By Lyn Bronson

Well, it was a real circus!

We had purchased tickets (at $90 a ticket, $180 for the pair) to Rudolf Buchbinder’s solo recital at the Salzburg Festival expecting to hear a serious recital by one of Europe’s better known pianists. Of course it wasn’t Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Daniel Barenboim, Martha Argerich or Maurizio Pollini, but nevertheless Rudolf Buchbinder is still a name to contend with.

We had been advised that concerts at the Festival were dressy affairs, and accordingly we were smartly dressed. However, when we turned the corner from the Getreidegasse and spotted the exterior of the Grosses Festspielhaus, it was obvious that we were in the middle of a media event. A good proportion of the audience was dressed for the opera (hey, remember that this was only a piano recital). There were a significant number of women in long gowns and men in tuxes, and we observed elegant people socializing in the street in front of the concert hall. I immediately spotted three TV camera crews (it was the usual gig with a young woman holding a mike and interviewing arriving patrons, while a young man held and operated a camcorder on his shoulder). There were several policemen directing traffic, since the backup of taxis and cars depositing people at the entrance was causing a traffic gridlock for several blocks around the Festspielhaus.

On entering the starkly modern lobby, in evidence were a few more camcorders and at least three print media photographers mingling amidst more elegant people sipping champagne, chardonnay and Evian water. I felt a little bit like a gunman at a garden party as I noticed that the media people’s eyes flicked over us rapidly while searching for more glamorous prey.

We quickly purchased a printed program (the only thing free at this overpriced event was the restrooms) and were ushered to our seats in the fourth row on the keyboard side. It was 8:45 pm and the concert was scheduled to begin at 9 pm. If this strikes you as a peculiar time, and rather late for a piano recital, it did us, too. So, I asked the concierge at our hotel the next day, and with a shrug of the shoulders, she informed me, “Well, it is to accommodate the many restaurant patrons who want a leisurely dinner.”

So, anyway, here it was fifteen minutes before the concert, and as we were reading the printed program, I noticed how sparsely attended the event seemed to be. There were empty seats everywhere. But, five minutes before curtain time, at virtually the last possible moment, the hordes poured in, and it was obvious that it was a sold out house.

The Hamburg Steinway on stage looked as elegant as the people attending the concert, although it was dwarfed by the size of the stage. For such a modern and luxurious concert hall, obviously an ordinary Wenger acoustical shell such as we so often see in the USA would have been out of place, and accordingly behind the Steinway was a wildly modern acoustic shell made up of natural wood panels in irregular shapes in a Picasso-like cubistic design.

Meanwhile, getting to the musical portion of the evening, we noticed that the program for the evening’s concert had been changed. When we purchased our tickets six months previously, the program as announced at the time was to begin with four Schubert-Liszt Song Transcriptions, followed by the Schubert Sonata in B-flat Major, Op. Posth. After intermission we were supposed to hear Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy” and Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1.

Gone were the Liszt-Schubert song transcriptions. Now the first half of the program consisted of Mephisto Waltz and the “Wanderer Fantasy, while the Schubert Sonata occupied the entire second half. This struck us as a dangerous program. To walk out cold and play Mephisto Waltz as your first piece was taking enormous risks, for you need to be relaxed and focused for this work.

Our fears were well grounded, for when Buchbinder sauntered out on stage and launched into his program, he was in trouble almost immediately. There were smudged passages here and there, and it got worse as the piece progressed, with whole passages omitted as he quickly rushed to find spots where he could resume after memory slips. Yet, there were moments of great beauty, especially the lovely slow waltz theme in D-flat major, and also the difficult trill-like passages suggesting Mephisto’s laughter. However, almost all of the more spectacular and difficult passages were overplayed and unmercifully banged

After this embarrassment, the Schubert “Wanderer” Fantasie went somewhat better, and  the slow movement emerged as a sublime jewel. Yet, Buchbinder was not entirely master of this work and it was often painful to listen to him flailing around the keyboard in the faster movements.

Thus, it was a great pleasure to hear after intermission the great Schubert, Op. Posth. B-flat Major Sonata. Here was truly masterful playing, artistic in all its details, and lovingly played. This was truly spell binding playing, and the skill with which he held it all together proclaimed that he is a world-class musician. This is a sprawling work that can disintegrate in lesser hands, and he never permitted this to happen. It is interesting that Buchbinder successfully took the first movement repeat, which adds ten minutes to the length of the movement, but which also contains passages of extraordinary beauty in the transition section that we very seldom hear.

Artur Schnabel has been quoted as saying, “As a performer you are a tour guide and you must never get in the way of the view.” The real problem in this recital was that Rudolf Buchbinder in the first half of the recital was wasn’t so much showing us the sights as trying to convince us that he was the greatest tour guide in the world. In other words he was role playing as “concert pianist” trying to impress us with his virtuosity, rather than convincing us that the music he was performing was something that he loved with all his heart.

The audience was just as enthusiastic about the unsatisfying first half of the program as it was about the truly sublime playing we heard after intermission. So, perhaps Buchbinder understands his audience all too well.

It has been said that Louis Moreau Gottschalk was perfectly able to play in the most sensitive exquisite manner, but as he would step out on the stage to play some overblown concert paraphrase for the one thousandth time, he would ask himself, “What will it matter a hundred years from now?”

There were two encores. Not surprisingly they were Liszt-Schubert song transcriptions, Der Lindenbaum and Der Erlkoenig. In the first, Buchbinder role played as musician and played exquisitely. In the second, he was back showing off as “concert pianist” and it was a bit of a mess. If he just hadn’t tried to impress us with how fast and how loud he could play the repeated octaves, it could have been a great performance.

End