Born in Jordan in 1988 but educated in Britain (at the Purcell School and the Royal Academy of Music) from the age of 11, Karim Said is clearly a pianist to follow. His debut recording comes under the title of Echoes from an Empire – the Austro-Hungarian empire, that is, which was swept away by the maelstrom of the first world war. The earliest work in Said’s survey is George Enescu’s Suite No 2, from 1903, in which the musical language of Brahms is seasoned spiked with the inflection of Romanian folk music; the latest Bartók’s Three Rondos on Slovak Folk Tunes, eventually completed in 1927 though based on tunes that he had collected before the outbreak of the great war. Said shows himself to be a wonderfully full-blooded interpreter of this music, in which the vestiges of late romanticism constantly butt up against the early stirrings of modernism. His performance of Webern’s student Sonata Movement from 1906 reveals the emotional power that the composer would later keep on the shortest of leashes; Janáček’s Sonata projects a potent mix of anger and despair, while the connections between Berg’s Sonata Op 1 and Schoenberg’s Three Pieces Op 11 have never seemed so obvious.
