Adelaide Review, November 2008
Cyprien Katsaris' virtuoso piano recital was notable on a number of counts: it was his first ever (hard to believe) Adelaide appearance; it focussed , with a couple of exceptions, on works transcribed by a variety of composers, himself included, for the piano; and it featured possibly the fastest piano playing I have ever heard in my life --- comparable only to the feats of Horowitz and, above all, Shura Cherkassky, in their prime.
While the majority of works in the programme showcased Liszt's approach to transcription and re-working of material from other sources, there were also pieces from Wagner and Bach --- and, as encores, Chopin and the first of the American virtuoso/composers, Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Katsaris' sombre, numinous reading of Liszt's Funeral Prelude and March established the tone of the first half of the programme, with its combination of folk music elements (as in the too rarely heard Fifth Hungarian Rhapsody) with the daemonic (as in the Csardas Obstiné -- a work which gains from being heard in its original version, rather than, as here, in Katsaris' own arrangement, which added some unnecessary elaborations to Liszt's sparse and insistent outlines.
On the other hand, his account of At The Grave of Richard Wagner, which merged into the transcendent harmonies and emotional outpouring of Isoldes Liebestod was restrained and haunting, providing as it did a moving comment on Liszt's own feelings for his son-in-law, as well as a triumphant demonstration of how the piano can indeed do justice to the world of ecstacy and passion that characterises Wagner's own opera.
After the interval, there was more Wagner, in the shape first of a rather pawky (unexpected, from this source) re-working of motifs from Tannhaeuser, and then in the misconceived meanderings of a work which , amidst some serious competition , clearly deserves the palm as the single most banal, trite and tacky piece of music written in the nineteenth century -- Wagner's transcription of Halévy's Overture from The Queen of Cyprus. Seldom in the history of human combat with musical material has so much dross been subjected to so much parading, with so little benefit for a suffering audience. Impossible to make out which was worse: the original music, or Wagner's treatment of it, which called to mind an image of him swaggering round his curtain- lined study, swathed in purple silk, while every now and then flinging back the swathes of material to disclose Lederhosen underneath. All that was missing was a platform performance from Andre Rieu....
After this, bliss it was to breathe the less overheated air of a trio of Schubert's transcriptions, including an elegant and beautifully shaped reading of the famous Serenade, with the various registers of the vocal line singing with what seemed like three voices, and a further trio of Bach works to round out the programme: among these a towering account of the pianist's own transcription of the famous Toccata and Fugue which did a remarkable job of capturing the blur of sounds and harmonies one associates with actual organ performances of the work. Some might object to the running together of figures and motifs, but Katsaris' account was magisterial and imposing.
But just about everything previously heard was surpassed by his astoundingly flamboyant and swirling performance of Gottschalk's The Banjo. Again, some might object to the speed and blur of the not fistfuls, but bucketfuls of notes: repeated octaves and fusillades of single notes shot out into the auditorium and past the listener's ears almost before s/he had the time to register them. The only thing moving faster than the notes themselves seemed to be Katsaris' fingers: most disconcerting of all was the realisation (for this listener who, many years ago, had played this piece in a two piano version) that Katsaris was playing more notes (and quicker) than any even relatively quickly moving set of four hands and twenty fingers.. While Stephen Foster's singer may have declared that he was "Gwine to run all night" - (in a melodic line that appears in the Gottschalk) Katsaris' rendition suggested that his sprint covered in barely three minutes the same stretch that most banjo pluckers -- even the incomparable Bella Fleck ----might cover over an evening.
Michael Morley, Adelaide review, November 2008
Cyprien Katsaris
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