Nikolai Lugansky doesn’t really do charm. He certainly does heavyweight keyboard pyrotechnics, loads of them, delivered in a fierce, take-it-or-leave-it sort of way, but concepts of subtlety and delicacy don’t seem to be part of his pianistic world view. That made it all the more puzzling that he should have chosen to begin his Wigmore Hall recital with a group of six of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, which are models of the intimate, modest miniature with few opportunities for anything spectacular. They were played perfectly correctly; no liberties were taken, nothing was exaggerated, but equally there was nothing to bring them alive, to give them shape or beguiling colour.
It’s the monochrome nature of Lugansky’s playing that is most troubling. However brilliantly he negotiates extreme technical challenges, and however thrillingly he hurls out torrents of notes at maximum velocity, the music always seems diminished. The dimension lacking in the Chopin group that followed the Mendelssohn – the A flat and F minor Ballades, separated by the D flat Nocturne Op 27 no 2 – was any sense of a dramatic narrative shaping the music. It goes without saying that all the virtuoso passages in the ballades were dispatched to great effect, but what came between them was far less engaging.
