Incredibly Gifted
Nicholas Spice · Khatia Buniatishvili
Judging by the number of hits on her YouTube clips, the 23-year-old Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili can scarcely be called a discovery, but, when I chanced on her for the first time the other day on Radio 3, her playing came as a revelation to me. She was in the middle of the Schumann C major Fantasy, playing it as if it really meant something to her, and the sense of release in the flow of musical energy was wonderful, creating great emotional intensity without any distortion to the architecture of the piece.
Buniatishvili is incredibly gifted. She has temperament, sensibility and intelligence, and, like the very greatest pianists before her, she has the ability to make the listener hear in the sound of the music the experience of the fingers that are making it. In seeming ourselves to touch, we are touched.
She hasn’t made any recordings yet, so you’ll have to make do with the smattering of fragmentary YouTube clips. I’d start with the various bits and pieces of the Schumann Fantasy, then move to the two extracts from the Brahms Second Piano Concerto (the clip from the second movement is especially startling). There are also extracts from the Chopin B minor Scherzo and the fourth Ballade, snatches of the Liszt Sonata and a frankly incredible performance of the Mephisto Waltz which restores imagination to piano virtuosity and makes you understand what Liszt was all about.
Comments
...she has the ability to make the listener hear in the sound of the music the experience of the fingers that are making it. In seeming ourselves to touch, we are touched.
which is certainly overwrought, but even if taken literally, doesn't mean she's touching us with her fingers.
Your innuendos make it sound like the cleavage exposing was done by anyone other than Buniatishvili herself. You can't blame Nicholas Spice that Youtube video is the only available medium for listening to free music. I found the entire video (facial expressions, cleavage) distracted my attention from what was being played so well.
I don't really disagree with most of what you write above, but I'm doubtful of the ability of words to get to the heart of the phenomena you're addressing.
But Nicholas' post is a prototypical example of what is wrong with music criticism these days: it is so purplish, he might as well have used that color for the font. Perhaps also one of those ersatz longhand topographies and added an RSVP for Kathia. And his comment goes beyond, becoming purely embarrassing. "Music works through metaphors of the body. It moves and breathes." This is the kind of writing that makes me turn the TNY or NYT into an spherical ballistic missile following a curvaceously voluptuous trajectory to the rubbish bin. Every single of Nicholas words' brings attention to his kitschy sensibility rather than to the performance he is writing about, to the musician, let alone the music. He should be reviewing Liberace or his contemporary heir, Lang Lang and stay away from real talent like this pianist.
Her debut album for Sony Classical, due in spring next year, will mark Liszt’s 200th anniversary, and will include the Sonata in B minor, along with Liebestraum No 3, La Campanella, Hungarian Rhapsody No 2 and the Mephisto Waltz.