 | Ates Orga's review from Cornucopia 27
“What matters to me is not who is playing on what instrument, but, rather, how the instrument is being played.” Now in his early thirties, Fazil Say is a force to be reckoned with. Big in Europe and America, as adulated in Turkey as her World Cup heroes, he is an original. Offering an extraordinary, frighteningly charged cocktail of Concorde-class pianism, dramatic delivery and passionate re-creative urge, he leaves you in no doubt of his sincerity that and the fact he has something very personal to communicate. Alone on stage with his piano, stripped of PR hype, he caresses, consummates and conquers in tidal waves of emotional tension and physical release. Every performance he gives seems to be like so many minutes of autobiography, the music as much a means of personal confession as to convey the ideas of the composer. So raw is the privacy exposed, so wracked the body language (notwithstanding his publicity shots, he’s not in the smiling business), that for many concertgoers these footlight-crossing encounters can be uncomfortably upfront maybe because they tell us something about ourselves, too.
His Warner/Teldec CDs are special. Purists may object to his “big-bone” romanticisation of Mozart, his liberties with Stravinsky, but the eloquence of playing, the sheer love of letting the modern concert grand speak unconstrained, is thrilling. Seeing music through images pictorial and programmatic, he relishes “orchestrating” his performances, giving a melody its head and dynamic, irrespective of style or convention. His Alla Turca climaxes in a stirring janissary canter. His Ah, vous dirai-je maman finds in Mozart’s nerve-ends the child being childish, pretending to be grown-up, the gate back to yesterday closed. Adding “prepared piano” effects, enriching the text, using variously microphoned sound balances, the four-hand version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, with Say dubbing himself, is as primeval, overwhelming and rhythmically sword-edged as the best orchestral versions. “It’s a very free, very personal interpretation. I stand by every note of it,” he says.
As a boy growing up in Ankara, Say saw Bernstein play Rhapsody in Blue on television. “His is a sophisticated reading,” he says, “as though he were playing for a lover, late at night, sitting at the piano, a cigarette in his mouth and a glass of whisky in front of him.” The Gershwin collection evokes the mood. To have had Lenny’s favourite clarinettist, the legendary Stan Drucker, fronting the band, and his old New York orchestra on hand to beef up proceedings, must have seemed like a dream come true. Say doesn’t let them down, his brittle, jazzily energised fingers blurring the keyboard in what must have been red-hot sessions.
“When I play Bach, I have just one aim: to go beyond the wall. Paradise is over there.” From French suite and Italian concerto to German variation and mystic fugue, baroque economy to romantic elaboration, Say’s thoughtful Bach quietly provokes, with as many echoes of Glenn Gould as vistas of Golden Age pianism reborn. Imperially cohesive and tensioned, the Tchaikovsky and Liszt pose different challenges. The concerto is full of “contrasts between black and white, good and evil, supreme happiness and painÉ a kind of ‘protest’”. The sonata is “akin to a stage production”, steeped in Faust, Teutonic myth and “the Romantic ideas and secret worlds” of its time. Both renderings scale the heights in terms defiantly individual, digging deeply, vocally into the sound. No second-hand music-making here, no one else’s ideas, simply the exultant, intimate, lonely journey of a man and his soul-searching.
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