27-year-old pianist Hélène Tysman has strong fingers, a huge, colorful sound (helped in part by Oehms’ overly resonant engineering), and well-intentioned expressive instincts that bode well for the Chopin works featured on her debut solo CD. However, her sense of architecture and rhythm are all over the place. In the B-flat minor sonata’s Scherzo, for instance, the main section’s tempo adjustments seem arbitrary, and the climaxes always build too soon. The trio sections of this movement and the following Funeral March are full of predictably stretched beats, while the unison-octave Finale is evenly, uniformly, and uneventfully dispatched, with none of the melodic or harmonic inflections with which more seasoned interpreters generate tension.
If anything, the Preludes further substantiate Tysman’s interpretive tics as bad habits, such as her tendency to begin a piece by prolonging the first note or chord, or starting slowly and inching up to tempo by the second or third bar. Although No. 3’s rapid left-hand runs are perfectly in place, Tysman never quite establishes a basic tempo. Her tapered phrasings in No. 8 dissipate the music’s fire and urgency, as do her superfluous underlinings and tenutos in No. 12. She begins No. 16 superbly, and pays attention to the left-hand accompaniment’s dynamic swells (many pianists ignore this detail), but the more difficult “B” section is blurry and overpedaled by comparison. Also, Tysman’s strong, uncommonly articulate left hand in No. 24 sometimes obliterates the big right-hand tune and pulls focus from passages that ought to build like crazy. Yet you cannot discount her superb non-pedaled legato control of No. 18’s difficult patterns. In sum, Tysman has great potential, but she’s still a work-in-progress.
