Brighton Year-Round 2024

St Nicholas Gabriele Sutkuté Piano Recital

Gabriele Sutkuté

Genre: Live Music, Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Lithuanian pianist Gabriele Sutkuté is already garnering praise on the international circuit, including the Wigmore, Cadogan and Steinway Halls in the UK.  And after study in Lithuania and extensively at the Royal Academy of Music (where she gained a First and post-graduate degrees)  a strong of international competition wins in the past two years.

Sutkuté ‘s an engaging communicator too and gives introductions to the composers she plays. Today she performed Rameau, Chopin, Debussy, Brahms and Haydn.

Decidedly individual she brings a mostly French-,based programme.

Playing Rameau’s baroque keyboard on the piano has become more permissible again over the last 20 years. His Suite in D major dates from 1724. From it the first and eighth pieces complement each other. ‘Les Tendres Plaintes’ is a gentle rondeau whose planes and terraces are further softened by the piano. It’s beguiling and a little mysterious. The famous ‘Les Cyclopes’ with its almost jaunty but also curious world is memorable and high- coloured in its unique rhythmic sway. Sutkuté managed the idiomatic quality French pianists have brought to this repertoire.

That’s even more true of the next works. Chopin’s three late Mazurkas Op 59 combine the earthy peasant dance with 3-4 time. The mazurka was always where Chopin experimented most boldly. The A minor is one of his finest creations as fine as the Op17/4 in the same key, and as alien to the world of the 1840s.

The A flat major is more exuberant and folk-like with Sutkuté sovereign in its tang and sashay into more exuberant major shifts.

The last in F sharp minor returns to the inward intensity of the A minor, with a swirl of regrets that means the end of each paragraph seems a perpetual fade. There’s the Mazurka rhythm but although delivered at speed with elan, there’s the feelers of a Nocturne or Prelude here.

Debussy’s 1903 Estampes or Prints just precede his fully mature piano music, stimulated by the younger Ravel.

‘Pagodes’ with its pentatonic chimes combines rapid figurations underpinning the Chinoiserie. Sutkuté scores deeply by bringing out the inner voices as in fact the main drivers of the piece, and I’d pinpoint throughout.

‘La Soirée Dans Granade’ furnished more exotica for Debussy who only visited Spain for a day. Again the energy of dance and musk of Flamenco are never far away, as the Habanera rhythms too build into this piece which voices itself as Debussy in a series of chimes and sudden bursts of quotations. It ends fading out the Havanese.

‘Jardins sous la pluie’ with its driving rhythms and cascading figures is thrilling in Sutkuté ‘s hands. It builds yo an exciting a climax as L’Isle Joyeux only two years later. Sweeps and triumphant glissandi celebrate more than one arrival.

Brahms is a surprise. His two Rhapsodies Op 79 from around 1879. Both are minor keyed but contrasted. As Sutkuté says the shorter second in G minor was felt note interesting at the time but her heart is perhaps with the first in B minor.

Stormy and unsettled, declamatory with almost stretto climaxes it’s a surfing piece, and Sutkuté shows here her headband surging power. Clearly a pianist who nails her great gifts to dynamic contrasts and passionate late romanticism in this showing is completely at home.

The calmer middle section is a precision of chiming and holding patterns. Sutkuté ‘s quietly singing contrasts here in the eye of the storm are magical – and precisely observed – before returning to the beefy B minor gestures of the opening. I’ve never heard this piece played with such effortless forte that never changes: yet explodes all the time.

The G minor is almost major-like in its more heroic opening. There’s a powerful tread almost alla Marcia that prefigures Rachmaninov’s Alla Marcia strutting Prelude Op 23/5 also in G minor. Though here there’s quieter and quieter gradations anchored in the same rhythm. Sutkuté has both captured the grandeur and the ghost of mischief shrouded in the syncopations that power this work..

The slow pavement Haydn Sonata in B minor Hb16/32 is a delicious encore returning us to the galantrie of the Rameau. It’s thrilling minuet-like set of refrains, not quite variations but restatements St in a terraced way give onto a trio of more storm und drang intensity. It’s most unusual for a Haydn sonata and many would love to hear the whole work in Sutkuté’s hands; who can carve these filigree classicism in cut glass. A marvellous conclusion to a world class recital

Sutkuté says she is particularly drawn to the early 20^th century: Ravel, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev, though wasn’t playing any of these composers today. I wonder too if the Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911), Ravel’s exact contemporary and the finest composer and painter to emerge from Lithuanian would ever figure. Given what follows, I hope so. She performs at the Chapel Royal in February.

Published November 6, 2024November 6, 2024 by Simon Jenner