Eighty-year-old piano legend Elisabeth Leonskaja throws herself on to the piano stool and into the two tumultuous descending chromatic scales that open Beethoven’s Op 77 Fantasia in G minor in a single gesture. We have a long way to go in a recital programme that reads like an Mittel-European lucky dip – Beethoven, Schoenberg, Chopin, Webern, Schubert – and Leonskaja isn’t messing around.
Of course, there was nothing chance about the programming. The Austrian pianist’s expressive, emotional playing may grab the headlines, but it’s the unerring sense of underlying architecture that’s the thread through her long career. We heard that here, not just within each of the works, but in the shared foundations, and sometimes secret connecting passages, she revealed between them.
With the inscrutable aphorisms of Webern’s Op 27 Variations (1936) and the fragments that are Schoenberg’s 6 Little Piano Pieces (1911) already in her sights, Leonskaja darted in and out of the truncated utterances and half-thoughts, the thematic dead ends and fancies that open Beethoven’s Fantasia. These, she suggested, were the true heart of the piece, not the dutiful variations that later see the music knuckle down to business. When those chromatic scales returned it was like a punchline: music we thought had finally been brought to heel throwing up its head to reveal its still-wild, unbroken spirit.
If we expected contrast between the Schoenberg and the Chopin that followed then we fell into Leonskaja’s trap. Lyricism and yearning were uppermost in the former, No 2 sounding almost like a second Viennese “Raindrop” Prelude – more so than the spiky flurries that open Chopin’s Scherzo No 1 in B minor. Passagework wasn’t always clean, but there was absolutely no doubt about the intent, whether here in the musical storm of a beginning, or the thunderous force with which she closed the Polonaise-fantaisie in A flat.
Schubert’s substantial Piano Sonata in A minor D845, composed on the brink of stardom in 1825, closed the programme. The slow movement’s variations were each cherished, Leonskaja’s left hand always anchoring their lightness, reminding us of their kinship with the bigger beasts of the scherzo and closing rondo. We had at last arrived at something substantial, complete: a full fresco in a programme of mosaic fragments.