#idil biret archive

[dustedmagazine]

Idil Biret — Concertos and Solo Music Edition (Idil Biret Archive/Naxos)

The tenth and final box anthologizing Turkish pianist Idil Biret’s studio recordings became available in the summer of 2018. This volume, and the huge set it concludes, has been an obvious labor of love to assemble and a joy to explore. I began listening to Biret’s playing in the middle 1990s, when only her then-recent recordings for Naxos were readily available, each of which presented a new and fascinating aspect of her broad repertoire and the stunning technique rendering it all convincing. She plays Chopin and Boulez with similar depth, precision and insight, no mean feat in a marketplace increasingly devoted either to specialization or glamour. If this volume seems to be a catch-all, gathering pieces and performances external to the other more thematically organized sets, its substance is not to be missed. As with every other entry, a bit of digging shows much more than at first meets the eye.

Before even taking stock of this final set on its own terms, a few contextual comments are in order. The completion of this mammoth project has been long and laborious in coming but not simply due to the material’s chronological disparity. For various reasons involving playing style, choice of repertoire and the resultant neglect by, and even downright hostility from, major labels and some in the critical establishment, a substantial part of Biret’s recorded legacy has been in need of recirculation. Now, her entire back catalog is housed under one roof, so to speak; in fact, while the ten sets do indeed contain all of Biret’s studio recordings, made for a variety of labels between 1959 and 2016, there are concert performances a-plenty; more on that presently. What unifies everything might also be the most difficult aspect of the set to describe. As a child, she could play adult works like Bach’s “Chromatic Fantasy” with an assurance and virtuosity any adult performer would envy. Like Alfred Brendel early on in his career, Biret had mastered a style of playing that exemplified and transcended convention, necessitating changes in articulation, phrasing and voicing as her art progressed that would bring the music to another level. The ten volumes cohere as related stylistic paragraphs and chapters rather than as a single overarching developmental narrative.

This final box brings together pieces from various countries and time periods, from Schubert through Ravel. If one descriptor could be used to describe Biret’s playing throughout, it is the potent but ultimately unsatisfying phrase “unostentatiously heroic.” Revel in the tempo flexibilities of her 2004 recording of Tchaikovsky’s first concerto, in collaboration with the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra under the direction of the still underrated Emil Tabakov, a Bulgarian composer, double bassist and conductor who brings a unique vision to everything he touches. His rendering of the first movement’s ubiquitous string melody is of a piece with Biret’s shaping of that melody in octaves, approximating molten granite, immutable in intent but fresh on every audition, while her subsequent arpeggios breeze by with liquid ease, and Tabakov’s reentry at 2:50 elicits some of the warmest and richest sonorities a string section can muster and tempo gradations as natural as breathing. Each pianistic and orchestral detail contains all this in microcosm. Biret’s low-register octaves, beginning at 15:12, gradually round and melt, merging with the sensual winds and succeeding solo oboe. All of the whimsy, tenderness and unadulterated triumph of the first movement are crystalized in the third. Any classical music aficionado has ridden the warhorse ad nauseam but never quite in this way!

Let a middle 1960s recording (no firmer date is provided) of Ravels Gaspard de la Nuit represent the compositions for solo piano. Its sonics are a little rough around the edges, but again, despite so many great versions in the catalog from players as diverse as Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Jacqueline Eymar, this one is unique. No aged and filtered recording can dim Biret’s take on Ravel’s interpretations of Bertrand’s evocative poetry. The accompanying booklet states that it is a studio production, though periodic coughs say otherwise. Whatever its provenance, the lonely siren in the heartbreaking Ondine has never shown her isolation so completely, save, perhaps ironically, in the version waxed by another Turkish pianist, Husein Sermet. Biret presents the initial melody as only slightly separate from its watery surroundings, repeated chords which morph gradually but definitely into the elements that are complicit in Ondine’s solitary fate, which Biret captures in the bitter laughter that ushers in the movement’s somberly anticlimactic conclusion. Only an unfortunate volume drop mars an exquisite and powerful performance. Biret’s Gibet is icily transparent, what Mark E. Smith encapsulated superbly in “Pat Trip Dispenser” as “clarity of nothing.” The tolling bell’s statement answers no questions in that existential moment of questioning images, and Biret depicts all regions of that ghostly landscape in diverse shades of stunning color in equally astonishing pianissimo. Her Scarbo, that fiendishly and notoriously difficult study in technical prowess in dance, is all contrast in the service of rhythmic unity as the monster, whimsically frightening but ultimately illusory, flits, stalks and romps, rearing up only to disappear with a slight but potent sting.

This set contains a remake of note in Franz Liszt’s arrangement of Hector Berlioz’s radical and programmatic Symphonie Fantastique of 1830. It was Liszt’s piano version that was published first, and Biret recorded it in the late 1970s. Here, we have a 1992 digital recording in a warmer and more reverberant acoustic, but her interpretation has also deepened. The symphony was conceived orchestrally, and, rising to a formidable challenge, Biret coaxes inner voices from Liszt’s dense writing that were overshadowed in her earlier version. Even a quick listen to the first movement’s introduction, with its volcanic shifts in tempo and dynamics, reveals a controlled freedom in which detail and emotion balance, like the best Furtwangler on record. Biret arrives at the first chord as at a summit, leaving it only reluctantly as the melody unfolds. Her second movement waltz, where the tortured artist attempts to drown his sorrows in a party atmosphere, is elegant and whimsical, especially the bass notes, which live as close to pizzicato strings as a piano can. She finds pathos in the artist’s final musings on his beloved as, on the scaffold, he faces execution, and the act itself is as sharp and cold as his reminiscences are tender and poignant. Biret takes obvious and slightly wicked delight in the last movement’s no-holds-barred harmonic complexities, constructing monoliths of stacked sonorities at top volume only to watch them disintegrate as the beloved, resurrected as a witch, greets the artist with bitter laughter so similar to Ondine’s in Gaspard. All recedes as the thunderous low-register octaves of the Dies Irae sweep all before them, foregrounding the cataclysm and capping a reading of Romantic scope and power.

 There is far too much to cover in a review. The Scriabin sonatas, while occupy a fair bit of my listening notes, didn’t get the space they deserve. They float lithely into focus, luminous but somehow light, ordered and almost academically figured while never losing their mystery. The closest proponent to Biret’s vision of this music is the still underappreciated Vladimir Sofronitsky, the Romantic who married Scriabin’s daughter, and there is the heart of the matter. Biret is a Romantic, maybe one of the last still playing. She is not in search of emotion, and she has no grand philosophical statements to make, though both the academic and the intuitive approaches come to her with grace and ease. Never striving to overaccentuate the music’s mythological or devotional qualities, a single chord can have the sonority of a church organ and can engender commensurate reactions. If her playing gains in introspection with age, it does not fall prey to the whims of fashion or even the whiles of self-parody that have diminished the work of higher profile performers. She confronts each piece with a balanced knowledge of interpretive history and inner vision, and in achieving both on multiple levels, her interpretations are ultimately patient, constructed on layers of sculpted narrative until they burst forth in that incendiary passion for the creative act that may be Biret’s legacy and most heroic accomplishment.  

Marc Medwin

[ojolosoy]

#NowPlaying Piano Quartet in A Minor de Gustav Mahler