Anna Tsybuleva took first prize in the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2015. The 25-year-old’s win came as a surprise – the concerto final may have been a lacklustre affair as a whole, but there were at least two other pianists who gave more interesting performances than her rather unfocussed account of Brahms’s Second Concerto.
Tsybuleva’s Wigmore Hall appearance was her highest profile date in the UK since that Leeds win. Her programme, of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Schumann, Medtner and Debussy, looked to be nicely wide-ranging, and wide enough, one hoped, to reveal some of the qualities that presumably she had shown in the earlier rounds in Leeds to justify her success.
But that enlightenment never came. Tsybuleva’s incoherent, safety-first treatment of Bach’s quirky F sharp minor Fantasia, with its stream-of-consciousness sequence of ideas, could have been put down to nerves at the beginning of her recital, but the impersonal account of Schumann’s Etudes Symphoniques that followed was much harder to explain away. There was none of the sense of fantasy that convincing Schumann performances require, nothing that brought the music to life.
The second half was a little more encouraging. Medtner’s G minor Sonata had plenty of the necessary flashy fingerwork, though not much of the structural coherence its Lisztian single-movement form really demands. Three Debussy preludes, followed by L’Isle Joyeuse, sparkled intermittently too, though rhythms were still blurred, and keyboard colours muted.
If Tsybuleva really has a musical personality that can engage an audience, she showed far too little of it here.
- At Skipton Town Hall 24 January. Box office: 01756 799912
