Search - Liszt, Kemal Gekic :: Etudes D'Execution Transcendante

Gekic plays Liszt with ebullient fire, drama, lyricism

Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 04/10/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The transcendental etudes by Liszt have long been virtuoso calling cards, but the music behind the display has all but been forgotten in our era as we aknowledge Liszt with faint praise.Into the midst of all this "yes, but ..." opinion arrives pianist Kemal Gekic. He has legitimate cultural claims to Hungarian authenticity; with a piano tone that is at once crystalline and thunderous. Right off, in the first etude, Gekic establishes his virtuoso credentials. His tempo alone would leave many an aspirant disqualified in the first elimination rounds. The fact is, he takes off in the first etude like a rocket. A listener may fear that he is using himself up in the first etude without leaving much for the next etudes. But as the succeeding etudes reveal, Gekic is much more than a speedster who can amaze with fast times around the track. He has a genuine feel for long, lyric lines ... which can often fall apart into disconnected phrases in lesser hands. In his hands, these lovely meldies inflect and breathe as Gekic catches and holds and shapes your musical attention across a page or more of singing line. He uncannily clarifies accompaniments and helter-skelter textures without losing sight of the larger narrative wholes. Display serves dramatic ends in playing that commands the whole keyboard. Individual etudes are characterized with the poetry or drama that their erstwhile literary origins may suggest. Almost superhuman feats of playing at first amaze with their sheer imperious command, and simultaneously yield to musical values of phrasing, rhythm, tone, and high romantic style. Empty figurations are strikingly revealed as rhetoric, and mercurial background filigree comments interestingly on the musical foreground. Gekic wanders easily in among all the considerable lights and shades that this music may cast.Yes, there are other ways to play this set of formidable etudes. But Gekic unfolds his own logic, as distinctively as a particular storyteller holds center stage in one of the ancient Greek dramas. And, just as with our western attempts to reclaim the heights and depths of drama and music as we imagined them to be in ancient Greece, Gekic compels us to remember that oral traditions of insight and deep communication preceeded written ones. Forget anaysis, just listen.Five starts, going on fifty. Highly, highly recommended. Look for a used copy if you can find one at all."