French President Jacques Chirac last week voiced his continuing concern that the dominance of American culture would prove to be a global catastrophe.
However, had he been at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater last Sunday afternoon, he might have been less fearful of Yankee hegemony. As the audience lights dimmed, a slight, gawkily attractive 16-year-old French pianist named Lise de la Salle, seated herself demurely at the Steinway concert grand and proceeded to blow the roof off the auditorium, commanding the instrument with an almost overwhelming display of sheer technical brilliance.
Lise appeared under the auspices of the Young Concert Artists organization. Now in its 26th year, YCA has been responsible for showcasing a significant number of rising young classical soloists in high-profile recitals in New York and the District.
Lise demonstrated a thorough command of Bach in her recital’s first stanza, particularly in her sweeping interpretation of his majestic organ Prelude and Fugue in A minor (BWV 543) as transcribed by Franz Liszt.
But she was equally adept at cleanly expressing the individual choirs in Bach’s modernistic Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor (BWV 543).
Lise devoted the second half of her program entirely to Liszt. After a lovely excursion into the Hungarian master’s Sonetto del Petrarca No. 104 from “Annees de Pelerinages” (“Years of Pilgrimage”), she performed the composer’s rarely played “St. Francois de Paul marchant sur les flots” (“St. Francis of Paola walks across the waves”), a sonata-like tone poem depicting the violently surging waves miraculously traversed on foot by his patron saint. Lise’s rippling legato added an extra dimension of drama beneath the solemn chorale of the saint’s main theme.
After an acidic etching of Liszt’s brief, lugubrious “La lugubre gondola” (roughly, “The funeral gondola”), a Bartok-like, nearly atonal experiment, Lise launched an exhilarating attack on the composer’s wicked Mephisto Waltz No. 1, a treacherous showoff piece where famous pianists routinely drop buckets of notes en route to a dramatic finish.
Twitching, fluttering, clattering, this odd waltz is Liszt’s grotesque hat tip to Mephi-stopheles, the devil and trickster who more than once engaged the composer’s lively imagination.
Lise was intent not only on taking the work at a breakneck tempo. She also decided to play all the notes — an astonishing tour de force for so young a pianist. But adding maturity and poise to her bag of technical tricks, she also interpreted the work’s quieter moments with extraordinary nuance and delicacy for one so young.
Called back for two encores, Lise concluded her triumphal Washington debut with a brilliantly percussive rendition of Prokofiev’s driving “Toccata” and a limpid, contrasting reading of Ravel’s brief “L’Oiseau Triste” (“The sorrowful bird”).
While Lise occasionally swept aside opportunities for more astute passage reading in favor of technical exuberance, hers is clearly a large, refreshing talent with room to grow.
If she’s not exploited by music teachers and nagging publicists eager to rush her too quickly into the lucrative limelight, she could eventually prove to be one of the notable pianistic talents of the 21st century. Even Monsieur Jacques Chirac might find her musical skills “formidable” indeed.
For information on YCA’s remaining concerts, visit online at www.yca.org or call 202/331-0405.
***1/2MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
Please read our comment policy before commenting.