Review | Bringing Bravado Home to Roost, at the Santa Barbara Lobero

Santa Barbara has enjoyed an unusually robust roster of world-class classical pianists on our stages in the past concert season, including Daniil Trifonov, Stephen Hough, Seong-Jin Cho, and Jeremy Denk (if we included the summer-timed Music Academy festival as part of the season). One distinction of virtuoso Hélène Grimaud’s recital last week at the Lobero Theatre was that she ostensibly had the shortest commute of the lot. The long-revered French-born pianist has called Santa Ynez home — or one of her homes — for several years now.

Grimaud’s latest visit to Santa Barbara, proper, followed on the heels of soloist duty with the Santa Barbara Symphony back in 2014 and two prior recitals for last week’s concert host, CAMA, in its chamber-sized “Masterseries.” For this occasion, Grimaud dug into an all-German program of the three-and-a-half B variety, with Beethoven, a double dose of Brahms and Bach — as arranged. It wasn’t her subtlest program and, on this night, the pianist periodically leaned into her Steinway with an excessively heavy-handed touch. Nonetheless, Grimaud’s power and deep musical presence kept us in thrall.

The best came first: Grimaud brought an assured musicality to Beethoven’s late-period Piano Sonata No. 30 in E, Opus 109, climaxing with a third movement serving as a substantial entity unto itself. The fascinating seven-part final movement is a series of alternately lyrical and sinewy variations on a theme, beautifully articulated by Grimaud. Brahms arrived, on either side of the recital’s intermission, in the diverse form of serial short pieces, with Three Intermezzi for Piano, Opus 117, and the seven distinct movements of “Fantasies,” Opus 116.

Bach’s legendary Chaconne, a movement from the Partita No. 2 in D Minor for Unaccompanied Violin, but a satisfying meal unto itself, has been successfully adapted to various instrumental settings. Among the score’s starring roles in the Lobero itself have been violin performances by Augustin Hadelich and Christian Tetzlaff, a mandolin version by Avi Avital, and a guitar transcription by Angel Romero.

In 2019, the piano version arranged by Busoni hit the Lobero stage during one of Hough’s visits. In last week’s rendition, Grimaud plunged into the thickened and over-harmonized masses of sound in the arrangement, segueing directly out of Brahms’s final “Fantasy,” and the Busoni-ized version grew evermore muscular and, depending on one’s allegiance to Bach-ian values, seemingly misguided.

Into the Baroque delicacy and structural elegance of Bach’s violin original, gushing gusts of Busoni’s late-19th-century Romantic sensibilities enter, counteracting the measured beauty of the composer’s intentions. Grimaud held nothing back, giving the Steinway a fairly brutal workout. The arrival of the famed passage of major mode repose came as some relief, but soon gave way to further fortissimo savagery.

Grimaud is capable of great subtlety and nuance in her interpretations. On the whole, this recital was not one of those occasions. At least we had the third movement of Beethoven’s Sonata, Opus 109, as the happiest memory of the evening.

As if to go gently into the good night and make amends with the piano and Bach, Grimaud returned for an encore of Rachmaninoff’s airy, dream-lined Étude-Tableau.