A chameleon of the keyboard

a review by Julia Meredith

To hear Japanese pianist Noriko Ogawa playing the French composer Satie, is like being gently led through a surreal landscape – where only she knows the path, or understands the rules, but somehow inspires confidence.
Eric Satie is an enigma, who fitted none of the contemporary genres of his time. Best known for his fragile, unsettling sound pictures, he also created an enchantingly bonkers soundtrack to what could have been a Laurel and Hardy knockabout set in a lunatic asylum.
That edge of introspective strangeness is something Noriko expressed with insight and delicacy in Satie’s opening Gnossienes.
Satie’s own description – ‘Furniture Music’ – perhaps explains something of its popularity in ads. This is music that hovers tentatively in the background: limbic music, if you will. That wistful, melancholic timeles quality is something Noriko articulates unerringly. For pieces so apparently random, they feel surprisingly immutable; in her hands, you sense Satie’s conviction, even as he disdains to explain.
Losing oneself in the Romanticism of the melody come to an abrupt stop with her second work: Satie’s Relâche. When you know it means ‘Theatre closed, no performance today’ you get some inkling of the experimental, nonsensical nature of the ballet for which it was composed.
To give you an idea: the action it accompanies includes a smoking ballerina who only dances when the music stops, and a fireman who does nothing but pour water from one bucket to another. Not Swan Lake then.
Clearly this enfant terrible intended to confound expectations and provoke outrage… passages of lyrical beauty (he could do it, when he chose!) are chopped into by jarring harmonies and jagged rhythms. Nursery rhyme tunes are given a slapstick, throwaway quality that smacks of the music hall. Tunes are introduced, dropped, subverted – you suspect he’s having a laugh at our expense. After the feather-touch of the Gnossienes, sometimes in Relâche the piano seems played with (ten tiny) sledgehammers.
And yet somehow, it has a single, recognisable voice, It bears creative authority. This is in no small measure part of Noriko’s astonishing ability to inhabit the music; I’ve never heard Satie played so persuasively by someone who didn’t grow up in the culture, with its shared sense of irony and drollerie. But it took thought: you could see her sit back inbetween pieces and get ‘into role’.
A chameleon indeed, as the post-interval programme was to show.
The second half offered us the France we’re more familiar with, in Debussy’s Estampes. These three works – ‘Estampes’, ‘La soiree dans Grenade’ and ‘Jardins sous la pluie’ are French Impressionism in sound. An intimate sense of place imperceptibly emerges through airy phrases, strokes of a paintbrush, a wash of harmony… Noriko’s playing is radiant and poetic, conjuring up an atmosphere that hovers on the fringes of memory, ethereal and fleeting. We may have held our breath during Relâche; in Estampes, it felt as though we were all exhaling with pleasure.
The big beast of the evening (as he so often is!) was Beethoven. This struck me as a brave choice and an exhaustive test of adaptability. The Appasionata was introduced as ‘One of the most amazing piano sonatas ever written’, notable for how mood and tempo change in an instant. That it was composed as Beethoven was losing his hearing adds a poignancy to the violence of feeling.
Closing my eyes in the first few minutes I was struck by the disconnect between the apparent delicacy of the performer and the sounds emanating from the Steinway. She attacks the piece as you could imagine its composer would have envisaged – with a furious emphatic commitment that seems to hold nothing back for later. She builds the ominous crescendo to storm pitch – and then as you almost shrink in your seat, achieves that mercurial switch into tenderness which only Beethoven could get away with. Her control of his volatile dynamics (and technical demands) is apparently effortless and quite exceptional.
The second movement leads out with a magisterial stoicism that restores and slows the racing heart. Noriko, the shapechanger, produced a sound of weighty calm, that transmutes into playing of such sweetness, you sense the gentle man inside the creative Atlas… but the effort required to hold the frustrations in check start to falter.

by Julia Meredith