2024-08-17 03:01:00
It was an enjoyable concert from start to finish, with a friendly programme and a performer capable of creating just the right atmosphere to enchant an attentive audience. On Thursday, at the Argentina Room of the Kirchner Cultural Centeras part of the always outstanding Mozart Midday Concerts cycle, the pianist Raul Canosa gave a very good recital. The Spaniard, who showed an optimal technique and a well-tempered sensitivity, articulated his presentation through a program whose economy revealed the relationship between pianistic pillars of romanticism and its Spanish nationalist successorswith works by Frederic Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Isaac Albéniz, Ernesto Halffter and, more recently, Miguel Ángel González Vallés and Canosa himself.
Loose and ironic –a fact that is, if not fundamental, always appreciated in a concert artist– Canosa predisposed the audience in the best way and placed each of the works with kindness, immediacy and humor. Reversing the order of what was announced in the program, he began his work with the Intermezzo in A major Op. 118 No. 2by Brahms. The almost rhapsodic scaffolding and the delayed waltz atmosphere of the piece – the work of a composer in his autumn – served Canosa to begin to trace a landscape of calm dynamics, which would begin to stir, without cracking, with the Ballad no3 in A flat major Op. 47by Chopin, announced as the first piece. Clear and lightWithout getting bogged down in the labyrinths of the work and its references, Canosa offered a brilliant reading.
The piece by the great Pole, which like much of his work is permeated by popular airs, worked better as the second piece in the program because served as a linkwith its cadences and rhythmic sensuality, to enter the Hispanic universe with to Havana Halffter’s piece. Canosa brought just the right amount of grace and sensitivity to highlight the features of the Madrid composer’s piece, which, more grace than science, does not go beyond the picturesque salon. Along the same lines, but with more imagination and superior piano resolution, “Tango” – part of the Spain Suiteby Albéniz–, ended up marking the program’s entry into another musical territory, which would have good moments with two works by González Vallés.
The Galician composer’s music is filled with the genes of improvisation that lie at its core. Habanera-Tango and the most concise Bandoneon Tango were two examples of pianistic skill of great effect, which Canosa knew how to channel towards a certain civic abstraction with notable expressiveness. The figure of the composer-pianist, a common feature of the works in this programme, was completed with Stolen jack, by Canosa himself. Of particular technical and emotional demand, the work –which develops features of the traditional “Jota aragonesa”– was the highlight of the recitalWithout overacting or duplicity, the performer put his virtuosity, which despite being solid is still plastic and elegant, at the service of Hispanic ease.
He prolonged applause In front of an enthusiastic audience he was rewarded with two encores. The first was a “Nocturne” by Chopin – the famous “Op. 9 No. 2” – played with tango licenses which highlighted Canosa’s talents as a good improviser – another appreciable trait of the pianist – and with the Waltz of the goblin –yes, Dolina’s, in Misha Dačić’s arrangement– played with inspired lightness, to link what an hour earlier and in another region of reverie had begun with the waltz of the old and beloved Brahms.