No less than nine composers are included in Hélène Grimaud’s latest recital, eight of them in the 40-minute sequence of pieces that makes up its first half. Ranging from Liszt and Fauré to Berio and Takemitsu, the pieces are all connected by the theme of water, and Grimaud plays them like an unbroken stream, with only the briefest pauses between each.
It certainly makes an imaginative piece of planning, and a welcome change from the all too predictable selections in many pianists’ programmes. But whether it works so convincingly in performance, with such abrupt stylistic shifts and hardly a moment to draw breath between one music world and another for either Grimaud or her audience, is more arguable. In Birmingham it was the larger-scale pieces that seemed to be diminished; both Fauré’s Fifth Barcarolle, Op 66 and the Almeria movement from the second book of Albéniz’s Iberia need more space around them than they got here.
Grimaud’s grip on those bigger structures was never as convincing as her encapsulations of the tinier ones, either. The first piece from Janáček’s In the Mists was turned into an impacted tone poem, and made one eager to hear her in the whole cycle; Wasserklavier, from Luciano Berio’s Six Encore Pieces, made a wonderfully ambiguous opening, like a piece of late Brahms rebuilt on ever-shifting harmonic foundations, and Debussy’s prelude La Cathédrale Engloutie made a suitably imposing and stark finale.
There was some real Brahms and some solid, harmonic ground after the interval. Grimaud’s instinctive, impulsive approach to the F sharp minor Piano Sonata, Op 2 did make its opening movement sometimes sound more like Liszt than Brahms, but her performance came steadily into focus as it went on – even hinting at connections with the first half of her recital in the barcarolle-like lilt that she brought to the central section of the scherzo, and inflecting the main theme of the finale with wonderful individuality when it makes its almost shy first appearance, though the final bars had all the grandstanding rhetoric anyone could want.
• At the Barbican, London, 16 May. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
