Miami Piano Festival > Press Releases 2005

This year's Miami International Piano Festival opened on Sunday with a double-barreled display of stamina and virtuosity that even days later seems hard to believe.

In the afternoon, Kemal Gekic performed the 27 Etudes of Chopin (Op. 10 and 25), plus the composer's Four Ballades. Tackling those intensely demanding works would have been task enough, but the Croatian pianist followed a few hours later with all 12 Transcendental Etudes by Liszt, capping the day with his epic Sonata in B minor. If the Emperor Joseph II thought Mozart's music had too many notes, imagine what he would have thought had he been at the Broward Center's Amaturo Theatre on Sunday.

I caught the second half of the marathon. There's no doubt that Gekic, who teaches at Florida International University, possesses one of the most formidable technical arsenals in the business, with nary a dropped note in all the flood of keyboard torrents Liszt demands. The Sonata in B minor is, arguably, the composer's masterpiece, an epic yet tightly woven work reconciling brilliant display and dramatic development, its long single movement ingeniously built from a variety! of musical themes. Gekic attacked the music with leonine ferocity. Rarely will one hear Liszt performed with the forceful command and polish that typified the fugal scherzo section. Yet the pianist also held the lyrical episodes in fine balance and rendered them with limpid tone. The climactic return of the chorale-like theme had a sense of grand inevitability, and Gekic accomplished something only the greatest artists can achieve, which is to make a listener experience even this keyboard war horse with fresh ears. As if the Sonata weren't labor enough, Gekic also tackled Liszt's knuckle-busting Transcendental Etudes without a break, an even more astonishing feat. The fact that he performed these tortuous works -- among the most difficult in the piano repertoire -- virtually note perfect is a testament to his steel-fingered musicianship. Rarely will one hear this repertoire rendered with such fearless bravura.

Even so, the program's 90-minute first half, overstuffed ! with those etudes, was a bit overwhelming, even numbing, and f! elt more like the public recording session it was -- Video Artist International is the festival's partner -- than an audience-friendly recital program. For even the most hard-core Lisztian, there was a bit too much music to swallow at one sitting.

Copyright (c) 2009 The Miami Herald

Review: FIU's Kemal Gekic triumphs in a keyboard marathon