There are so many great pianists everywhere in the world that we can only listen to small handful in a lifetime. Others will flit by with only the lightest trace. German Silke Avenhaus has the potential to leave a deeper impression, judging from a new album of pieces by Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt and Gioacchino Rossini.
Issued on Bavarian Radio’s BR Klassik label, Salon Chromatique et Harmonique is a beautifully curated programme presented by an elegant interpreter. Munich-based Avenhaus seduces with her fingers.
Wagner, who wrote next to no music for solo piano, is clearly exploring the sounds of the orchestra and his layering of musical motifs as he writes for the keyboard. A sonata for Mathilde Wesendonck, one of his many married lovers, starts the album in a solidly structured, intensely expressive way, but the real juice is in hearing “Isolde’s Liebestod,” rendered so ably by Avenhaus.
Liszt is at once trying to capture singers, chorus and orchestra with his 10 fingers and trying to depict emotions and other abstract concepts in his music. The two most powerful of these adventures of the soul close the disc, “La lugubre Gondola,” followed by the “After Reading Dante” fantasy from the Italian Years of Pilgrimage collection.
It may seem strange to have Rossini mixed in here, but he wrote a lot of solo piano music in his dotage. He called these works the “sins of my old age.” And anything entitled “Une caresse à ma femme,” (A Caress for my Wife) sounds pretty enticing.
I have to admit it turns into a pretty acrobatic caress, at one point. And it definitely sounds like Rossini. Think of it as an amuse-gueule.
The glue linking Rossini and Wagner is Liszt, who was 11 when he first met the famed opera composer. Liszt went on to transcribe and fantasize at length at the keyboard on a lot of Rossini’s operatic material. And there’s some of that on the album, as well.
For more information on the album, click here.
And here is Avenhaus playing Isolde’s Liebestod two years ago (the audio on the disc is infinitely better):
John Terauds