|
As war came to Novi Sad in Northeastern Yugoslavia on Wednesday
night, Kemal Gekic, who heads the university piano department
there, was making his South Florida debut at the Lincoln Theatre
in Miami Beach, courtesy of the Miami Festival of Discovery.
Before launching his recital, Gekic told the
audience how difficult it was for him to perform, as he hadn't
heard from his family and his city had just bombed. But as
the dark horse in the festival's pianistic derby, he had drawn
many discerning music lovers and professionals to hear him,
so steeled himself and played a recital that will long be
remembered.
Word had gotten out of his fiery virtuosity
on a recording of Liszt's 12 Trascendental Etudes - which
Gekic is scheduled to perform at the University of Miami's
Gusman Hall April 29 - and piano buffs were curios to learn
whether he's really as formidable as his CD suggests.
The answer: yes, even more so.
In the first half of his recital, he played
the complete second book of Annes de pelerinage, seven works
inspired by Liszt's travels in Italy, and the results were
often breathtaking, not only because Gekic is a tonal colorist
of the first order.
He displayed a velvet tone with a cutting edge,
reminiscent of Horowitz and Rubinstein. Gekic began with Spozalizio,
inspired by a Raphael painting. He conjured its contemplative
beauty, playing with supremely patrician introspection. Il
Penseroso, evoking the Michelangelo Lorenzo di Medici statute,
was all stately eloquence. And in Canzonetta de Salvator Rosa
and the three Petrarch sonnets, he put ardent virtuosity purely
at the service of poetry.
Then came the Dante Sonata, flamboyant, duskily
romantic and highly bravura, and Gekic made it all of that,
whipping the music into a dark foam that filled the hall with
the essence of an era. He returned to hold the Scriabin Sonata-Fantasie
superbly together - an extraordinarily well-knit conception
of a work that can aprawl in lesser hands - and delicately
etched two Scriabin Poems.
What a contrast to his Rachmaninoff group,
in which four Etudes-Tableaux poured out of him in molten
glory - tumultuous, passionate, furiously victorious. When
that was over and the audience got its breath back for shouting,
Gekic lit into a comparative Liszt rarity: the Grand Galop
Chromatique. When the composer himself played this at the
Hungarian National Theatre back in 1840, Liszt biographer
Alan Walker reports he had the strength to follow it with
a phenomenal arrangement of the Rackoczy March that stirred
up a clamor "almost enough to have awakened the dead." Gekic
instead chose to wrap up his recital with a wry etude by a
friend, Croatian composer Boris Papandopulo, and an unaffected
and flowing Schubert - Liszt Serenade.
This is a truly major artist; how nice it would
be to have him teaching and performing in South Florida.
end
|
