FAINA LUSHTAK, PIANO, Jeanné Wagner Theatre, Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, Oct. 10
There are many elements that go into creating a true artist of the piano – sensitive interpretative skills, equal amounts of musicality and technique, passion, and an uncanny ability to bring the music to life and mesmerize the listener.
Faina Lushtak
Faina Lushtak is one such pianist who has it all. She is a marvelous interpreter who creates poetry at the keyboard, and her emotional involvement in the music she plays transfixes her audience.
And there is no better pianist than Lushtak to inaugurate the Paul Pollei Commemorative Piano Concert Series, the newly renamed recital series that honors the late founder of the Gina Bachauer competition.
The program Lushtak chose to play Friday was a wonderful journey from Mozart to Prokofiev, with a few pieces she wrote along for the ride. And Lushtak showed she is a remarkable interpreter of this wide ranging repertoire, playing everything with an ease and naturalness that comes from a deep understanding and affection for the music.
The first half opened with a glorious account of Mozart’s delightful Sonata in G major, K. 283, with its playful outer movements and touchingly poignant Andante. She played the work with cleanly defined phrases, delicately crafted lyricism and a transparency that underscored the sunny nature of the music.
That transparency was also abundantly evident in the work that followed: Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood, the composer’s wistful look back to lost youth. Lushtak’s playing was beautifully textured and captured the joyfulness expressed in the short character pieces comprising the work. Particularly striking was her account of Träumerei, the best known piece in the set. She played it with a tenderness that underscored the smooth mellowness of the music.
Lushtak rounded out the first half with two pieces by Liszt: the Waldesrauschen and the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 11. She gave an evocative reading of the first piece that captured the imagery of rustling trees in a forest, while her interpretation of the latter was full of fiery passion.
The Russian-born pianist turned to her countrymen after intermission.
She opened the second half of the program with Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 3 in A minor, a lushly romantic work that clearly shows where the composer’s musical origins are. Lushtak played it with bold lines and large gestures that captured the dramatic sweep of the work. But she also tempered her playing with well crafted expressiveness that gave even the loudest and technically demanding passages well defined lyricism.
She followed this up with four movements from Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, a delightful set of short piano pieces describing each month of the year. Lushtak gave a wonderfully lucid and vibrant account of April, August, October and December. Infused with the lyricism that is Tchaikovsky’s trademark, these miniatures are gems of the piano repertoire and deserve to be played more frequently.
Lushtak closed her recital with three of her own works, Sonatina, Five Preludes and Old and New, that gave an insightful look into her compositional world, a world that embraces jazz idioms, virtuosity and an underlying lyricism. There are hints of Prokofiev and other Russians in the music, but everything is written in a manner that is distinctly her own and not imitative.