WEB REVIEW (Paul Boekkooi)
Unisa Conference Hall, Pretoria
November 7, 2001

Ten years is the period Petronel Malan stayed out of the South African public’s ear – a long time for any pianist. Her comeback completed, as it were, the bridge between her being a child prodigy and the process in which she established herself as a fully-fledged professional. Much of that bridge was perhaps deliberately burnt, but what we find unscathed amidst her newly acquired maturity plus a sense of fantasy as a performing artist, are still many traces of her personal charm, here emerging quite strongly as she performed in front of her home-town audience. Making a career as a performing artist and an academic in the United States couldn’t have been all that easy, while at the same time still actively doing the rounds at various piano competitions, winning no less than four gold medals last year.
Her penultimate recital of her current tour was as varied as it was unusual. With music ranging from Scarlatti to Ravel, she certainly covered some of the lesser travelled highways of keyboard glories, with additional works by Haydn, Liszt, Busoni and Rachmaninov.
With two contrasting Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti – one in C major, the other in G major – opening the programme, Petronel Malan gave us bold readings that were highly responsive to the mood, colour and character of each piece. The C major sounded expressive and refined, while the G major was welcomed by more abandon and fire. Without being bold on a concert grand (that in contrast to the harpsichord for which these sonatas were originally written) Scarlatti’s resourcefulness can hardly be communicated. Ms Malan did not push the character of the music to its limits, but playing them on a Steinway, boils down to an "orchestration" or a more "pictorial" process of what Scarlatti might have had in mind. Although she cleared any signs of gentility out of the way, one was appreciative of the fact that there were hardly any traces of a semi-staccato – a brittle, pecking kind of touch that many pianists seem to regard as peculiarly apt when performing Scarlatti’s Sonatas.
In Haydn’s Sonata in C major, Hob XVI/50 her sense of fantasy and what might be described as the composer’s humour (actually the way he surprises the listener with unusual melodic and especially harmonic "twists") stood out. Within a classical framework, the performance strongly conveyed a lyrical style: communicative and attractive, with an ideal degree of repose and rhetorical expansiveness in the slow movement, without losing sight of the movement’s arching span. In both the opening movement and finale Petronel Malan never played too boldly or propulsively, but always allowed some "air" between the notes. All in all this was articulate, colourful, affectionate and – combining these elements– purely expressive Haydn.
Her maturity within the darker regions of pianistic expression were found in her solid, musicianly reading of Busoni’s brooding Sonatina Seconda as well as in Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonata No 2 in B flat minor in its 1931 revision. The Rachmaninov struck me already at her recital in Potchefstroom six weeks ago during the Aardklop Festival, as extremely mature. In a work that often seemed to break up into separate, violent impacts, Malan’s extremely refined unlatching and development of its structure could be regarded as the interpretation’s greatest asset together with the lyrical outpouring of the Non Allegro – Adagio. Busoni’s transcription of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody sounded passionately gypsy-like, even if many of the developing pyrotechnics did little to set the soul free.
Petronel Malan also explored, perhaps slightly one-sidedly, the solo piano version of Ravel’s La Valse. There was too little on the level of pure tone painting, and with an overall tempo that would make any ensemble in the orchestral version struggle to keep up, it focused mainly on its brutal dynamic, as if standing at the edge of a apocalyptic vortex.
Still, it is a darkly demonic work. After all, the Hapsburg Empire was rather decadent. The pianist brought out these elements rather strongly instead of suggesting its sinister quality and the spectres and shadows that inhabit it. While this pianist has a most phenomenal facility to get around the piano, here one often found that it seemed to threaten a fuller emotional expression. Especially one aspect of the work did strike a positive response. At the first appearance of the Straussian theme in thirds it brimmed with sensuality and tenderness, Then, when it ultimately returned to whirl the waltz to its death, the contrast was palpable, even shocking.
Petronel Malan’s final concert of her currrent tour is on Sunday 18 November at 3.30 pm in the Linder Auditorium, JCE, Parktown, Johannesburg. Under the auspices of the Johannesburg Musical Society she’ll play the Rachmaninov, Liszt and Ravel mentioned above as well as Beethoven’s Les Adieu Sonata. Booking is at Computicket or from 2.30 onwards at the Linder’s box-office.