiar works ends with
the heavenly Berceuse.
...In striking a balance between all these paradoxes, Peter Katin shows how it can be
done under the "less is more" banner. He makes no special pleas or dramatic revelations,
and his dynamic range is fairly narrow, yet there none of the sleepwalking I hear from
[other artists]. Katin is an artist of exquisite taste, but every musical detail tells.
His "melos" is seamless, subject to lovely but selfless dynamic variation. His tone
doesn't harden or tighten up in trills, indeed the ornaments become points of relaxation.
Similarly, Chopin's bass register whirlwinds never overpower the texture.
Conjuring up and sustaining a tonally seductive cantabile line on the piano is actually
a gift given to very few, and it's something that many of the headliners of today
simply don't possess. Countless are the number of times I've heard Mendelssohn's
two mature concertos rattled through as though their principal purpose was to
provide an elevated form of five-finger exercise. Turn to Peter Katin's mid-1950s
accounts for Decca and you no longer care whether he gets around all the notes
(he does, as it happens) for the listener is cocooned in a web of golden legato
sound which transforms the "hammer-and-nail" of some recorded versions into gentle
ripples of exquisite sound. I haven't been so affected by a piano recording
in a very long time.
Peter Katin remains one of my favourite pianists, and his recording of the Rachmaninov
Preludes shows him at his absolute best. Katin's sound-world is utterly his own,
and his variety of sonority is put to tremendous poetic effect in these readings,
where the glittering edge of his cantabile is matched by playing of ardent
commitment in the more vigorous Preludes.
The large and appreciative audience that attended Peter Katin's recital at Wigmore Hall
on 14 February was rewarded with the distinguished musicianship that has marked
this artist as one of the finest British pianists of the last 60 years.
His recital identified the interpretive strengths which have endured in Katin's playing.
The key quality is not that it is old-fashioned but that it transcends fashion. There
is always room for a pianist who, like him, understands the concepts of style, of taste,
of discretion and musical character. In playing like this, the sensitivity and ability to
distil the creative essence of a piece could have found no more persuasive expression.
"Katin is not the sort of pianist who attracts, or who has ever indeed courted, the lavish publicity that
can surround artists today. For those of us of a certain generation, he has always been there; we may even
have been guilty of taking him for granted, as the firmament of pianistic stars became all the more crowded.
But he introduced many of us to the core works of the solo and concerto repertory, and, as this recital
showed, he can still create a frisson through his sensitive musicianship and his impeccable sense of style.
The programme book quoted a Daily Telegraph review of his London recital last January, commenting that his
playing has the ability to transcend fashion. His recital could not have reinforced the point more eloquently,
for Katin's faith in music and its composers is ageless. It seems to be his whole reason for playing."
|
