Brighton Year-Round 2024

St Nicholas Louis-Viktor Bak Piano Recital

Louis-Viktor Bak

Genre: Live Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Louis-Viktor Bak is a multiple-prize-winning French pianist who also graduated from the Royal College of Music in 2023. Still in his earlier 20s, Bak’s keen to ruffle the way we listen to recitals and made a bold choice not only with repertoire but with programming sequence.

He arrives at St Nicholas on a bright early March day with a decent audience, and happily on the new Petrof grand piano installed only three weeks ago. It’s fair to say that alone has revolutionised St Nicholas’ potential as a recital space.

It’s a gleaming powerful new instrument with a plangent range, a subtle colour palate a bit like a Fazioli with a typically bright Steinway top end. It’s exactly what Bak – whose career almost starts the same time as the instrument – needs and deserves.

We often begin a classical recital if it has Scarlatti, Bach or particularly Haydn, with that item first. Not here. Bak firsts plays Berg’s Piano Sonata Op 1, then Haydn’s Piano Sonata HB XVI/46 in A flat and finally a repertoire he’d particularly at home in: Debussy’s First Book of Images.

Berg’s Piano Sonata Op 1

Lasting ten minutes this is a delight. Dating from 1908, and Berg’s allegro of a projected three-movement Sonata he got stuck till his teacher Schoenberg told him it was already complete.

Its surge and climactic passages can only be compared tonally with the very late romantic Schoenberg of Pélleas et Melisande or a Mahler symphony. Or Berg’s fellow-pupil Webern in his Passacaglia Op 1 also from 1908

It’s like concertinaing a symphony into a small space: not like Webern was to do, but as if the early songs Berg wrote are being all set off at once. But in counterpoint. This might seem overheated to some, but it’s perfectly logical.

Bak plays this with a control of surge and ebb, of night-shadows and calmer, very briefly calmer reflective passages. There’s no doubt of his identification with a work that, like Debussy, holds a hinterland of late tonality and post-tonality still proximate to romanticism. It’s very different from Prokofiev, whom Bak feels not to his taste.

Haydn’s Piano Sonata HB XVI/46 in A flat

We’re used to Haydn’s Sonatas Nos 20.4,50. 52. No. 46 is less known, and more interesting. It’s unsettling, and despite its numbering, early too (1767-70), hence its unjustified neglect.  It’s so early it was called originally a Divertimento, and betrays its early roots by refusing direct contrasts in material over its three movements, and inviting lots of ornaments directed to the harpsichord player. There’s a lot of flats too, more than usual.

Though no movement plays in the minor, the unsettled harmonies of all three major-key movements sideslip into shadows, despite the jaunty main theme in dotted rhythms. Haydn’s having fun with classical form. It’s an experiment gone right.

The boisterous thrust of this first allegro moderato movement statement is somehow undermined almost casually by the way the minor slips in as Bak revels in the harmonies, quirks and quite experimental – a word he used – harmonies in the first movement.

You might expect a minor keyed slow adagio movement after that. But no, Haydn decides on a slower version of the same material, refracted through a different tempo. Bak lulls through this like a slow surge but always pointillistic and bright where required. And with the presto finale he dances with the bright top of the piano’s sonance. This is exuberant mature Haydn on the cusp of breaking out. Bak traverses this in 12 minutes, when some take 15.

Debussy’s First Book of Images

Dating from 1905-07, very slightly before the Berg, Debussy’s mature piano style’s evident here. It’s his first full statement after his earlier work like Pour Le Piano and Estampes, paradoxically spurred on by the younger Ravel. Here Bak shows complete identification with the three movements, only two of which are titled.

Reflets dans l’eau could easily reference Ravel’s 1901 Jeux d’eaux and Faure’s middle Barcarolles. It’s a more confident work though, refusing the easy glitter of water, and the use of it in these two other masters of the genre. La Mer was written at the same time (1904-05) and Debussy terraces his water-scape rising and falling with the experience rather than the sheer optics.

Hommage a Rameau more than nods to the last great claveciniste who lived 1683-1764 (Ravel was to pay homage to Couperin). It also references his friend Dukas’ set of Rameau Variations of 1903, which he criticised, saying he wanted his Dukas pure. And thus there’s no theme recognisable from Rameau, no hint of any kind of 18^th century phrase, let alone pastiche.

Whatever is paid homage to is buried in an aesthetic; the surge of Debussy’s writing is late-Romantic, or post-Romantic. Ravel was to take a slightly different path, framing his suite more classically, as many were to do in the 1920s.

Here there is climax, retreat and a series of striking chords never strident and always somehow contained in the texture. It’s certainly more a feeling of what Rameau means to Debussy, than hommage as such.

Mouvement is much simpler: Debussy could have easily labelled this Comme le vent or some kind of swirling tidal run. He doesn’t. It’s effectively a scherzo-finale, a moto perpetuo that whips up a revelry of colour and affirmation in its repeated six-chord phrases, then dies away.  Bak here takes 15 minutes, still a brisk, but not over-brisk traversal.

An exceptionally distinguished recital. We’re lucky to have Bak, and the Petroff piano might just tempt him – and others – to return.

Published March 6, 2024March 6, 2024 by Simon Jenner