CHOPIN: 4 Ballades; Fantasie in F Minor, Op. 49; Barcarolle in F-sharp Major, Op. 60; 4 Mazurkas, Op. 30 – Alessandra Ammara, piano – Arts

by | Jan 15, 2009 | Classical CD Reviews | 0 comments

CHOPIN: 4 Ballades; Fantasie in F Minor, Op. 49; Barcarolle in F-sharp Major, Op. 60; 4 Mazurkas, Op. 30 – Alessandra Ammara, piano – Arts 47896-2, 71:33 [Distrib. by Albany] ****:


This recording boasts several personalized touches, not the least of which is the recording (19-21 March 2007) venue, the ancient hall at Palazzo Penissi di Floristella in Acireale, Sicily. The acoustic is warm–albeit dry–and the sound of the Steinway D-274 resonant and firm, without gloss, shatter, or ping that plague many keyboard recitals.

Ammara herself appears a natural exponent of Chopin, her sense of drama balanced by a light, supple command of Chopin’s operatic rhetoric, his fluttering roulades, his recitatives, and the titanic grip of his layered stretti. The narrative of the G Minor Ballade ebbs and flows, always on the point of emotional, Neapolitan explosion. The silences resound as thoroughly as the massive periods and refrains, Chopin’s answer to Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. A sense of medieval romance permeates the F Major Ballade, a noble tale of long ago and far away, but an A Minor passion threatens to sweep us into a current maelstrom. The tension between folk simplicity and feverish torment often threatens to capsize the little bark our idyll, the dark bass tones often looking forward to Moussorgsky.

Ammara’s deep lyricism and terrific trill place her with Martha Argerich and Maria Tipo at once, a passionate acolyte of the most idiosyncratic of classical Romantics.  Nice color palette from Ammara to lay out the three registers of the opening of the A-flat Ballade, the trills and roulades sliding in sequence to produce a dynamically graduated, lustrous effect. Repeated notes evolve into a Bellini aria, rocking as well as singing in a salon style, the tonic resolution delayed in delicious modulations and cadences that tease and lull us at once. Ammara’s color palette in the A-flat rivals the effects we have come to know from Alfred Cortot. Finally, the tragic F Minor Ballade, whose counterpoint and variation technique, its use of the subdominant, the power of its stretti and shattering pauses and silences, provide it a canvas both monumental and exquisitely piquant. The bass progressions alone could supply Debussy a lifetime of contours.  Colossal yet transparent, the realization by Ammara ripples with ardent, sensual intelligence.

The martial, episodic Fantasie in F Minor indulges Ammara her sense of dramatic declamation and her ability to project a kind of studied improvisation, the rolling arpeggios and pregnant pauses  often plunging, de profundis, into the demonized abyss and then re-emerging with angels’ wings. Ammara keeps a taut line, brisk pacing, and shimmering sonority in delicate balance throughout, the Fantasie’s moody spasms finally having been tamed by the those lulling arpeggios. Ammara plays the later pages as a melancholy epilogue, almost allowing the music to stagnate in lost or probing meditation. Suddenly , the music surges once more to a recapitulation, as if the askew development section were again in force; but the tempest curtails the idyll of form and cedes the palette to passions in the manner of stormy ballade whose narrative lies in upheavals of the human heart.  The last of the big pieces is the Venetian boat-song of infinite harmonic eddies and sirens’ provocations. The trill simultaneously moves the music forward and pins it to a depth of unfathomable, mercurial images. The inexorable, rocking rhythms gain by graduated, harmonically labyrinthine shifts to encompass oceans not yet measured by mortal man. That Chopin knew he played with titanic forces comes in the designation “sfogato,” unbound, that unleashes a series of improvised runs and trills, delicate and spiritually insistent. The last pages certify trills and triumph, arioso and entirely voluptuous.

The folkish aristocracy of the Op. 30 mazurkas demand contrapuntal dexterity and rhythmic deftness, holding a steady pulsation under the protean, treble canvas. A gloomy, stately C Minor mazurka yields to a more passionate, sultry F-sharp Minor mazurka, steamy in its quick shifts in duple and triple meter. The rapid, even rabid, shifts of major and minor, of pianissimo and fortissimo, of the D-flat No. 3 make it a tiger of expression, intensely concentrated, liquid fire. The opening chord of the C-sharp Minor is worth dissertations by itself; the eerie dance proceeds in angular accents to any number of diverse affects, keeping us suspended and off balance emotionally as musically. Even in its compression this piece explodes every rhetorical convention it touches.  Masterfully, thoughtfully played by Amarra, the Op. 30 set achieves the same epic expressiveness as the Four Ballades, only more laconically.

–Gary Lemco
 

Related Reviews
Logo Pure Pleasure
Logo Crystal Records Sidebar 300 ms
Logo Jazz Detective Deep Digs Animated 01