Concert Review: Benjamin Grosvenor, 14 March 2023

Three scènes:

- A child sits leaning forward, slack-jawed, as arpeggios soar up four, five, six octaves.

- A man leans back, eyes closed, a glimmer of a smile on his face; wafer-thin pianissimo passages meander, pause, and fade away.

- An elderly woman jolts awake at pounding chords—dissonant, impassioned, and triumphant all at the same time.

Your correspondent saw these and more during Benjamin Grosvenor's colossal, sweeping piano recital at the Kennedy Center this past week. Mr. Grosvenor is celebrated for his recordings of composers from Bach to Ravel; he is no less revered onstage: your correspondent's mother, no green concertgoer herself, recalls his performance of Beethoven's C Minor Concerto with the New York Philharmonic in 2018 as the best concerto performance she has attended in her life. Your correspondent is suprised—most delightfully surprised—to accord another superlative: Mr. Grosvenor's performance, out of the seventy-plus piano recital attendances of your correspondent's life, was the finest by some distance.

Your correspondent has in fact attended a recital with the same first half—Busoni's transcription of Bach's Chaconne in D Minor for solo violin, and Schumann's Fantasy in C—as Mr. Grosvenor's: Mr. Hamelin's at Carnegie Hall, four-and-a-half years ago. Mr. Hamelin's performance of these two works had been magisterial, grand, sensitive—all qualities for which he is renowned. But Mr. Grosvenor's performance—with unbounded vitality, fathomless sorrow, and a casual disregard for traditional interpretation—went further for, and achieved to a greater degree, an ecstatic, almost dissociative state of wonder.

The Chaconne, from its first chord, snapped the audience to attention. Mr. Grosvenor is, no offense intended, not an imposing presence: neither short nor tall, in a tidy suit, and still rather baby-faced, he does not inspire much awe as he strides across a stage. But with the first notes, he seemed to take the audience by the lapels: "I have something to tell you." For the next quarter-hour, Mr. Grosvenor's tale seemed to encompass battles won, homelands abandoned, loves found and lost. Busoni's writing transfigures what is already one of Bach's most dramatic, moving works into a monolith of tragedy and passion; with Mr. Grosvenor's mèthode—to take each detail and stretch it to its logical extreme—it became a colossus of Wagnerian power and proportion, and the most superb realization of the Busoni Chaconne your correspondent has ever heard (over Mr. Kissin, Ms. Grimaud, and yes, Mr. Hamelin). Which isn't to say Mr. Grosvenor didn't give the more delicate moments their due. The elegiac, tender section before the final push to the finale, too often merely trodden through, glimmered with a confessional earnestness rarely heard on the recital stage today: its keening, major-key grief hit like scenes from a life flitting past before the hand's last twitch, the heart's final pump.

Schumann's Fantasy in C went off like a cannon: the first note, an accented G deep in the bass, is followed by perpetuum-mobile left hand figuration and a right hand chorale. Your correspondent had never registered before that the chorale is slightly delirious in a both-sane-and-not way, not unlike Schumann himself.

The second movement, a virtuoso romp of endless galloping rhythms and manic hand-crossing, was dispatched with a single sweat: a phone's ring made Mr. Grosvenor lose his place momentarily; he stumbled through a few passages quasi-improvisationally before landing on firm ground again. The rest of the movement proceeded smoothly, and the music, teetering on the edge of madness, frantic but determined, indeed sounded effortless, like a romp. Where Mr. Grosvenor's performance may have lagged just slightly behind Mr. Hamelin's in nuance and craft, it more than made up in sheer energy. The finale of the movement is perhaps the hardest minute of piano music Schumann ever wrote, but Mr. Grosvenor accelerated into it and did not let up, flying chords and all, until the last earth-shattering chord. It was a miracle the hall didn't erupt in applause—and, for once, your correspondent wouldn't have minded.

The last movement—the most moving, and expressively the most challenging—cannot aptly be described in words. With certain less-than-perfect performances, one can feel the audience growing restless: more shifting, subtle coughing and throat-clearing, whispering here and there. Suffice to say there was none here; Mr. Grosvenor entranced his audience from the airy, sighing opening arpeggios to the final passage, taken morendo (dying away)—not written as such, but all the better that it was performed that way. The applause before intermission was greater than most at the ends of recitals.

The latter half of the recital—Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin and Prokofiev's Piano Sonata no. 7 in B-flat Major—impressed upon your correspondent's mind the single thought: Mr. Grosvenor is capable of anything. Le Tombeau is a suite of Baroque structure—a prelude, a fugue, a few dances, a toccata—and Ravelian whizzbangery—brilliant color, textures you didn't know the piano was capable of, pyrotechnics for the sake of drama rather than ostentation—written as a tribute to friends who had died during World War I. The prélude was a jaunty, eager thing, bouncing along as the perfect, well, prelude to the rest of the kaleidoscopic suite. The fugue impressed your correspondent more than even Mr. Grosvenor's recording of Bach's keyboard partitas; it had all of the clear, articulated, Baroque counterpoint alongside the mesmerizing glow characteristic of Ravel's slow pieces. The menuet became a study in undanceable dances, skipping and sliding without a care in the world; never has a piece so delicately constructed sounded so improvised and free. The final movement, toccata, practically transformed the piano into a Tesla coil; your correspondent would not have been surprised to see bolts of plasma flying from the instrument's strings. The same possessed energy of the Fantasy's second movement was sustained for nearly four minutes; Ravel's hypersaturated, dizzying sprint of a finale has never been bettered.

The audience had hardly had a chance to catch its breath—Mr. Grosvenor of course didn't have to—when the acrid, sarcastic Prokofiev sonata took off. One of three so-called "War Sonatas," though the composer never endorsed the moniker, the Seventh is harshly momentous, moving broadly from dissonance and disorder to resolution and violent sublimity. The first movement's opening could be felt in your correspondent's molars; even knowing the music that was to come, his palms sweated profusely from holding the armrests. Mr. Grosvenor langorously unspooled the second movement, all rotten-fruit sweetness and drippingly bitter harmony. The darkness only relented in the ballistic finale, precipitato: a hammering 7/8 rhythm depicted—a march? a victory procession? cannon fire? Whatever it may have intended to conjure, Mr. Grosvenor took this muscle car of a movement at a breakneck clip, all burning rubber and screaming engines, from the revving first notes to the explosive last. Three sharp B-flat double octaves marked the end of the sonata, and the recital; for the first time in his life, your correspondent called out, "Bravo!"

With a house on its feet and cheers pouring forth, Mr. Grosvenor played two gorgeous encores—Ravel's Jeux d'eau, perfectly flowing and elegant, and one your correspondent didn't know, softly textured and slightly yearning. Your correspondent wouldn't dare touch one of the evening's four pieces, let alone perform them all together at a recital; leaving the hall, he felt as though he had witnessed God Himself. Mr. Grosvenor's potential is limitless—he may already have arrived there.

[Written 2023]

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