Pianist Alessio Bax shows true touch of class

All elegance and class, Italian pianist Alessio Bax built his program for his Sydney Symphony debut recital with his homeland as its theme.

Italian pianist Alessio Bax gave a recital for Sydney Symphony. Picture: Marco Borggreve

• God bless the child
• Singing and dancing in the rain
• Strictly by arrangement
• Turandot ticks all the boxes

Coming from Italy and making his Sydney Symphony debut, it was natural for pianist Alessio Bax to build his recital program with his homeland as its theme.

But this wasn’t an all-Italian affair by any means. The German Johann Sebastian Bach had a hand in the first piece, the Russian Sergei Rachmaninov in the following work and the Hungarian Franz Liszt in the recital’s closing works.

At 41 New York-based Bax has carved out an impressive career on four continents as a soloist, chamber musician and as a four-handed piano duo with his wife Lucille Chung. He is a musician who oozes grace and class, both in his stage manner and in his playing.

He is capable of great delicacy, as in his handling of the airy birdsong at the top of the keyboard in Liszt’s St Francoise d’Assise: Le predication aux oiseaux attests, as well as power and muscle, shown to thrilling effect in the same composer’s sonata Apres une Lecture de Dante which followed and closed the evening.

Bax allowed the music to breathe and unfold with beautifully shaped lines, precise articulation and subtle use of the pedals.

Bax started his program with Bach’s Concerto in D minor BWV974, a work inspired by Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in C minor with its melting adagio, used to great erotic effect in Isobel Coixet’s movie Elegy starring Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz.

Here Bax allowed the music to breathe and unfold with beautifully shaped lines, precise articulation and subtle use of the pedals.

The full range of his artistry was put to the test in the next piece, Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme by Correlli, a work which the composer confessed bored him, sometimes skipping some of the variations if his audience got restless.

There was, however, no restlessness or intrusive coughing from the full house for this Sydney Symphony International Pianists in Recital concert. Bax held them entranced.

The other work on the program was Italian through and through.

Luigi Dallapiccola’s composing life changed when in 1935 he heard a piece by atonal master Anton Webern and marvelled at how so many ideas could be conveyed with such brevity. He also had a fascination for JS Bach’s keyboard works and his Quaderno musicale di Annalibera uses the BACH musical autograph (B flat-A-C-B natural) as a basis for these 12 short pieces.

The result is some of the most charming and lyrical atonal music you are likely to hear.

After the Liszt pieces in the second half brought the house down, Bax gave two encores to set the seal of this special recital, Aleksandr Scriabin’s Chopinesque Prelude for the Left Hand Op 9 No 1 and Gyorgy Cziffra’s lavishly decorated arrangement of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No.5.

DETAILS

● CONCERT: Alessio Bax in recital

● WHERE: City Recital Hall Angel Place

● WHEN: Monday, March 25.