It’s almost 10 years since, at the age of 20, Rafał Blechacz won all five first prizes at the most prestigious piano competition, the Chopin in Warsaw. Then it seemed only a matter of time until Blechacz would establish himself near the top of the international pianistic tree, but so far his career hasn’t quite followed that assured trajectory. There have been some dazzling recordings alongside others that have been much less successful, while Blechacz’s appearances in the UK have been sporadic and just as inconsistent.
His Wigmore recital – a rather unenterprising programme of sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven, followed by a Chopin group – did little to clarify things. Most pianists become more subtle as they mature, extending their range of keyboard touch and colour and using it more discriminatingly, but as he approaches 30, Blechacz seems determined to move in the opposite direction. The sonatas here, Mozart’s D major K311 and Beethoven’s Pathétique Op 13, were heavy-handed and superficial, while the Chopin sequence, the three mazurkas of Op 56 and three waltzes Op 64, followed by the towering F sharp minor Polonaise Op 44, seemed as if this pianist had played them all just once too often.
Technically everything was as it should be, but there was no hint of the delicacy and refinement that sometimes make Blechacz’s playing seem so special, and little sense of emotional engagement, either, until his encore. That was Brahms’s A major Intermezzo Op 118 No 2. Suddenly everything clicked into focus. The music seemed to matter, the rubato became instinctive rather than contrived, every phrase was individually coloured and shaped. The transformation was so complete that one wondered why Blechacz had put together a programme of Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin when, at present, he seems so much more engaged by music from the second half of the 19th century. A genuinely puzzling evening.
