Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Mozart
– Sonata in F K 376.
Debussy– Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. Messiaen– Le merle noir. Poulenc– Sonata.
This was a very welcome return to Ireland by the young Israeli pianist Matan Porat, a most interesting winner of the prize for best semi-finalist as well as third place overall (I had him second) in the Axa Dublin International Piano Competition in 2003, the year Antti Siirala came first. With a biography now filled with things that do good publicity for the Dublin competition, it was good to hear him in one aspect of piano-playing not currently covered by the competition.
This was chamber music, for which he was joined on this occasion by flautist and fellow Israeli Roy Amotz. Their programme – reduced for this one-hour concert from the full programme advertised – consisted of four pieces of which two were originally for flute and two were arrangements.
The arrangements, while never less than pleasing, were intrinsically the less satisfying part of the programme. Debussy's ground-breaking and hypnotic Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faunehas two key attractions: its flute solo, delivered with suitable languor by Amotz, and its extraordinary orchestral palette, possible only to evoke – and not replicate – in (here uncredited) piano reduction, even with a performance as rich and sensitive as Porat's.
On the other hand, Porat simply shone in Mozart’s customary favouring of the keyboard in his sonatas for piano and violin, here represented by an arrangement with flute of the Sonata in F K. 376. But whereas Porat exuded the same style and engagement he so profitably deployed playing Mozart in that Axa semi-final, Amotz found it hard to make up the ground lost to both the composer’s piano bias and to being at a remove from the original instrumentation.
So where this concert really hit stride was in the music by Messiaen and Poulenc. Messiaen's 1951 stand-alone piece for flute and piano Le merle noir("The Blackbird") is an intense, five-minute blending of mimicked birdsong and post-war dissonance, which the duo truly sold by means of highly committed and virtuosic playing.
Amotz's strong technical facility was also to the fore in the mad Presto giocosofinale to Poulenc's Sonata, an exciting contrast to his lyric sweetness in the central Cantilena.
