A pianist lights up the sky
By Andrew M. Pincus, Special to The Eagle
Berkshire Eagle
Sunday, February 26
Wow. The competition that isn't a competition came up with a winner who is a winner. She's Ingrid Fliter, a 32-year-old Argentine pianist named winner of the 2006 Gilmore Artist Award.
Unlike most competitions, which parade their young contestants before judges (and sometimes audiences) like ponies in a show, the Gilmore is a stealth operation. A team of scouts goes around the world listening to concerts and recitals anonymously to find The One, who receives $300,000 in career support over the next four years.
Although Fliter (pronounced FLEET-er) has performed extensively in Europe, she is virtually unknown in the United States. From recordings, it appears that like two previous Gilmore Artists, Piotr Anderszewski and David Owen Norris, she's an original.
A pair of VAI compact discs, recorded in concert in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and made available by the Kalamazoo, Mich.-based Gilmore organization, has her playing Beethoven and Chopin on one release and all-Chopin on the other.
The blonde Fliter is a powerhouse at the keyboard, first of all. Her Chopin has to be some of the fastest and most dizzying since Martha Argerich first set the keyboard ablaze.
Perhaps the resemblance isn't entirely coincidental. Like Argerich, Fliter was born in Buenos Aires and went to Europe to make a career. Like Argerich, Fliter puts drama up front. It's not that there's any lack of introspection or tender feeling, but electric contrasts between fast and slow, loud and soft, slashing and moody, distinguish the performances.
In Chopin's Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise, the andante comes close to a meditative adagio before the polonaise erupts in brilliance. In Beethoven's Sonata, Opus 10, No. 3 (paired with Opus 31, No. 3), the slow movement becomes not only "largo e mesto" ("slow and sad"), but an outright funeral march.
This way madness lies. Or it does if you're looking for the customary muscular Beethoven or rhapsodic Chopin.
Fliter's Beethoven turns more inward — at times quite inward indeed — than her Chopin. In both composers, her hot-headed, pile-driving tendencies probably need to be tamed. But this pianist has that sine qua non of a real musician: a personal vision, coupled with command of nuance, voicing and the rest to make that vision — and the composer's — jump out.
Fliter is the fifth Gilmore Artist, succeeding the English Norris (1991), the Finnish Ralf Gothoni (1994), the Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes (1998) and the Polish Anderszewski (2002). Only Andsnes has gone on to a mainstream career, but when competitions like the Cliburn turn out technically fluent champions who sound pretty much alike, an idiosyncratic, even eccentric laureate, chosen in secrecy, comes across as a waker-upper.
VAI recordings are available at www.vaimusic.com. The sample Beethoven-Chopin disc was defective. A replacement was clean.
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Fliter's recordings take a place among several by pianists familiar in the Berkshires. In another release, Evgeny Kissin and James Levine play Schubert's music for piano four hands on a two-disc RCA Red Seal set.
Recorded live last year at a Carnegie Hall recital, the program was a repeat of a Symphony Hall recital in Boston four days earlier. The playing was evidently better balanced in New York than Boston, where Kissin, playing primo, dominated. (Or did the Carnegie microphones compensate?)
The younger pianist still comes across as more forceful, but the two parts dovetail comfortably. Especially in the tremendous "Grand Duo" Sonata in C, the performances on two modern grand pianos before an audience in the thousands can seem too grand and proclamatory for works intended for parlor duets on a single instrument. Yet the music, some of Schubert's most wonderful, is bathed in the warm glow that only he can evoke. The Boston Symphony's director proves himself as formidable a pianist as conductor.
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To go back to Chopin, a more traditional approach comes from Emanuel Ax in a two-disc RCA Red Seal album devoted to the four ballades and other works.
A comparison between Fliter and Ax in the fourth ballade is instructive. Where Fliter is impetuous, Ax is poised and ruminative. In general, this is Ax at his urbane best. The music rolls out in waves of beautiful sound that reveal the expressive depths below.
