The great German pianist Martin Helmchen was, on Saturday, one of the star guests of the Montreal Bach Festival 2021. On the program: the six Partitas for keyboard with, as a result, a strange and academic exercise in style.
Why choose the piano to embody Bach’s keyboard music, originally write for the harpsichord? There is to this fundamental question – we already mentioned it on Saturday in our overview “Bach, winner of the pandemic” – two answers. Or we use the big instrument to ape the harpsichord with a sharp playing. So we just change colors and attack mode of the string (pinching is replaced by percussion). Or we use the piano for what it is, that is to say an instrument endowed with dynamics and, above all, resonance.
Feet glued to the ground
The very idea of the piano in Bach is, through an intelligent play of the pedals, to allow a life of the chords and to give birth, in particular in the Sarabandes (slow movements), a sound continuum which inhabits the temporal space while not not blurring the clarity of musical lines. The harpsichord cannot prolong the sounds, but these are its intrinsic limits, it is played differently and in other places. To play the piano without making it sound is not to use its features. So it’s quite simply the wrong instrument: like eating white fish without sauce in a steak restaurant! We can, if it’s on the menu, but that’s not really the concept …
Martin Helmchen came to play the Partitas of Bach on a Steinway, gluing his feet to the floor of the Pierre-Mercure room. He delivered a Bach of fingers, impressive fingers in shining and twirling currents (Partitas nbone 1, 3 and 5) or in the Scherzo de la 3e Partita took as quickly as possible.
Obviously, the fingers and thoroughness of a great pianist without feet or pedals are much better than the erratic ego of a (Lang Lang) or a (Simone Dinnerstein) pianist who comes to bend Bach’s music to their whims. romantic. Martin Helmchen’s dexterity is astonishing, the clarity of his polyphonic vision impeccable.
But in this soulless universe the Sarabandes inevitably turned to insignificant strumming and, after two hours, the row of sixteenth notes dried up by the kilometer ended up seriously boring. Martin Helmchen starting in the 2e Partita (Sinfonia, Allemande, Capriccio), the fourth of the six in the program, to have in addition to problems with memory, concentration and fingers, we left the last two (Partitas nbone 4 and 6) to the bravest and less disillusioned than us to go “purge our ears” with the disc, decidedly exceptional (conduct of sentences, ornamentation, intelligence of the sound!), by Schaghajegh Nosrati.