She is perhaps best known as a chamber musician, but Katya Apekisheva’s recital in the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama’s Steinway Series was ample demonstration of her credentials as a soloist of formidable technical prowess in the Russian style of her earliest training.
Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition demands weighty, powerhouse sound and finely executed details of the programmatic descriptions and, across the span of 10 movements, Apekisheva’s use of the extremes of dynamic range made these contrasts all the more urgent. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the final Great Gate of Kiev, always a triumphant climax, should now seem to carry with it a sense of tragic bombardment.
In choosing the last three pieces from Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, Apekisheva was also very much on home ground. Her strength is in creating long arcs of melodic line and in conveying a balletic grace, even if her tendency to indulge in a marked degree of rubato would risk a dancer coming a cropper.
It was in the less familiar French music of the first half of her recital that Apekisheva made her mark. The almost elegiac Fauré’s Nocturne, Op 33, No 1 in E flat minor was a dark way to open proceedings of a Sunday morning, its stormy passion coming to the fore before subsiding again, with the harmonic fluctuations in its partner, the A flat major No 3, then tantalisingly teased out.
If much of Fauré’s music – apart from his Requiem – still remains something of a mystery, that’s as nothing by comparison with his compatriot Mel Bonis, her 79-year life span identical, just a decade later. Bonis’s output was prolific, her piano music alone extending to 11 volumes, crying out to be heard. Apekisheva was a highly persuasive advocate of two of Bonis’s keyboard portraits of legendary women, the Mélisande of Maeterlinck’s play, and Omphale, the mythological Queen of Lydia, their flowing virtuosity and dramatic control revelatory.
Elena Langer’s 2020 work L’Armoire de Couperin neatly bridged the programme’s French and Russian elements. Originally written for harpsichord and referring tongue-in-cheek to Ravel’s suite Le Tombeau de Couperin, this contemporary tribute to baroque sensibilities with its typically quirky moments emerged with disarming clarity here.
