Newsday, July 2005

JEROME ROSE and FABIO BIDINI, piano. Attended Sunday and Monday at the International Keyboard Institute and Festival, 150 West 85th Street in Manhattan. Visit www.ikif.org or call 212-580-0210 ext. 4858.

The heat, the din, the crush of frantic souls: The ticket line at the International Keyboard Institute and Festival (IKIF) makes Dante's Inferno look tame. But just as Dante's trek gave way to ineffable bliss, so does the chaotic gateway to Mannes College of Music’s annual piano extravaganza admit listeners to one of New York’s most thrilling concert series.

The IKIF roster—including Earl Wild, Marc-André Hamelin and Melvyn Tan—is stellar. What's more, concerts take place in Mannes' cozy recital hall, creating a mood of unique concentration and intimacy. The whisper of the air conditioning is a roar over audiences' silence; cell phones and catarrh are nowhere to be heard. Big-venue recitals seem oddly impersonal by comparison—until you remember that many piano works were composed for just such human-scale spaces.

This year's IKIF opened with performances that merited audiences' rapt attention. Humility marked festival founder Jerome Rose's concert: not meekness, but a noble willingness to put his intelligence and skills wholly at the service of music. Stark, percussive attacks opened Schubert's C-Minor Sonata, D. 958, whose pools of seeming calm were roiled by thunder from deep within. There was nothing dainty or pretty about Rose's Schubert: his tone was solid even in the Adagio's gentle filigree, and ripples of gloom ate away at the finale's dance-like figure.

Philip Lasser's "De l’hiver au printemps," a world premiere, brought to mind the broken but rapturous lyricism of Alban Berg's music. Rose summoned a soft, feathery touch for its meditative conclusion. In Rose's hands, Chopin's Ballade No. 3 did not simply glitter, but sang with a boldness and generosity of soul.

Brahms' Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel can bring out the gluey worst in pianists, but Rose found a clear line and pulse beneath all those impish splats, swirls of autumnal melancholy and shades of Romany mystery.

Young Fabio Bidini's second-night concert was equally remarkable. Two Scarlatti sonatas were a mad rush, but Bidini bathed Galuppi's Sonata in C Major in dewy grace. To Clementi's Sonata Op. 40, No. 2, he brought ferocious intensity, knitting together stormy episodes and haunted airs into a heaving, feverish whole. Runs stung with fury; silences between notes told of darkness. Listeners who had considered Clementi mere fodder for beginner pianists came away chastened.

Bidini played Beethoven's Sonata, Op. 109 with heart-stopping beauty: a freedom of phrasing that most pianists reserve for Chopin, and a delicacy of touch that made one long series of arpeggios seem to float away.

There was a brittle sweetness to the most confident melodies in Bidini's performance of Schubert's "Wanderer-Fantasie." Its frills spun webs of sadness, and its fugue suggested not order but madness precariously stanched. His take on this familiar work was brave and extreme—not canonically beautiful, perhaps, but a stunning conclusion to a revelatory concert.

Marion Lignana Rosenberg is a freelance writer.