FLAMES AND TEMPERAMENT
~ DINARA KLINTON'S CHOPIN ~
Dinara Klinton's handsomely engineered new album draws together studio recordings of some of the works with which she captivated the 2015 Warsaw International Chopin Piano Competition. From Kharkiv, Klinton – who studied in Moscow with Valery Pyasetsky (Central
Music School) and Eliso Virsaladze (Conservatoire) before coming to
London to work with Dina Parakhina at the RCM –
is an artist of flaming passion and exotic temperament. Determined,
technically replete, acutely focussed, she brings a volcanic
chemistry to her performances, impetuous yet disciplined, capricious
yet cool, physically energised yet poetically wondrous. We're all familiar with her Liszt, Chopin and Tchaikovsky, but I've heard her
do miraculous things with Scarlatti, Mozart and Beethoven. Her
big-boned Brahms shows the contemplative architect within.
This
Chopin traversal commands attention at many levels. The Nouvelles
études are caressed in velvet, their voices and chromatics curtained in veils of pedalled sonority, each a fragile glance just
shy of seduction: the middle one, in A flat (acknowledging the
autograph order), reminds of the adieu of
Chopin's 'grey hours' with Maria Wodzińska a few years
previously. The early G minor Nocturne – arguably the most
problematic of the Chopin canon to bring off, Robert Schumann's 'declaration of war with the entire past' – is aristocratically
crafted, wraiths of dances and chorales shadowing the imagination,
the gasp and tension of dry decay in a responsive acoustic not lost
on Klinton.
The
C minor Polonaise, theatrically weighted – Klinton's 2005 Steinway
all about sepulchral gravity – is darkly magnificent. Some accounts
stick in the mind, eclipsing all others. Hearing Małcużyński play
this one winter Sunday afternoon in 1960, Royal Festival Hall, lights
dimmed, was a life-changing, style-shaping encounter. Reminiscent of
Gilels, Klinton's approach – the pain of loss, the poignancy of the
once shared – comes as close as one can to rekindling the memory.
Her proud, octave-powered F sharp minor Polonaise scales the heights,
more flowing, stable and less agitated than many a historic or
current reading. She finely polarises the mysterious and rhetorical,
chivalry and song, what Liszt called the 'ominous air', 'desperate exclamations' and 'defiance' of the opening idea –
initially questioning/exploratory, cumulatively ablaze. Her
right-hand glitters, her left-hand thunders. The cavalry canter,
tight to the beat, and the cannons unleash their death. The central
mazurka floats between nostalgia and delirium, maidens before men,
heart before heroics. Two lightning flashes, pulverising in
their fortissimo,
break the dream. Sixty-four bars later, the Tatras wandered, silence
falls: an adrenalin-charged narrative.

With
the Barcarolle Klinton is more rural than urban, affectingly simple
rather than aromatically sophisticated. The music wends its
ornamental way, the waters never ruffled, the palaces of place and
time viewed from afar. Her opening low C sharp octave is full but not
forward, preferring the Jagiellonian Stichvorlage and
the French and German first editions (November 1846 – which placed
the forte in
the proximity of the second-beat right-hand chord) rather than
Wessel's London printing (October 1846 – which opted for
a forzando downbeat).
Among the many litmus tests of the piece, the C sharp dolce
sfogato transition
to the forte reprise
is without fuss, rubato kept
to a minimum, the expression buttoned-up, Klinton's back-lit modesty
spinning a fragrance of its own.
Her
B flat minor Sonata – an interpretation marrying youthful urgency
and high-octane technical finish with a measure of life experience –
is toughly argued, favouring onward direction to sentimental hiatus
or tempo bending. The Scherzo is gruffly Beethovenian – puissance
pianism at its most arrogantly brilliant, free of terror – and the
Finale is a disciplined study in sotto
voce unanimity.
Funerals walked rather than seen inform the third movement. In her
tolling left-hand bells, weeping right-hand grace-notes, rock-steady
beat, and patrician grandeur (crotchet circa 40-44),
Klinton, bypassing the pre-war greats (Hofmann, Rachmaninov,
Paderewski, Cortot – significantly faster), recalls Rubinstein;
her cantabile is
seamless and spine-shivering, the sustained prayer of the D flat Trio
a malachite of purest bel
canto,
each trill like so many ghosts of incense trembling the air.
Tackling
the first movement Klinton unfurls a bold symphonic dynamic, more
especially in the development section where she terraces Chopin's
complex texture with Brucknerian nobility and a driving sense of
clarity, inevitability and climax, thrilling at every turn.

The
talking point, however, will likely be her decision to take the
repeat from the Grave introduction
rather than the Doppio
movimento.
It's been done before – Uchida (Philips), Ian Hobson more recently
(Zephyr) – but, despite the endorsement of Edward T. Cone, Charles
Rosen, Jeffrey Kallberg and others, continues to divide opinion. Joan
Chissell thought it 'illogical', without saying why (Gramophone). Anatole
Leiken argues against it: 'Unless we hear new arguments to the
contrary, we had better exclude the Grave […] from the repeat of
the exposition' (Musical Quarterly). The graphical evidence sends mixed signals. Of the
three first editions published in England, France and Germany during the late spring of 1840, only the
German one carried repeat dots at the start of the Doppio
movimento,
despite the Stichvorlage received
from Chopin's associate Adolf Gutmann indicating nothing. The French
and English engravings give just a single bar-line. Surviving copies
from Chopin's students, annotated by him, don't address the matter.
Brahms's 1878 Gesammtausgabe omitted
the sign; correspondingly the current Polish National Edition.
This
is not the place to discuss the issue. The shock, harmonically, of
going back to the beginning of the Doppio
movimento is
well ingrained. Yet when you get an account as committed and
believable as Klinton's, returning to the Grave seems
suddenly very plausible, that natal first D flat not only obliging
cadence and challenge dramaturgically but manifesting a continuum
of Grave colonnades
(en
route to
the development) otherwise occluded by history and habit.
September 2017
Piano Sonata No 2, in B
flat minor, Op 35 (Funeral March)
Barcarolle in F sharp
major, Op 60
Trois
nouvelles études , KKIIb:3
Nocturne
in G minor, Op 15 No 3
Polonaises
– C minor, Op 40 No 1; F sharp minor, Op 44
12-14 August 2016
Witold
Lutosławski Concert Studio of Polish Radio, Warsaw
Fryderyk Chopin Institute NIFCCD 218
67 minutes
Adapted by kind permission

© Ateş Orga 2017
not to be reproduced without permission