Musica Viva. The Adelaide Town Hall. 12 Nov 2025
Polish pianist Piotr Anderszewski is currently touring Australia for Musica Viva, and his one-and-only concert in the Adelaide Town Hall was a provocative reminder about how important it is to experience art music ‘live’, rather than choosing recordings too often.
Why provocative? Because his interpretations are sometimes so different to what one is accustomed on ‘definitive’ recordings that his playing rouses one to listen closely as if hearing the music for the first time, and reminds us that performing music is a very personal and human activity.
Anderszewski is recognised as being a superlative interpreter of the music of Brahms, and the first half of his program is entirely Brahms - a selection of short pieces all around 5 minutes duration each from Seven Fantasies, Op. 116, Three Intermezzi, Op. 117, Six Pieces for Piano, Op. 118, and Four Pieces for Piano, Op. 119.
Anderszewski appears reserved and fully focussed as he purposefully and deliberately strides to the piano, adjusts his chair, gently places his hands on the keyboard and gently coaxes the Intermezzo No. 1, Op. 119 from the mighty concert Steinway. But he is not eliciting something that is pre-set and rigidly unchanging, such as what we might hear again and again on a recording. His performance is unique to the very moment and is dependent on his emotional base at the time. For the next 50 minutes or so we hear the music of Brahms as perhaps Brahms himself might have heard it in his own mind as he first composed it. We hear a performance in which the quietest notes seem quite alone, the fortés have unnerving clarity and authority, passage work has gossamer-like delicacy, unusual harmonies sound ‘in place’, emotion is ‘worn on the sleeve’ without becoming mawkish, and brooding sadness becomes a thing of beauty.
Anderszewski plays all twelve Brahms pieces with only the briefest pause between each one. There is no room for audience applause. The pieces are carefully sequenced together as if they belong together as a single composition, and they almost do, for that is the response Anderszewski evokes from the listener.
The second half of the program features two Bach Preludes & Fugues (E major BWV 878, and G-sharp minor BWV 887) from The Well Tempered Clavier, Book II, and Beethoven’s penultimate Piano Sonata No 31 in A-flat, Op. 110. If Anderszewski was ever idiosyncratic in his interpretations with anything on his program, it was certainly with these.
There is an enormous collection of recordings available of the Bach Preludes and Fugues, and it is easy to adopt a favourite and compare a live performance to that. By doing so, it is probable that Anderszewski’s interpretations might ‘jar’ a little in that he capitalises on the modern piano’s ability to give lush, romantic and sonorous characteristics to something that might otherwise be more accustomed to a more detached sound that amplifies the counterpoint. But, Anderszewski’s interpretation was fresh and exciting, and as one member of the audience remarked withing my hearing “It’s as if I’d never heard it before, and I must now listen to it again when I get home.”
In the mighty Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 31, Anderszewski employed a surprising amount rubato and was almost talking to himself as he played, something akin to the style of the legendary Glenn Gould. Beethoven’s last two piano sonatas stand in distinction to what came before – they almost presage jazz – and Anderszewski demonstrated this at the keyboard. It felt as if he was extemporising at times, and the result was electric.
The next time I hear Anderszewski in concert it won’t be soon enough.
Kym Clayton
When: 12 Nov
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
