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Victor Goldberg, piano
Pro Musicis
Weill Recital Hall at
Carnegie Hall
April 21, 2010
Victor
Goldberg is an excellent pianist with a formidable technique, a
powerful tone, and a romantic soul (and a distracting habit of
tossing his hands way up). Russian-born, he has studied,
performed and won competitions in Europe, Israel and America,
and is the recipient of the 2008 Pro Musicis International
Award.
His Weill
Recital Hall concert, rather enigmatically entitled “From the
Depths of the Creative Spirit,” showed his pianistic strengths,
emotional projection, and stylistic versatility. Except for
Domenico Scarlatti’s famous E major Sonata – played with
filigree delicacy, crystal-clear runs and elegant leaps - the
program featured music of the 19th and 20th centuries. The
beginning of Chopin’s B-flat minor Scherzo immediately
demonstrated that Goldberg subscribes to a key element of
today’s performing style: utmost dynamic contrast. The opening
figure’s ominous whisper and the crashing chords following it
seemed to skirt the outer limits of the instrument’s sound, a
tendency toward extremes that continued throughout the concert.
But within these parameters, Mr. Goldberg has a wide range of
nuances and colors, which he used with great skill and
imagination.
Shostakovich
wrote his second Sonata in 1942 during Hitler’s infamous siege
of Leningrad that claimed 632,000 lives. One of the victims was
Shostakovich’s teacher Leonid Nikolaev, to whose memory the
sonata is dedicated. The Shostakovich family had been evacuated
from the besieged city, but, though composed in the comparative
safety of the countryside, the sonata has an eerie, unsettled
quality and a desolate ending; Mr. Goldberg’s intensely
expressive performance had a powerful emotional impact.
The program’s
highlight was Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Handel,
one of the most daunting masterpieces of the repertoire.
Goldberg met its instrumental and musical challenges with
masterful technical and tonal command. Combining careful
planning with spontaneity, austerity with romantic passion, he
made the variations building blocks in an overarching structure,
yet he also brought out their individual characters, using the
repeats to underline different voices. With the final fugue as a
true culmination, it was a most impressive performance.
Responding to the audience’s enthusiasm, he played encores by
Debussy, Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky.
-Edith Eisler
for New York
Concert Review; New York, NY
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