Andrew Clements 

Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition review – Flamboyant but contrived

The 2012 Leeds Piano Competition winner handles the big moments well but allows his sense of drama to obscure the music, writes Andrew Clements
  
  

Federicco Colli
Impressive technique … Federicco Colli Photograph: PR

Federico Colli narrowly won the 2012 Leeds Piano Competition. The flamboyance that gave him the edge in that final comes across vividly in his first recital disc, in a programme that seems to have been planned more for the impression it will make than for any musical coherence and sense. There's certainly real dash about Colli's playing; his technique is impressive and he's obviously good at the big gestures, so that the clinching moments in Pictures at an Exhibition – the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, the Marketplace at Limoges and especially the final Great Gate of Kiev – come off well. But there are also little stresses and hesitations in passages that should be presented much more straightforwardly which make the performance seem self-conscious and contrived. That's even more obvious in Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata, where the first climax is pushed almost to the point of parody, and Colli's account never really settles down or hangs together. In Scriabin's Tenth Sonata the effect is piecemeal, too, without the sense of obsessive accumulation the music needs.

 

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