IAN PACE: Piano
KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL
Friday, 30th October, 2015
Ian Pace is giving two concerts for sound this year. The first, on Friday evening was devoted to the music of just one composer Pascal Dusapin. Two of his shorter pieces preceded his Magnum Opus for piano, Sept Études pour piano, two of which were dedicated to this evening’s performer and another two to Vanessa Wagner who has also made a recording of the works.
After hearing these pieces, it did not surprise me to learn that Dusapin had studied with Messiaen and was also an admirer of Edgar Varèse. There were echos of both in his Études. I was also interested to learn that he had spent years as a jazz pianist and that explained some things too.
In fact we learned that Dusapin came to write for piano quite late in his composing career but he is now recognised as a landmark composer for advanced piano music.
Ian Pace is a performer who is gifted with an almost terrifying level of technical virtuosity. I suspect that the University’s quite stolid old Bluthner has never been put through its paces (no pun intended) like this before – and that after what it was subjected to by Ensemble Alternance at Lunchtime. I’ll bet it is saying to the other pianos, “Hey, look what I’m doing these days!”
Of the two short introductory pieces in the programme, the first, entitled 1er Février 2007 was very short indeed, followed by Schnell, faster as the title suggested, but not that much longer. These pieces gave us a taste of Dusapin’s style and of Ian Pace’s amazing virtuosity but I began to be concerned that we were going to be out of the Chapel in just a few minutes after taking our seats. I need not have worried because the seven studies are decidedly more substantial works. Each piece is centred on a different aspect of piano technique, trills or ornaments or even just as in “tangram” the third study, repeated notes. Here I was reminded of the film Marathon Man where Laurence Olivier set himself the task of repeating the line “Is it safe?” with as many different inflections as he could. In a similar way Ian Pace managed to give so many of his repeated notes a different inflection, a different significance within the music. How amazing was that? Long sustained notes in some of the études were made to sing out magnificently then in the penultimate study which began with a right hand trill while the left hand played a strong slow moving melody the music just went mad with at one point the pianists hands superposed and seemingly trying to drill their way through the keyboard.
I was lucky to be sitting where I could see the scores quite clearly and it was fascinating to watch the notes on the page and then Ian Pace’s hands bringing them vibrantly to life. His playing was so precise, so intentional and so well thought out.
This music has the feeling of being freely improvised – but not at all. Every note was there, clearly written down on the page but it was part of Ian Page’s brilliance as an interpreter that he led us to think otherwise. I am looking forward to his performance in the MacRobert Building tomorrow.
