Karl Lutchmayer Press

Deccan Herald, Bangalore

2012-04-06T08:40:00.003-07:00

Imagine a pianist performing passionately with pursed lips, whose eyebrows move with delight at each note coming out of the grand piano.

That pianist was Karl Lutchmayer, who celebrated the bicentenary of the Hungarian composer and pianist, Franz Liszt, with great depth and reverence at the Alliance Francaise recently.

“It feels really great to be back in Bangalore. I was last here in 1980 and it hasn’t changed a bit since then. It still feels like an English summer,” says Karl. He then began the recital with a piece by Bach adapted by Busoni, which Bach had composed to lament his wife’s death. It was a moving piece and the sorrow seeped into the music and the emotions with which it was played.

UK-based Karl, who is a professor of performing practice at the Trinity College of Music, London, unknowingly let out the professor in him during the recital. He explained the linkage between the composer of the piece and Liszt before performing it, making it a more intimate and personal experience for the audience. As expected, nobody seemed to mind.

“It was very enjoyable, particularly because of his explanations and interpretations. He was one of the few pianists to take the audience through the pieces he was going to play, making it more meaningful,” said Niloufer Gupta, a member of the audience who was left mesmerised by the end of the recital. “I felt like I was a young student learning something,” she chuckled.

One of the most impressive pieces played by Karl was ‘March to the Scaffold’ from ‘Symphonie Fantastique’. Liszt had originally played the piece solo minutes after it had been performed by an orchestra of 80 musicians. Another noteworthy piece was Beethoven’s ‘Les Adieux,’ a 20-minute-long piece where he tried to find one particular chord which was placed only four bars before the very end. Karl even acted as if he was Beethoven trying to find it but not being able to with his disapproving frowns and shaking of the head as he played.

“I thought he was brilliant — it was so free-flowing and his fingers moved through the rhythm beautifully,” said Nalini Prabhu, an audience member. “I don’t play the piano or understand the nuances of classical music. But I appreciated what I heard and saw,” she added. With anecdotes about Liszt and his pieces of varying tempos and moods, Karl Lutchmayer surely left a little bit of the great Hungarian pianist in the minds of each individual present.

Adrian Jack, The Independent

2012-04-06T08:09:00.002-07:00

Karl Lutchmayer is a young London-based pianist with arresting ideas about programme-planning. On Friday he gave the first of three recitals at the Warehouse, in which he combining new British music with connoisseur’s items from the past as well as some standard warhorses. Friday’s programme was particularly intriguing, with Bartok and Liszt framing a new set of pieces by 30-year-old Richard Causton, then major works by two shadowy figures from the early 20th century, Busoni and Enescu.

The Warehouse acoustic doesn’t always allow for ideal clarity, and Lutchmayer sometimes seemed to be holding back to compensate, so that the outer movements of Bartok’s Out of Doors suite came across as well controlled rather than exciting. There was no doubt, though, about his sensitive colouring of the exquisite nocturnal evocation in the fourth movement with its eerie sounds of natural life and oriental arabesques.

The first two and fourth of Causton’s five inventions in One Part were particularly striking studies in reconciling two contrasted ideas undergoing continuous change. The first for instance, was a dialogue in which lively angular shapes alternated with single notes allowed to blur into each other gently, loud contrasted with soft, tight rhythms with looser durations, after which Lutchmayer showed he had the chops for Liszt’s murderous Tarantella, as well as the gracefulness and velvety touch for its relaxed middle section.

Busoni’s Indianisches Tagebuch is rather improbably based on Red Indian themes given to him by an American student, though they are absorbed into Busoni’s characteristically muted, crepuscular style. His recently discovered Indianisches Erntelied was his first setting of one of these melodies, quiet and magical, with ghostly rippling scales and little weeping motifs.

It was impressive that Lutchmayer played everything except the Causton pieces from memory, and when a digital alarm interrupted the last piece in the Tagbuch, he simply stopped and went back a couple of bars or so, as if to say “Now let’s hear that again”.

There were certainly lots of notes to remember in Enescu’s Sonata in D, written in the 1930s - a mostly happy piece with an ear-tickling first movement bubbling along in not-quite-regular rhythms, though it would have been interesting to see the score to discover how the teasing rhythms in this rarity were actually notated.

Time Out

2012-03-24T17:30:00.005-07:00

Busoni Recital - Classical Source

2012-03-24T07:34:00.001-07:00

Busoni’s piano music has a committed avatar in Karl Lutchmayer, the principal player in the concert. He began at the end, with the Toccata of 1920, Busoni’s last major work for solo piano and the summation of his neo-classicist ideas. It is a masterly work, economical and tautly argued; at its heart is a searching, Lisztian fantasia that Lutchmayer never allowed to drift. Instead, an insistent triplet rhythm tugged the reflective passages into a chaconne that brought brilliant pianistic fireworks.

The Sonatina Seconda, another late work, was even more intensely introspective, its unpredictable shifts in direction and tonality reminding us that this was the age of Freud’s unconscious. Once again Lutchmayer’s performance was compelling, drawing a wide expressive range of sonorities from his instrument.

The second half offered a virtuoso rendition of the revised Ten Variations on Chopin’s C minor Prelude, which tests its theme against a range of harmonic possibilities, followed by the Second Violin Sonata. This is the work of a younger Busoni, and it shows; the form is more conventionally Romantic, and some of the melodies tend toward the foursquare. But this was a rapt, intense performance by Lutchmayer and Gabrielle Painter, whose earthy, lustrous tone gave visceral form to this cerebral music.