Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigan inaugurated Tuesday evening the new pianoforte at Bourgie Hall in Montreal, a very beautiful instrument by Rodney J. Regier that gives off an impression of poise and solidity.
It was Ronald Brautigam who was to carry out this baptism in January 2021, a ceremony postponed to October 2021 and then entrusted to Andreas Staier who could not assume it for health reasons. Brautigam therefore recovered the inauguration in this month of April 2022.
If the concert consisted in deploying the various facets of the reply inspired by Rodney J. Regier by the instruments of Viennese makers Conrad Graf and Ignaz Bösendorfer dating from the late 1820s to 1840s, we will say that this pianoforte is comfortably pleasant, flattering , more monobloc than kaleidoscopic and that it draws clearly more towards the Bösendorfer genre 1840 than towards the Graf of 1820.
During our interview with Ronald Brautigam last Saturday, the pianist praised the instruments of his friend McNulty, a colleague of Regier, saying: “Paul McNulty worked for Steinway. He therefore knows modern pianos very well and tries to approach on his copies the colors that can be found on modern instruments”. One would have said that he was describing there the new pianoforte offered by Pierre Bourgie to the room that bears his name: an instrument giving a feeling of modern solidity while dispensing “sepia” sonorities. What we missed a little and yet often makes the magic of pianoforte is the tiling of sonorities in the resonance. This Regier is above all an “old-fashioned” sound, much more than an intrinsic sound poetics linked to mechanics or a form of fragility.
Honorable Pianism
Ronald Brautigam came to deliver a “tailored” program, which is not the one he is currently filming. The Dutch pianist devotes himself to Schubert with a view to recording his final compositions this summer. He therefore skilfully referred to his scores in Mendelssohn, occasionally paying for a minor hitch during a page turn. Helping professionalism, all of this was very presentable and made it possible to note the incredible evolution between the romance op. 19 (1829-1832) and those op. 62 (1841-1844), whose Andante maestoso even seemed to prefigure, from afar, the 1st movement of the 5th Symphony by Mahler!
Rebelote in Schumann, a work from 1837 where the instrument held up without a problem (CQFD). Here it is, is Wirren Traumas that Brautigam did not fully have in his fingers. It is true that the thing is diabolical. Intelligent reading, of course, since the pianist is. He put forward some refined sounds.
You should not expect in the Sonata D.960 to great romantic outpourings. On the other hand, there was no major recourse to a subtlety of touch or spirit either. Brautigam spun through the score to show that it shouldn’t be approached in a convoluted or tortured way. All the keys did not necessarily respond to the nuances of the 2nd movement, but when they passed in finesse, delicious moments were born. In the great outbursts of FinalBrautigam was not always imperial.
It is also true that it was difficult to find the ground of the cows after the supernatural recital of Pavel Kolesnikov, Sunday. Of the latter we had written that he was as good at the concert as on the record. We must admit that judging by the recital on Tuesday evening, slightly disappointing, Ronald Brautigam on record seems more interesting than in concert.