Rafał Blechacz plays Beethoven | Auditorium Parco della Musica | 27 February 2012

Less than a year since he was last in Rome delighting audiences in the Santa Cecilia concert hall, Polish classical pianist Rafał Blechacz was back at the Auditorium Parco della Musica yesterday evening, with another young star in the world of classical music at the helm, Colombian conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada, who was making his debut with the Accademia di Santa Cecilia Orchestra and Choir.

The evening opened with a rare treat - Elegischer Gesang, Op.118 and Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, Op. 112, two hauntingly beautiful and rarely-performed choral works by Beethoven - before Rafał Blechacz took to the stage to perform as the soloist in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major. Still only 26 years old and looking, if anything, slightly younger, Blechacz plays with a depth and maturity beyond his years. He is currently garnering unanimous critical praise for his latest and absolutely stunning recording of works by Szymanowski and Debussy (anybody lucky enough to have caught his performance last time around in Rome would have heard him play some of those pieces live). I am now hoping that we won't have to wait long before the immensely talented Blechacz records his own interpretation of Beethoven's piano concertos too – his playing last night was a wonderfully measured blend of intimate delicacy and sparkling virtuosity.

At the close of the concerto rapturous cheers and applause from the audience brought him back out on stage several times before he graciously conceded an encore. Blechacz famously won all the prizes at the 2005 Chopin Competition in Warsaw and it was to the work of his fellow countryman that he returned for what turned out to be an absolutely sublime encore – Chopin's Waltz in A minor Op.34 No.2. Unmissable!

The concert was rounded out with an exhilarating performance of Antonin Dvořak's Symphony No. 7, which saw both orchestra and conductor Orozco-Estrada enthusiastically applauded at its close.

Full programme:
Beethoven
Elegischer Gesang, Op. 118
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, Op. 112
Piano Concerto No. 4 G major, Op. 58
Encore:
Chopin
Waltz in A minor Op.34 No.2
*
Dvořák
Symphony No. 7 D minor, Op. 70

Evgeny Kissin – Grieg's Piano | Auditorium Parco della Musica | 5 February, 2012

Russian-born classical pianist Evgeny Kissin returned to enthral audiences in Rome at the weekend for a series of three concerts in the Santa Cecilia concert hall at the Auditorium Parco della Musica performing Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg's perennially popular Piano Concerto. British conductor James Judd stepped in at the last minute for Vladimir Jurowski who had been originally slated to conduct the Santa Cecilia Orchestra, but was forced to cancel due to sudden illness.

With Rome brought to a standstill by heavy snow falls and with schools, offices and museums closed, I had feared the worst on Saturday morning and resigned myself to the fact that the concert would surely be cancelled – thanks to the goodwill of the performers and the organisers, however, the concert was merely postponed until Sunday afternoon.

Grieg's Piano Concerto is something of a warhorse. One of my own earliest memories of hearing it as a child is a television sketch by British comedy legends Morecambe and Wise in which Eric Morecambe, together with an orchestra conducted by an exasperated André Previn, attempts to perform the concerto by playing “all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”! Incidentally, that often repeated piece of vintage comedy first aired in 1971, the year in which Evgeny Kissin was born. A former child prodigy upon whom the “genius” epithet was bestowed at a tender age – he was playing entire piano concertos from memory at age four – the forty year old adult Kissin is now a critically acclaimed virtuoso and considered one of the world's great pianists. Who better than Kissin to bring fresh life and power to those familiar motifs of Grieg's richly melodic concerto? I was utterly captivated by the understated bravura of his playing throughout the entire performance.

The sold-out concert hall was maybe not as full as one would have expected under normal circumstances, but the rapturous applause and cheers of bravo from the audience were as loud as ever when Kissin took his bows at the end of the concert and was cheered back on stage for a first exhilarating encore, where he announced in a surprisingly deep voice that he would play Grieg's From the Carnival. Kissin has a reputation for enormous generosity with his encores and true to form, the audience managed to cajol him out again for one final gem – an exquisite rendition of Chopin's Minute Waltz. A must-see performer!

The concert was rounded out with Brahms' Tragic Overture, which opened the afternoon, and Tchaikovsky's immensely enjoyable Symphony No 2 - “The Little Russian”, which were also met with warm applause.

Full programme:
Brahms
Tragic Overture
Grieg
Piano Concerto in A minor
Encore:
Grieg
From the Carnival (Pictures from Country-Life, Op.19)
Chopin
Minute Waltz
*
Tchaikovsky
Symphony No 2 - “The Little Russian”

Snow in the Eternal City!

When a light dusting of snow fell on the city of Rome almost two years ago in February 2010, I was amazed and delighted to have witnessed such a rare event.

Incredibly, it has snowed again this year - Friday night saw heavy snowfalls and Romans awoke this morning to find the Eternal City covered in a thick blanket of snow.

Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, Piazza Navona in the snow - Photo © Deborah Swain

Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986 -2011 at the Gagosian Gallery

Phe-Tyr, 2004–11

Whilst Damien Hirst may have achieved worldwide fame, and some notoriety, with his sliced and diced animals pickled in formaldehyde, the British artist's current show at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome is a decidedly less gruesome affair. The Complete Spot Paintings are exactly as the title implies – precise grids of different coloured discs of household gloss enamel painted onto white or off-white canvases – and some of them are really rather beautiful. Not that Hirst's works can't be beautiful - his controversial butterfly collages with their dazzling, kaleidoscopic colours are stunning, but the thought of the artist – or presumably his numerous assistants – systematically pulling the wings off thousands of exotic butterflies to create them, inevitably makes viewing these, and other works, disturbing.

Damien Hirst is one of the few post-Warhol artists to have truly become a global brand and as if to emphasise this point the 300 or so paintings in this show are spread across all of the Gagosian’s eleven locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, with seventeen pieces on display in Rome. Similarly to Warhol, Hirst has only ever painted a handful of Spot Paintings himself and instead employs studio assistants to execute the works – the assistants even choose the colours. Perhaps it is the diversity of hands and very individual colour choices behind the the creation of these works that brings such variety to this exhibition – some colours positively vibrate and keep the viewer gazing at the canvas long and hard, whilst other compositions appeal less and barely earn more than a glance. Even the steadiness of the outlines and the precision of each dot might vary from canvas to canvas to create subtle, yet fundamental differences that render each piece unique, and very human, in spite of their initial machine-made impact.

Many of the paintings are titled after pharmaceutical drugs and some ways one is reminded of the multi-coloured pills used in Hirst's medicine cabinet installations, such as Lullaby Spring which contained 6,136 individually painted pills (and which sold for a record-breaking £9.65 million at Sotheby's in London a few years back). Maybe, the bad boy of British art has been a colourist all along...

I was always a colorist, I’ve always had a phenomenal love of color… I mean, I just move color around on its own. So that’s where the spot paintings came from—to create that structure to do those colors, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of color.

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986 -2011 continues at the Gagosian Gallery at Via Francesco Crispi, 16 until 10 March, 2012. Worth a visit!

Image © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2011 (Web-resolution, fair use)

Mondrian: Perfect Harmony at the Complesso del Vittoriano

Mondrian: Perfect Harmony at the Complesso del Vittoriano

Composition No. 12 with Blue © Mondrian/Holtzman Trust

One of the best places in the world to view the work of Piet Mondrian is undoubtedly the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, where Dutch architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage created a Municipal Art Gallery designed to fully exploit natural light wherever possible. When I visited the museum as an art student over twenty years ago, the dazzling colours and light in Mondrian's early landscape paintings had an enormous and lasting impact on me – these works were sheer perfection. I was genuinely excited, therefore, when I discovered that the current Mondrian exhibition at the Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome would consist almost entirely of works on loan from the Gemeentemuseum's vast collection of works by the Dutch painter.

Mondrian's primary coloured Neo-plastic paintings are truly iconic and instantly recognisable the world over. They are represented at the close of this retrospective by a handful of paintings in the final room, and include the Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue (1921) used in the poster campaign across the city, as well as Composition No. 12 with Blue (started in Paris in 1936 and completed after his move to New York in 1942), on loan from the National Gallery of Canada. As familiar as these paintings may be, no reproduction can ever quite match the thrill of the encounter with real paint on canvas – the dynamism of Composition No. 12, with its flickering optical effects, kept me transfixed.

Study for Five Trees along the Gein with Moon (1907)
© Mondrian/Holtzman Trust

Perhaps the greatest achievement of this exhibition, however, is in the way it traces the logical progression of Mondrian's artistic journey from his origins as a painter of Dutch impressionist landscape paintings in the style of the Hague School, through the various artistic movements of the twentieth century, until the influence of cubism set him on the path towards first, De Stijl and eventually, total abstraction. Symbolism, luminism, pointillism, and the vivid colors of fauvism, all played a part, as did his interest in theosophy, and it is these earlier paintings and varied styles which will surely surprise and delight any visitor with only a passing knowledge of the artist.

The Red Cloud © Mondrian/Holtzman Trust

Whilst Mondrian would eventually pare down his artistic vision into vertical and horizontal lines and blocks of saturated primaries, this tendency can also be seen in his charcoal studies of trees, which are well represented in this show, and in the architectural forms such as the lighthouses, windmills and churches that break the flat Dutch landscape, or even gorgeous splashes of colour such as a solitary salmon-coloured cloud in an azure sky in The Red Cloud (1907).

The awkward spacial layout and lack of natural lighting at the Vittoriano make this exhibition space less than ideal for showcasing the shimmering beauty of Mondrian's early landscapes, but this is nevertheless, a must-see show and an excellent introduction to the artist's entire oeuvre.

Mondrian: Perfect Harmony continues at the Complesso del Vittoriano until 29th January, 2012.

Copyright on paintings in this post as indicated (web-resolution, fair use rationale).