BY JAMES ROOS
Herald Music Critic
Jeffrey Biegel, the Kapell
Competition winner previously
presented here by the Chopin
Foundation Council of South Florida,
returned to
play a memorable recital
for the Vizcaya Foundation Sun
day night in
the villa's
inner courtyard and displayed his
enormous growth as a
thinking
man's pianist.
Biegel possesses encompassing technique that he places
fully at the service of music,
and his interpret-
ations demonstrated a thorough understanding of the background of each
score. |
 |
The Chopin G minor Ballade
tells a tone-story, and Biegel
gave it the character of a musical narrative, phrasing the
opening slow section with
exceptional breadth, yet holding this free-form piece tightly
together. He built up the stormy
passion that reflects Chopin's
unhappy love for Maria Wodzinska and swept the Ballade to
a fiery conclusion.
Liszt's famous vignette
inspired by Petrarch's 104th
Sonnet was also unfurled in
|
gleaming tone with spacious, deeply poetic lyricism, and the
dazzling Schu!z-Evler transcription of Strauss' Blue Danube sparkled with glittering
facility that evoked ghostly virtuosos like Josef Lhevinne, who
made the old showpiece a
mainstay of his turn-of-the-century repertoire.
Biegel's discussion of seven
Gershwin Preludes (including
four less familiar than the
famous Three Preludes) and the
1924 original-manuscript version of Rhapsody in Blue was
especially enjoyable for his
detective-like identification of
the influences of Debussy, Chopin and Prokofiev. But his
Gershwin playing was also optimal -- unaffected, unsentimen
talized, rhythmically freewheeling, and tangy. It was fascinating, too, to hear a few of the
bridge passages Gershwin originally composed for Rhapsody
that are usually cut.
Encores? Of course. Schumann's Warurn? and Mozskowski's Etincelles, though it's
hard to hear that last finger-twister without hearing in the
mind's ear Vladimir Horowitz's
breathtaking way with it. |