Few music festivals in Scotland will boast a setting as beautiful as Summer Music at Ayton Castle. Ildiko Bartha sat framed in the huge bay window of the dining room, against a backdrop of green fields glowing in the evening sun, rising to the haar-topped hills beyond.
It would be hard to imagine not enjoying just about any recital in such a setting, but this young Hungarian pianist would have sounded good anywhere. If the authentic chamber music setting was informal, she came to the recital extremely well-prepared, playing all the works from memory, and with evidence of considerable reflection.
She opened with the earliest piece in the festival, Handel's Chaconne in G, and if advocates of period performance might have disapproved, her reading of it was both lyrical and appropriate to the modern instrument.
The baby Steinway sounded very bright in this setting, but her account of the first of Brahms's three Intermezzi revealed a slight lack of richness in the bottom octaves, which play such an expressive part in this piece, based on a Scottish lullaby. She seemed both temperamentally and technically attuned to this final, very personal facet of his piano music, and played with equal conviction in Bartok's Folksongs from County Csik, and a pungent Romanian Dance.
The second half was given over to the major work of the recital, Chopin's 24 preludes. The pairing of the preludes in major-minor relationships is largely a nominal one, since Chopin's dramatic harmonic writing runs through so many modulations within each, but her shapely phrasing and crisp touch brought a pleasing sense of overall flow, as well as consummate attention to the music's rapid shifts of mood and detail.
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