Each time internationally acclaimed concert pianist Marouan Benabdallah visits Goa, music-lovers know they are in for a feat of music, a night to remember. Child’s Play India Foundation is pleased to present him on Saturday 13 April 2024, ESG Maquinez Palace Auditorium 1, 6 PM. Donation passes available at Furtados, and at the door before the concert.
Benabdallah is indisputably the leading representative of his native Morocco on the international concert stage. With a musical heritage deeply rooted in the Hungarian tradition, he received his formal training at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary.
He first attracted international attention in 2003, following his triumphs at the Hungarian Radio Piano Competition and the Andorra Grand Prize. Later on, he was a prize-winner at the Hilton Head Piano Competition (US) and the Arthur Rubinstein Master Competition where the local media proclaimed his playing “miraculous” (Maariv).
Benabdallah has been praised for his “stunning natural virtuosity” (Nice-Matin), “delicate stylishness” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), “compelling sense of momentum” (Washington Post) and “resourceful pianism, lyrical instincts and thoughtfulness” (New York Times). He has been invited as guest soloist by numerous orchestras in Europe, Asia, America and Africa, and has collaborated with conductors such as Lorin Maazel, Charles Dutoit, Zoltan Kocsis, Iván Fischer, Renato Palumbo, Tan Lihua and others.
He has performed on stages such as the Great Hall of the Franz Liszt Music Academy and the Palace of Arts in Budapest, the Salle Cortot in Paris, the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, the Oriental Art Centre in Shanghai, the Teatro Communale di Bologna, the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, the Maison Symphonique in Montreal, the National Center for the Performing Arts in umbai, the Cairo Opera House, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Benabdallah makes his home between Budapest, Rabat, Paris and Beijing. He is a “Yamaha Artist”. He serves on the piano faculty of the Liszt Academy [University] of Music in Budapest.
As always, Benabdallah’s recitals are thoughtfully curated by him. The second half of his programme is devoted to ‘La Nuit’ (The Night): “The night is the realm of indistinguishability, the moment of revelation, of enlightenment. The night has always been paradoxical and malleable, it is reassuring as it is disturbing. It is a place of the imagination and the subconscious, a place that inspires artists and fires their creativity.
How do we depict the night? How do we give colour to such dark hours? How to make the night musical? Benabdallah invites the audience to an exploration of the night through paintings and music
focusing on French composers from the early 20th century,” ranging from the more familiar, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) to those perhaps less so: Henri Duparc (1848-1933), Mel Bonis (1858–1937), Abel Decaux (1869–1943), Gustave Samazeuilh (1877-1967) and Louis Aubert (1877–1968).
I’m just as excited about what is in store for us before that in the first half of Benabdallah’s concert: the not-so-frequently performed but extremely atmospheric Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 28 by Russian composer, virtuoso pianist and conductor Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943), whose 150th birth anniversary we celebrated last year.
As their overlapping timelines indicate, all the composers mentioned above were contemporaries, so a juxtaposition of their works in one concert allows us to compare their compositional styles.
Rachmaninov was considered anachronistic even in his lifetime, as a 20th century throwback to a Romantic era that had ended.
The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians !1954 edition), barely a decade after his death, notoriously dismissed Rachmaninoff’s music as “monotonous in texture … consist[ing] mainly of artificial and gushing tunes” and predicted that his popular success was “not likely to last.”
But as Alex Ross put it in his August 2022 New Yorker article (‘How radical was Rachmaninov?’), “To be anachronistic is to be outside one’s time; it does not rule out belonging to the future.”
In my column last year to mark the Rachmaninov birthday milestone, I mentioned how it had taken hypnotherapy in 1900 to get him out of a depression trough after the vicious criticism of his First Symphony. Among the trio of “Dresden pieces” he wrote after emerging from that low point in his life were his Second Piano Concerto (which he dedicated in gratitude to his therapist Dr. Nikolai Dahl), part of an opera ’Monna Vanna’ (which was never finished), and this First Piano Sonata.
Although Rachmaninov soon abandoned the thematic idea (German polymath and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragic play ‘Faust’)
that was originally the sonata’s inspiration, traces of its influence still linger. Its three movements, structured like a typical Classical sonata, (fast movements surrounding a slower, more tender second movement), are based on the play’s three main characters Faust, Gretchen (short for Margarete) and the devil Mephistopheles respectively. In that sense it parallels Franz Liszt’s 1857 choral work ‘A Faust symphony in three character pieces’ which also reflect those characters.
I rejoiced when I heard Benabdallah would be playing this “dark, demonic masterpiece”. It has formidable technical challenges. Rachmaninov himself wrote of it in a letter to a friend: “Nobody will ever play this composition. It’s too difficult and long.” The Russian critic Yuli Engel on examining the score said of it: “Unravelling this tangle of passages, rhythms, harmonies, polyphonic twistings, is no easy matter, even for an accomplished pianist.”
But its building blocks are deceptively simple: fifths, scales, and repeating notes. It is a mark of the genius of the composer that these musical devices can be employed to “paint” portraits of three completely different personalities. Rising and falling fifths in the first movement for example could be seen as Faust’s constant questioning, yearning for “more than earthly meat and drink” to give meaning to this life, even to extent of being willing to sell his soul to the devil to find answers to those questions. And the single repeating note in one motif, similar to a Russian Orthodox chant: is Faust hedging his bets here, appealing to God too, to whoever answers first?
In the middle ‘Gretchen’ movement, those devices paint a picture of innocence, virtue and bliss. The last movement is the headlong galloping descent into hell, complete with tolling bells and a generous quote of the first fragment of the ‘Dies Irae’ (the well-known Latin chant portraying the wrath of God) motif that Rachmaninov frequently inserted in so many of his works, a sign of his profound contemplation on the subject of death and mortality throughout his life.
What makes Rachmaninov’s music so compelling is not just its complexity but how it invites you to explore the whole gamut of the human experience. I was struck by the various impressions of this work by listeners on a piano forum. To one, it felt like “you’re flying through the cosmos and witnessing planets being formed and destroyed.” To another “it has this grand, subtly storytelling, yet almost hypnotic quality that makes me think of atoms and stars and stuff like that.”
What will be your own experience? Why not come along to Marouan Benabdallah’s concert and discover the answer yourself?
(An edited version of this article was published on 07 April 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
Luis Dias 