Magic With The Lively Lad

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday June 26, 2007

Reviewed by Peter McCallum

CLASSICAL ROGER WOODWARD AND SIMON TEDESCHI

City Recital Hall, June 24

ROGER WOODWARD is a mercurial magician at the keyboard, able to blend subtle and surprising colours and shapes to create an arc in the air.

Simon Tedeschi is a showman whose nonchalant pluck raises a smile from admirers.

Stravinsky's Concerto for Two Solo Pianos leaves little space for magic or nonchalance, yet brought these two players together in a performance of vivid rhythmic intricacy.

Only the slow movement, a pastiche of a Baroque arioso, allowed time to revert to character. For the demanding outer movements, flamboyance was put aside while each hewed out spiky textures and flinty phrases with exhilarating dispatch.

Bach's Concerto in C, BWV 1061, creates a similar opportunity to relish its brilliant torrents: supremely organised notes yet the first movement was taken at such deliberate steadiness one longed for the players to let it flow. The last movement, however, galvanised the two into splendid momentum.

For Anne Boyd's Book of the Bells each pianist was equipped not only with the magnificent Steinway but some marvellously chthonic gongs which rang as if tapping into the viscera of eternity. This piece sets out layers of silence and vibration as though laying out the interlocking musics of the spheres, though its extended duration doesn't leave the listener many places to go if you are not in the mood for its trance-like meditation.

Mozart brings out the best and the worst. In the Sonata in D major, K448, I found Tedeschi's exaggerated shaping and pulling back of rhythm tasteless at times, though it's amazing what a lively lad with a bit of pluck can get away with.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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