Washington Classical Review

Pianist Vadym Kholodenko performed a recital Tuesday night at Sixth & I for Washington Performing Arts.

Vadym Kholodenko’s 2016 Washington debut, at the Phillips Collection, came a couple years after he won the gold medal at the Van Cliburn competition in 2013. Washington Performing Arts presented him in a superlative program that went far beyond mere virtuosity Tuesday evening at Sixth & I.

Kholodenko opened with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 29, known as the “Hammerklavier.” The pianist deployed a broad range of touch, articulation, and dynamics in this intensely demanding piece, conveying the jubilation of the opening motif with extravagant rubato enlivening the gentle secondary theme.

In the development came a subtly demarcated contrapuntal section, a sort of allusion to the fugue that concludes the sonata. Omitting the repeat of the first movement’s exposition, Kholodenko left time for the rest of the piece to unfold. The compact Scherzo, relaxed in tempo, featured subtle voicings in its three main sections. The moment where the piece made a “wrong” turn to B-natural, “hammered” back down to B-flat, came off as more insistent than manic.

Kholodenko rendered the central slow movement, a tragic monologue, with ineffable sadness, stretching out the movement to over twenty minutes in duration. That mastery of touch created an aura of being weighed down with an interior lament, which occasionally burst into the open. In the thicker textures, such as the crossing of the right hand into deep bass territory, each layer of sound was voiced in detail. This was musicianship that gave one pause, requiring time to take it all in.

Likewise, Kholodenko took a long time with the Introduzione section of the final movement, to bring the listener out of the well of despair, with some stops and starts before settling on the concluding Fugue. The main motifs of the subject, an insistent trill and a downward scale, came across with utmost clarity, played with a severity and rigor that implied heroic resolution in the face of what had come before.

A similar trajectory marked the concert’s second half, which began with the Three Preludes, Op. 38, by Ukrainian composer Borys Lyatoshynsky. The composer included a quotation before each piece in the score, words penned by the beloved Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko. Kholodenko did not need to say a word about the brutal Russian war in Ukraine: this poetic subtext, along with the Ukrainian flag pin worn on his lapel, spoke even more forcefully.

In the poem of Prelude No. 1, Shevchenko wrote of how nightfall always brought him sad memories of his homeland: “But I have only to glance and my heart aches, / So I am involuntarily drawn to Ukraine.” Kholodenko drew out the sadness of this music, with a fluid tempo and a careful unwinding of the enigmatic modal turns taken by its principal tunes.

Something more ominous, the specter of death, hovered over Prelude No. 2, whose poem reads, “And the pipes stand sorrowful without smoke, / Behind vegetable gardens, beyond the fence, / Black graves rise.” Much of the piece has both hands playing in the bass clef, which Kholodenko rendered in a way that was murky, again weighed down by sadness. The music grew fuller, more openly grief-stricken, resolving into a hopeful major chord at the end.

In Prelude No. 3, Kholodenko applied a steady implacability to the ostinato pattern in the left hand that runs through the whole piece. The rumbling background octaves grew more insistent, ending on a gnawingly dissonant cluster.

To end such a deep-thinking program with a flashy Liszt work like the Grandes études de Paganini, seemed odd. Yet Kholodenko’s interpretation of these pieces, adapted from some of Paganini’s most challenging music and dedicated to Clara Schumann, transformed them into something daring and musical to parallel Beethoven’s concluding fugue on the first half.

Étude No. 1 set the tone, with the theatrical potential of the opening roulades kept in check. The tremolos that run through the work were also downplayed, to favor the musical phrasing of the sad melody, rendered with violinistic delicacy. In Étude No. 2, with its adornment of dizzying scales, Kholodenko put back in some of the flourishes in thirds that Liszt later decided to remove. In Étude No. 2, the famous “La Campanella,” Kholodenko again soft-pedaled the outrageous technical escapades to focus on a rubato fluidity of accelerando and rallentando.

Étude No. 4, taken very fast and staccato, featured outstanding hand crossings and runs in chords. The sounds of hunting horns in Étude No. 5 came through, even in the sections where athletic register leaps abounded. Finally in Étude No. 6, a tribute to Paganini’s celebrated Caprice No. 24, Kholodenko treated the ensuing variations with greater and greater degrees of surprise. The tenth variation, the one with a near-constant trill, shivered with an air of intense mystery, avoiding overt showmanship.

Two encores continued to provide unexpected pleasures, beginning with a Gavotte (Op. 12, no. 2) by Prokofiev, with its pseudo-baroque grace notes filtered through a Soviet lens. The second encore, Busoni’s transcriptions of a Brahms Chorale Prelude, had a similar heady mixture of styles, rounding out an exceptionally satisfying concert.

Pianist Julia Hamos plays music of Kurtág, Haydn, Ligeti, Mozart, and Schumann’s Fantasie in C Major 2 p.m. May 16 at Hopkins Bloomberg Center. washingtonperformingarts.org