The return of young pianist Albert Cano Smit to Montreal on Tuesday at Bourgie Hall, as part of the Bach Festival, materialized in a remarkable concert highlighting the poetic qualities of an artist to follow.
It was in 2017. Albert Cano Smit attacked at the age of 20 the monumental 1st Concerto de Brahms in the final of the Montreal International Musical Competition (CMIM). A daring bet, full of promises. Competitions are not there to judge the potential of pianists, it seems. He is a seasoned thirty-something who won the competition by playing the concerto he had just presented with the national orchestra of his country. Great good did him.
Even though Albert Cano Smit was among the three unsuccessful finalists, this did not prevent us from writing: “Cano Smit is the artist whose future we will watch with great interest”. He is now 25 years old. A student at Juilliard, he won two competitions, we saw him in Verbier and he benefited from the advice of Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Richard Goode and Stephen Hough.
The artist that we discover is very exactly the one on the anticipated trajectory in 2017, now a hundred cubits above the winner of the CMIM 2017 and his dolphins, above, also, Jayson Gillham the winner of the CMIM 2014 . Why ? Because Albert Cano Smit, at the base, had the imagination and the taste for risk. Today, he has better control over risk, still possesses the imagination and cultivates a sense of sound.
The great romantic
We are more and more surprised by the number of young pianists (Grosvenor, Kolesnikov, Geniusas, etc.) whose primary quality is culture and sound poetics. Albert Cano Smit belongs to this category of artists and tries to attract listeners in his quest. At any time, during his Kreisleriana of Schumann, we said to ourselves that since the OSM had let slip last week the opportunity to present the Piano Concerto of Schumann, we had in front of us the moving young poet to whom we had to dare to entrust him.
Albert Cano Smit is a great romantic: he had shown it in 2017 in his bold, solemn and slow Brahms concerto. He begins his 2021 concert by almost dissecting the Contrapunctus I of The art of running away. But his arrangement between energetic fugues and recurring returns to the theme is very clever. It stops time in the Contrapunctus V and gloriously propels the Contrapuntus IX alla duodecima, while pressing on the appearances of the theme, to make it the conclusion of its selection.
The English suite n ° 1 strikes with its contrasts and an approach that does not treat the piano as a substitute for the harpsichord, but as an expressive instrument. The Sarabande, weightless, becomes the natural heart of the work.
But it’s in Kreisleriana that Cano Smit, more Eusébius (the dreamer) than Florestan (the fiery) captivates us. He scrutinizes the resonances of the piano in the passages ” sehr langsam (Very slow) that it adorns with mystery. The “sehr lebhaft” (very lively) is animated with an interior life, not so much a bustle of tempo. Albert Cano Smit’s Schumann is not a restless cyclothymic, like Argerich or Le Sage, but a restless one who seems spied on by ghosts and seeks refuge within himself.
Here is truly a pianist whose evolution we always want to follow so that he can tell us, in the coming years, many other stories.