Piotr Anderszewski is a pianist with a very particular stage presence. He entered and exited the Barbican’s large concert platform with a rapid, don’t-mind-me shuffle. At a venue that revels in polychrome lighting for solo recitals, his Steinway grand and plain orchestral chair were placed in a single pool of white. He is physically undemonstrative once seated: only the periodic descent of his head towards the keyboard or brief gazes upwards separated him from anyone with a desk job and half-decent posture.
Amid so much understatement what stands out is Anderszewski’s extraordinary sound. The term “attack” – the moment the fingers meet the keys – has rarely seemed more apt. Loud passages (and there were plenty of them in this heavyweight programme drawn from his famously slow-to-grow repertory) were explosive, as if carved out with a hammer and chisel. He visibly measured certain entries, flexing his fingers like an athlete limbering up.
In Anderszewski’s hands, Bach’s Partita No 6 was overwhelmingly muscular, bright to the point of brashness. Basslines were thunderous and every fugal entry appeared in high definition. It was the quiet moments that stood out, where notes were struck with the same remarkable precision but now in miniature, each ringing with a tiny crystalline gleam. (That many of these passages were accompanied by audible humming was distracting, albeit in the venerable Glenn Gould tradition.) The handful of Szymanowski’s Op 50 Mazurkas that followed – the only works on the programme that Anderszewski hasn’t recorded – were more persuasively haunted by their original dance form than any of the Bach movements. Circling descant lines were spare and elegiac, basslines heavy with barely suppressed violence. The half-remembered folk idioms sounded threatening, not jovial.
In the second half, Webern’s Variations, Op 27 were a showcase of Anderszewski’s pianistic pointillism, the ferocious intensity of his playing holding the audience spellbound. That he continued immediately without pause into Beethoven’s late Piano Sonata No 31 was a masterstroke – its opening transformed in this new sonic context. In fact the entire sonata sounded like a new discovery, raw and astonishing, from the liquid figuration in the first movement to the catastrophically wild energy of the last.
