United Kingdom Rachmaninoff, Clementi, Liszt: Noah Zhou (piano). Wigmore Hall, 15.1.2025. (MBr)

Rachmaninnoff – Études-tableaux, Op.33
Muzio Clementi – Piano Sonata in A, Op.33 No.1
Liszt – Réminiscences de Norma. S 394
This recital, given by the British-Chinese pianist Noah Zhou, was almost perfect. I say almost perfect because the program choice for his second work, a sonata by Muzio Clementi, left me wondering whether it should be in this recital at all: Clementi barely gets a mention in most books on Rachmaninoff; Liszt gets a great deal. However, as a kind of musical luftpause between two highly virtuosic works, the Clementi was a considerable downsizing of scale: lucid, almost clear as glass in its textures, it looks to Haydn, as indeed did Zhou’s playing of it. There was wit, yes, but it was also a little too square as well. No mishaps, of course… but I would have rather – if it had been here at all – it had begun the recital and not been placed between the two exceptional performances we did get.
Of the two sets of Études-tableaux that Rachmaninoff composed Zhou chose to play the earlier one, the Op.33 – begun in 1911. I have never quite been convinced that these are among Rachmaninoff’s greatest piano creations – and perhaps somewhat even more oddly these pieces perhaps seem quite monochromatic at times (especially when compared with Scriabin’s) for a composer who so often attains a great of vividness in his writing. All credit to Zhou, then, for giving a performance of the Op.33 that was often of staggering imagination.
Still scorched in the memory, for example, are the final pages of the F minor No.1. I am not sure I have ever heard this music melt with such beauty; and nor have I heard such a magical touch as if the notes were just vaporising into the air. The wonderful timbre – funereal, yet with its colours as soft as velvet – was noble at the opening of the C minor No.3. The virtuosity which Zhou brought to the E-flat major (No.6) was effortless, and yet there was enough room to add tension to his playing. The C-sharp minor No.8, maybe the finest of the set, somehow managed to bring together all of Zhou’s exceptional skills and qualities and distil them into a single étude: the stormy virtuosity, the expressive touch, vivid colour projection. But here we got a microcosm of everything else that had preceded it: immaculate pedalling, octaves played within an inch of their lives, cross-handed notes, arpeggios, ascending scales of dizzying accuracy.
The beauty of this performance wasn’t just in its gorgeous playing of Rachmaninoff; rather, this was Rachmaninoff that summoned up Chopin, Balakirev and Debussy too.
Franz Liszt’s Réminiscences de Norma is one of his great pianistic paraphrases, this one based on Bellini’s bel canto opera. Liszt uses a number of variations based on seven arias, and the opera’s introduction – arias largely for both Norma herself (such as the Act II, finale) and Oroveso (his Act I, Sc.1 aria). The complexity of this magnificent work is not so much in its enormous technical difficulty but rather in understanding the dramatic scope of Bellini’s opera and what possibilities the piano can give the soloist to create this in sound – and a rather grand, Romantic one at that. All the tragedy from the opera is in Liszt’s score, woven through it. But there remain more than torrential chords, wild cadenzas, tumbling arpeggios, surging octaves, massive dynamic shifts, interlaced cross-handed playing – all of which Zhou navigated with thrilling dexterity, by the way, from my keyboard side view – to tell this narrative.
There is no doubt that Zhou got the entrance aria spot on, as he did the rhythms and dynamics of the militaristic march of the Druids (Oreveso and Chorus). The complexity of the final scene – at once a confession, and also a call to arms – was just exhilarating, too: one felt Zhou had probably just managed to resolve the conflict of Norma’s betrayal. Indeed, some of his playing here was tempestuous enough to suggest exactly this dichotomy: the resolution into E-flat major just magical.
My reservation about the Clementi aside, this really had been a tremendous recital by an exceptional pianist.
Marc Bridle