Argentinian pianist Ingrid Fliter make her EMI debut with this all-Chopin disc, a composer to whom she has devoted considerable time on the VAI label as well. Sponsored by compatriot Martha Argerich, Ms. Fliter has gleaned a strong reputation for the range of her tastes; her winning of the Gilmore Award in 2006 solidified her international renown.
Fliter opens with a strong rendition of the Third Sonata, Op. 58, all expository repeats intact, which provides an uncommon breadth to this massive work, whose length matches the sonata in the same key by Liszt. Recorded May-October 2007 at Potton Hal, Suffolk, the piano sports a lovely mid and upper range, quite resonant, with striking overtones. Fliter’s aggressive security in the Allegro maestoso is matched by a peerless fluency in the ensuing Scherzo, whose first statement she swallows whole. Fliter relishes the Chopin polyphony, the often three-hand effects and harmonic dissonances that drive the music into startling and startled regions of the spirit. The Largo is big, a meditation-nocturne that proceeds in a linear though introspective mode, and then allows various dynamic nuances and luftpausen to modulate the harmonic-rhythm of the periods. Is the middle section by Chopin or Debussy? Thunder and guns mark Fliter’s last movement, a sonata-rondo of impressive, plastic, motor power, whose realization at several points had me looking to Novaes for favorable comparisons.
Fliter’s extroverted pianism finds happy vehicles in the Op. 59 mazurkas, played without any trace of “foreign” accent, in much the same, idiomatic fashion as her mentor, Argerich. The lyrical, erotic Barcarolle proves quite expansive, a gondolier song turned etude-nocturne with trills and rhetorical nuances of the highest order. The Op. 18 Waltz has a grand irony about it, a mock-heroic scale that had me going back for another listening. Nice rhythmic inflections for the Waltz in C-sharp Minor, the perennial Chopin waltz. Fliter plays its last statement as a ready-made codetta, its middle section as a mazurka which easily droops into ¾ time. Has anyone ever pronounced the D-flat “Minute” Waltz as “my-noot,” so as to realize not its length but its breadth is the key. The Moderato A-flat Waltz allows Fliter to relish those tricky agogics of Chipin, his love of hemiola that shifts to variants of the metric pulse. The concluding Ballade in F Minor is immense, a perfect foil to the texture and spirit of the A-flat Waltz that precedes it. Grace merges with dark inevitability to produce a chiseled, liquid interpretation that searches for meaning as it improvises the polyphonic variants before our ears. This is a thoughtful, flamboyant virtuoso whose pianism communicates a freshness worthy of our devotion.
–Gary Lemco
