Gallic Hue Bodes Well For Mozart

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday September 26, 2007

Reviewed by Graeme Skinner

ROGER MURARO

City Recital Hall, September 24

ALMOST 20 years after his first visit as part of the composer Olivier Messiaen's entourage in 1988, the French pianist Roger Muraro is back in Australia, and if his recital on Monday night is an indicator, he will be worth hearing in Mozart's Piano Concerto in A major with the Sydney Symphony tomorrow and on Friday.

He has been a prize-getter in competitions in Parma (Liszt) and Moscow (Tchaikovsky), and has recorded Chopin and Messiaen commercially. By contrast, his Sydney solo program was a mostly Gallic affair - Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen - with a gesture to "exotic" Spain in Ravel's Alborada del Gracioso and in the person of the French-trained Isaac Albeniz.

A late change in order meant he played Debussy's Images, Book II immediately after the interval, rather than first up, a fortunate move. After the more decoratively impressionistic Ravel and Albeniz in the first half, the century-old Debussy set rightly was the musical meat, its greater depth of sound and complexity of interlocking ideas drawing Muraro out intellectually as well as technically.

The publicity promised performances with Muraro's "trademark panache", though they were, in fact, delivered with a minimum of the swagger this might denote. His playing was elegant, economical in gesture and compelling in attention to detail. Especially memorable was the painterly voicing of distant chords in the closing moments of the first and last pieces of Albeniz's Suite Iberia Book I.

A typically under-demonstrative Sydney Recital Hall audience finally stirred itself to a brief volley of bravos, but Muraro might have expected, as I think he deserved, a more prolonged show of appreciation at the end.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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