Review by Elizabeth Leonskaja – The unmistakable sense of architecture of the piano legend reveals connections and kinship | classical music

eEighty-year-old piano legend Elisabeth Leonskaya threw herself onto the piano stool and into the two turbulent descending chromatic scales that open Beethoven’s Op 77 Fantasia in G minor in one gesture. There’s still a long way to go in a concert program that feels like a lucky dip into European metal — Beethoven, Schoenberg, Chopin, Webern, Schubert — and Leonskaya isn’t messing around.

Of course, there was no chance in terms of programming. The Austrian pianist’s expressive and passionate playing may grab headlines, but an unerring sense of underlying architecture is the thread throughout her long career. We heard it here, not just within each of the works, but in the shared foundations and sometimes secret passages they revealed.

With the enigmatic aphorisms of Webern’s Op 27 Variations (1936) and the parts representing Schoenberg’s 6 minor piano pieces (1911) already in her sights, Leonskaja darted in and out of the truncated utterances, half-thoughts, thematic dead ends and fantasies that open up Beethoven’s fantasia. She suggested that these were the real heart of the piece, rather than the obedient variations that later saw the music transformed into action. When those chromatic scales returned, it was like a sentence of words: the music we thought had finally reached the heel to rear its head to reveal its still wild and unbroken soul.

If we anticipate the contrast between Schoenberg and Chopin that follows, we have fallen into Leonskaya’s trap. Lyricism and longing were at an all-time high in the first, with No. 2 sounding almost like a second overture to a Viennese “Raindrop” — more so than the prickly flurries that open Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1 in B minor. The work was not always clean, but there was never any doubt of intent, whether here in the musical storm of the beginning, or the thunderous force with which it ended the polonaise fantasy in a flat.

Schubert’s Grand Piano Sonata in A Minor D845, composed on the brink of stardom in 1825, closed the program. All variations of the slow movement were cherished, and Leonskaga’s left hand always demonstrated the lightness of these movements, reminding us of their kinship with the larger monsters of the scherzo and the concluding rondo. We have finally come up with something substantial and complete: a complete fresco in a program of mosaic fragments.