Home Music Lane

It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes.

Catching up with the recent concerts I've attended - what's been happening with Lucas [Debargue]. . .

. . . since the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition?

You'll remember the order of the six finalists:
I prize and a gold medal: Dmitry Masleev

II prize and a silver medal: Lucas Geniusas; George Li (tie)

III prize and a bronze medal: Sergei Redkin, Daniel Kharitonov (tie)

IV prize: Lucas Debargue

V prize: -

VI prize: -
So Lucas D. actually placed last among the six finalists. Funny thing though: Lucas D. also picked up the most lucrative recording contract within the final group, because word got out that he was somewhat of a "maverick", with his jazz club background and his late start as a pianist. (He also played bass guitar in a rock band while in high school.) One of the jurors (Boris Berezovsky - the pianist, not the oligarch!) was particularly charmed, crediting Debargue with "genius-like playing". My own feeling was that he was pretty erratic: when he was good, he was very, very good. But his good side didn't prevail often enough IMHO. OTOH, Madeline (my wife) liked his playing more than I did.

Anyway, he's had two Sony releases since the end of the competition, the first of in-concert performances, and the second of studio performances:



Last Sunday (February 12), Madeline and I saw him in recital at Herz Hall at UC Berkeley (during a break in the riots!), in the following program:
D. Scarlatti: Sonata in A Major, K. 208 (Adagio), Sonata in A Major, K. 24 (Presto), Sonata in C Major, K. 132 (Andante), Sonata in D minor, K. 141 (Allegro - toccata)

Beethoven: Sonata in D Major, Op. 10, No. 3

Chopin: Ballade No. 4

Ravel: Gaspard de la Nuit

Medtner: Sonata in F minor, Op. 5
All in all, the recital was pretty good, but there were certain aspects to his playing that I didn't like. For one thing, there was a certain rhythmic waywardness to his playing, as in the Scarlatti C-major Sonata, where hardly four measures would go by without a change in the tempo. If you like this sort of thing, you call it "flexibility", but, as I mentioned, it struck me as erratic. In the big Chopin and Ravel works, I think he misjudged the balance in the big arpeggiated fourishes so that we didn't get enough detail - certainly the coda of the Chopin lacked the clarity it should have. We had these big undifferentiated washes of sound instead. And in the Ravel, both Martha and Pogo (and maybe Anna Vinnitskaya) still rule - I can tell that, in some ways, Debargue might qualify as a "thinking man's pianist": his pedal-wash through the little recitative on the last page just before the end of "Ondine" might be perceived as an "insight" and is something that I was tempted to do when I studied this piece as an undergraduate in college. But I finally decided against it as being too obvious and too cheap in its effect. Nor did Debargue play the repeated notes in "Scarbo" as cleanly as I've heard in some other performances.

The piece (and performance) for which I had more enthusiasm on the recital (and also when Debargue played it at the Tchaikovsky competition) was the Medtner Sonata - a much finer work than the only other piano sonata I can think of in F minor, Op. 5. ;-) It too was played with some of the same big sounding effects in preference to chiaroscuro and detail, but this approach seemed to work better here than in the Chopin and Ravel works. Once again, Madeline liked the recital better than I did, but I was still interested enough to obtain a 24/192 download from Acoustic Sounds of Debargue's second album pictured above. This studio recording showed Debargue exerting better control of the detail than in his competition and recital performances I'd heard. One thing still bothered me however: in the second movement, which Debargue rendered as an implacable procession of strange abnormalities, Medtner had marked the tempo as "Allegro". The most charitable description of Debargue's tempo for this movement would be "Moderato" (at best!). It was time to invoke odious comparisons, so I switched over to my copy of Marc-Andre Hamelin's Hyperion recording (from his miraculous album of the complete Medtner Sonatas). Hamelin was faster in each of the four movements, but the difference in the second movement was shocking - 3:23 for Hamelin vs. 5:51 for Debargue. OK, Debargue's comparatively slow-mo performance was NOT uninteresting (even more so at the recital, where he enlivened the texture with more interesting nuances in the bass, than on the recording). But I'm not convinced that this kind of "thinking man's" approach to interpretation is going to wear well over time. We'll see.

Overall though, I'm still glad I attended the event and downloaded the commercial album.

Preview of future post: yes, I DID see Yuja's amazing appearance with the Santa Cruz Symphony in Watsonville yesterday, and, as promised, I'll post about ALL ASPECTS of it either later today or in the next day or two.


This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Parts Connexion  


Topic - Catching up with the recent concerts I've attended - what's been happening with Lucas [Debargue]. . . - Chris from Lafayette 14:03:49 02/20/17 (4)

FAQ

Post a Message!

Forgot Password?
Moniker (Username):
Password (Optional):
  Remember my Moniker & Password  (What's this?)    Eat Me
E-Mail (Optional):
Subject:
Message:   (Posts are subject to Content Rules)
Optional Link URL:
Optional Link Title:
Optional Image URL:
Upload Image:
E-mail Replies:  Automagically notify you when someone responds.