Filip Michalak at St Mary’s Perivale
Radiance and beauty of a great artist
Some remarkable playing of aristocratic maturity and simple beauty. I cannot remember ever listening with such satisfaction to these six pieces op 118 as today. They were played with sumptuous rich sound and scrupulous attention to Brahms’ markings. I do not mean just attention to the dots and dashes on the page but the true meaning behind a notation which is the nearest a composer can get to describing the sounds in his head. A full rich sound ,never hard, but with a glowing luminosity that rarely I have heard on an instrument that I have listen to for many a year. It reminded me of the richness of sound of Bruno Leonardo Gelber who had acquired a rich sound through being bedridden as a child with poliomyelitis and only having a keyboard on his bed to practice on. No pedal of course so there was the chameleonic legato , like an organist, never leaving the keys, playing with weight in the horizontal not vertical sense. It is the school of Scaramuzza of course where so many great pianists were created in Argentina. I read that Filip had been mentored by Gabriela Montero and expect this has been a great influence allowing him to search out this wonderful golden sound that gave such body and strength to all he did today.
