It’s quite a challenge to come up with a programme for a piano recital with a Shakespearean theme, but Alexei Volodin managed it, for the first half of his Wigmore Hall concert at least. In fact just one of the works he’d chosen was originally intended for piano – one of Nikolay Medtner’s 34 Skazki (Fairytales). They are miniatures that portray inner dramas, and the C-sharp minor piece that Volodin played, the fourth of the Op 35 set, is prefaced by a famous quote from King Lear: “Blow, wind, and crack thy cheeks.”
In fact that turbulent, unrelenting piece showed Volodin at his best, for he seems to belong to the school of Russian-trained players who believe that the faster and louder a piece is played the better. There weren’t many real pianissimos during the evening, and not much in the way of subtle textural effects either. The 10 pieces from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet did better on menace than they did on charm, even in the numbers devoted to Juliet, while Rachmaninov’s transcription of the scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music was taken just a fraction too fast to be cleanly articulated.
Volodin followed this sequence with more Rachmaninov with a very different literary connection. The programme for the First Piano Sonata comes from Goethe’s Faust, and it follows the scheme of Liszt’s Faust Symphony, with each of the movements representing a portrait of one of the protagonists.
Predictably, Volodin’s performance was much more convincing in its outer-movement depictions of Faust and Mephistopheles than it was with the more introspective centrepiece, devoted to Gretchen, but the majesty that he conjured for the sonata’s closing pages was certainly impressive.
