Piotr Anderszewski is one of the leading pianists of our time, but it seems that these days that is not enough to guarantee a respectable audience; the Barbican was less than half full for his latest recital. Perhaps the prospect of a programme made up largely of miniatures kept some away, but if so they missed a rare treat, for even by Anderszewski’s meticulous standards it was an exceptional event.
The miniatures were shaped into a glowing sequence – bagatelles by Beethoven and Bartók framed late intermezzi by Brahms, and in every one of those pieces Anderszewski’s ability to crystallise a whole expressive world in microcosm was extraordinary. The first of Beethoven’s Bagatelles Op 126 seemed to be conjured out of silence before our ears, the hymn-like third in the same set made to melt away equally magically. The Brahms pieces were a selection of six from the sets of Op 116 to 119, played without noticeable breaks, their tone set by the first piece of Op 119, which Clara Schumann described as “grey, pearl-veiled and very precious”. Anderszewski treated each intermezzo as if it was a jewel, with not a note out of place, nor a chord not perfectly balanced.
The 14 Bartók Bagatelles were composed in 1908, and each in its varied way is a fiercely compressed experiment in modernism, with shards of folk music woven into the chromatic mix; they were presented as vivid snapshots, glistening and utterly clear. Music by JS Bach almost always features somewhere in an Anderszewski recital, and here it came at the very end, in the shape of the first of the keyboard partitas, the B flat, BWV825. His approach is a model of how to play these pieces on a modern concert grand, with no unnecessary frills or spurious rubato, every rhythm perfectly articulated. The Chopin mazurka that followed as an encore, Op 59 no 2, might have belonged to another world altogether, yet in its own way it was just as remarkable.
