Washington Classical Review

Antoni Kłeczek performed music of Chopin Tuesday night at La Maison Française, presented by L’Opéra Comique de Washington.

Antoni Kłeczek is only 18 years old, but he has already won an impressive number of music competitions. This past spring the pianist from Vienna, Virginia, passed the preliminary rounds of the XIX International Chopin Piano Competition, along with 85 other participants. 

Before returning to Warsaw for the main event next month, Kłeczek gave an all-Chopin recital Tuesday evening at La Maison Française, presented by L’Opéra Comique de Washington.

Competitions, for better or worse, tend to reward daring and virtuosity—even when mechanistic—over musicality and reserve. As a marker of such technical acumen, this program featured some of Chopin’s most challenging works, starting with the Lisztian Variations on “Là ci darem la mano.” Composed for piano and orchestra when Chopin was only 17, the solo version requires the pianist to play the orchestral rhapsodic introduction and repeated refrain as well as the demanding solo part.

Each variation featured ever-increasing technical flair, culminating in the “Con bravura” fourth iteration. Over pulsating patterns of staccato chords and bass notes, Kłeczek’s outlined the melody of Mozart’s famous duet from Don Giovanni. For the fifth variation, dreamy and set in the parallel minor, Kłeczek channeled bel canto roulades with his right hand, before launching into a gutsy handling of the “Alla Polacca” conclusion.

To demonstrate the more interior, enigmatic side of Chopin, Kłeczek played the three Mazurkas of Op. 50. Particularly in the second and third pieces, the pianist found the ideal combination of delicate touch and unpredictable rubato. He is a player who tends to prefer subtlety over bombast, which brought out the forlorn quality of these most personal pieces. In the Mazurkas, where phrases tend to be repeated several times as the form cycles through, Kłeczek found different shadings for nearly every statement.

The stormy sections of Piano Sonata No. 3 convinced most in Kłeczek’s hands: the moody themes of the first movement, the wild right-hand notes in the Scherzo, and especially the hammered, obsessive rendition of the Finale’s main theme. Only the slow movement fell slightly flat, where the poetry Kłeczek had found in the Mazurkas seemed mostly to escape him.

In the Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat Major, Chopin repeatedly interrupts the Polish dance form with fanciful diversions. Kłeczek gave these wanderings a poetic sense of whimsy, like a sign of the mind wandering away, distracted by other memories or ideas. In this work, as in those he played before it, Kłeczek’s greatest strength was the graceful fragility of his touch at the keyboard. While he explored a broad range of soft dynamics throughout the program, the only element possibly not in abundance was an audacious sense of risk.

Kłeczek showed some of that elusive quality in his choice of encore, the bustling Waltz in A-flat Major, Op. 42. The mental fortitude to perform this demanding recital, played from memory and without intermission, as well as the finger facility and potential power are all there. In the heat of competition, the young Virginian, who will go on to undergraduate studies in Poland next year, could push himself even closer to the edge of control. Listeners can follow him in the competition via its website and watch his performances from the preliminary rounds..

L’Opéra Comique de Washington, under artistic director Simon Charette, kicks off its season with Louis Varney’s Les Mousquetaires au Couvent 7:30 p.m. November 1 at La Maison Française. operacomiquedewashington.org