★★★★½ Forceful renditions of Debussy, Bach and Beethoven reveal inspired insights.

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne
June 23, 2016

For five decades, eminent Australian pianist Roger Woodward has enjoyed a glittering international career, with recordings and concert performances receiving consistent critical acclaim. Although justly famous for core 19th-century Romantic repertoire, Woodward is an open and versatile pianist. Like his exact contemporary Maurizio Pollini (both were born in 1942), Woodward has steadfastly championed modernist works by contemporary composers including Iannis Xenakis, Toru Takemitsu and Morton Feldman, also Australian composers Anne Boyd and Barry Conyngham, among many others. An understanding of these composers as stops on the same ever-evolving musical continuum as Bach, Debussy and Beethoven is central to Woodward’s deep musical intellect, and thoroughly informs his approach to performance.

Woodward began with the two books of Images by Claude Debussy, from 1905 and 1907. Each set consists of three pieces that give expression to different facets of the composer’s abandonment of traditional key systems (steadily occurring over the preceding decades), which paved the way for further Modernist dismantling throughout the 20th century. Woodward rendered these aural snapshots with great delicacy and simultaneously forceful precision, every gesture imbued with a thorough exactitude that produced a series of mysterious, rippling sonic landscapes.

The Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, BWV903 of JS Bach was delivered in an unapologetically 19th-century manner, with no concessions to its origins as a work for the considerably less volcanic harpsichord. This is entirely in keeping with its status as a favourite of and great influence upon Felix Mendelssohn (for instance), and Woodward has explained elsewhere his understanding of Bach as a Romantic composer whose influence permeated the works of Brahms, Liszt and their contemporaries. It was a loud, wild success, with ringing tonalities and overtones meshing together in triumph.

Bach’s impact on Romanticism is of course strongly in evidence with Beethoven, who repeatedly returned to fugal forms, particularly in his later works. Fitting then, that Sonata No 29, Op. 106, the Hammerklavier, should occupy the entire second half of this recital. Beethoven’s monster four-movement sonata is his longest: the average performance clocks in at forty-five minutes. Notoriously demanding, its technical requirements are immense and require marathon-like stamina and vigilant pacing. So too, the emotional extremes – two thunderous movements followed by the epic Adagio Sostenuto, also Beethoven’s longest slow movement, and easily one of his most devastating. In his recent Beethoven biography, composer Jan Swafford described it as “like a sublime performance of sorrow and transcendence by a singer who has known every shade of grief and hope.”  A confession here: I am morbidly obsessed with this movement, and have witnessed and usually prefer more lyrical readings. Woodward had me rethinking this, however, as his delicate but barely contained strength was utterly consistent with his reading of the other three movements, for which a degree of brute force is undeniably required. To wit: with performer and listener in emotional tatters following the Adagio Sostenuto, we’re hurled into a violent fugal finale, a belting smasher for which, it transpired, we were duly prepared by the earlier Bach Fantasia and Fugue. The Hammerklavier is not for every pianist, but it is certainly for Woodward, who could easily be imagined destroying less robust fortepianos with the force of his playing, as did the composer. It is a truly extraordinary work, unique among Beethoven’s 32 sonatas, and a turning point: from here on, Beethoven tore relentlessly forth into a final decade of tonal experimentation and emotional anguish. Woodward did not play an encore.