‘Rising star’ pianist shows she’s got talent to burn

At just 24, Albanian-French pianist Marie-Ange Nguci showed a Sydney audience why she deserves the tag “rising star”.

Albanian-French pianist Marie-Ange Nguci made her Sydney Symphony Orchestra debut with a stunning recital.

• Cello fireworks and a light fandango
• Russian maestro gets up close and personal
• Titan launch for the new season
• Lose the plot, just enjoy the show

At just 24 and with a full dance card of concerts and appearances for the year ahead, Albanian-French pianist Marie-Ange Nguci justly deserves the tag “rising star”.

Accepted into the prestigious Paris Conservatoire at the age of 13, she studied organ and cello as well as piano, and recently spent a year in Vienna learning about composition and orchestral conducting.

From the opening moments of the all-Russian program for her Sydney debut – the first of this year’s Sydney Symphony Orchestra Pianists in Recital series – it was obvious that here was a rare talent and intellect.

Her flowing and poetic handling of the opening bars of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme by Chopin showed that her audience in the City Recital Hall were in for a treat. And she did disappoint throughout the 22 variations which run the gamut of emotional and virtuosic pianism. This work was written when the composer was not that much older than the pianist, and he was out to impress, wringing all he could from the simple theme of Chopin’s Prelude No 20, Op 29.

After flexing her muscles with the quick-fire, mainly quiet first nine variations, Nguci opened her shoulders like a batsman dispatching a drive to the boundary for the powerful 10th variation. From then on she wove a spell with her fresh and intense playing style, deft lightness of touch and brilliant tone.

Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No 5 in F sharp major with its colourful ever-shifting harmonies is not always the easiest piece to capture, but the young virtuoso gave it shape and cohesion with her great control of dynamic, bringing out the inner voices and handling the grandiose gestures with aplomb and maturity.

But the highlight of the concert came in the second half with a wonderful performance of Ukrainian-born Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev’s sixth sonata, one of three to be designated “war sonatas” – its angular, anguished and bitter, occasionally consoling, first movement seeming to have additional power and poignancy in the light of current events.

Nguci brought out the forced gaiety of the second movement and the grief and despair of the slow third movement before the energetic whirling rhythms of the finale. This elicited loud cheers from the auditorium and the momentum was maintained in the short final piece, a brief movement by another Ukrainian composer, Nikolai Kapustin, who combined a love for pre-Revolutionary Russian music with a craze for the jazz of Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

Although his works sound like jazz-tinged improvisations he wrote them all out, “and they became much better; it improved them”, he said.

It would be hard to improve on this performance, and by way of an encore Nguci gave us a transparent, awe-inspiring rendition of Ondine from Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit.

This is truly a pianist we shall be hearing a lot more from. In fact you can catch her performing Camille Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No 2, along with a performance of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, at Sydney Opera House Concert Hall at 8pm on Wednesday, March 8, Friday, March 10, and Saturday, March 11, and at 1.30pm on Thursday, March 9.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Marie-Ange Nguci In Recital

• WHERE City Recital Hall

• WHEN March 6, 2023