In the days before piano recitals became Serious Business, Romantic virtuosos delighted audiences by serving up lighthearted encores where technical fireworks and effortless charm went hand in hand. At first the prospect of hearing 16 such pieces in a row struck me as akin to having nothing but candy for dinner, yet Jeffrey Biegel’s excellent programming instincts and canny sense of pacing manages to transform what the late Arthur Loesser called “cream of corn” into real sustenance. More importantly, he takes the texts seriously without losing sight of their entertainment value.
In the Moszkowski selections, for example, he eschews cuts in the Caprice espagnol, plays Étincelles’ understated ending as opposed to Horowitz’s rewrite (although Biegel sneaks in a few flourishes of his own!), and elegantly passes the tunes back and forth between hands in La jongleuse. He dispatches Henselt’s treacherous double notes in “Si oiseau j’étais” rapidly, effortlessly, smoothly, and with little pedal, much as Rachmaninov did in his classic recording. By contrast, Biegel treats Mischa Levitski’s Valse in A major with more languor and lyricism than in the composer’s terser reading.
The opposite is true with Paderewski’s B-flat major Nocturne, where the composer’s yielding, wistful lyricism differs from Biegel’s drier, more urgent shaping of the left-hand accompaniment. While it’s good to hear the full version of Anton Rubinstein’s Rêve angélique, I find Biegel’s interpretation a shade careful and studio-bound, lacking the floating animation of Harold Bauer’s ancient shellac recording. I also find Biegel’s minuscule rhythmic delays in the Schulz-Evler/Strauss Blue Danube’s main tune a bit studied and predictable, in contrast to his heartfelt and musically compelling rubatos in the slower sections. Among modern recordings of this celebrated transcription, I prefer Marc-André Hamelin’s more forceful, sweeping bravura.
Biegel concludes his program with a vivacious performance of Abram Chasins’ once-popular Rush Hour in Hong Kong. My little quibbles do not lessen the positive impact that keyboard lovers surely will glean from Biegel’s impressively finished, communicative, and joyful pianism, not to mention the excellent annotations and sonics.
