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Philharmonic REVIEW by C.Wall
Alexandra Dovgan may not yet be seventeen but, several years into a sober performing career, it would be quite unfair to call her a child prodigy.
Her youthful expression is never impatient: each performance an exploration of a specific composition on a particular piano.
Though she is perfectly polite to the audience, she addresses the music as though there were no spectators.
Ms Dovgan’s recital at the Convent Ballroom, presented by The Katsuma Trust, marked another coup by the Gibraltar Philharmonic Society.
The Toccata that opened J S Bach’s Partita for keyboard No. 6, BMW 830, had an almost improvisational fluidity. Volume and vibrato were varied according to phrase, which left the slightest impression of the composition’s harpsichord origin.
The Sarabande was boldly extroverted, with a tactile brittleness that shifted logically to the spirited Gigue, and an air of harmonious irresolution.
The emotion expressed in Beethoven’s programmatic Piano Sonata No. 26, Op. 81a, is also mature and reflective, sufficient for the composer to resent the popular French nickname “Les Adieux”.
The opening of the Adagio was dirge slow, the solemnity undermined with a soulful restlessness, cueing the uneasy harmonies of the virtuosic second theme. There was less ambiguity in the second movement, evoking loss and lament, through which the rests articulated absence.
The final movement, representing the return of Beethoven’s patron, was lively and effusive, though again punctuated by the delicacy of an unhealed wound.
More Bach followed, this time Rachmaninov’s piano arrangement of three movements from Violin Partita No. 3, BMW 1006.1
The Preludio, all semiquavers, seemed ornamental before sweeping into something more emotive. The popular Gavotte en Rondeau was here decorous and restrained, though never dry. The Gigue seemed more restless, a dance seeking resolution.
Rachmaninov’s Op. 42 Variations on a Theme of Corelli, a piece the composer claimed to never have played properly in concert, offered a more structural challenge to Ms Dovgan.
She switched easily from a reverential Theme to a giddy dissonance by the third Variation, and the returning Andante had a different edge.
The eighth Variation was uncanny, and the ninth otherworldly. There was more animated virtuosity in the middle variations, while the more tortured expressions we often associate with Rachmaninov appeared towards the end.
I could sense the organising principle in her interpretation, but couldn’t quite understand where she was going.
Even the generous two encores from Mr Dovgan seemed thought out before us.
She seems to know so much, and so keen to discover more.
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