Córdoba. Rafael Orozco Superior Conservatory of Music. 11-XI-2021. XIX Rafael Orozco Piano Festival. Daniel Ciobanu, piano. Works by Silvestri, Enescu, Mussorgski, Dediu, Liszt, Chopin/Hamelin and Prokofiev.
You, a regular visitor to the concert halls, will want from time to time a concert like the one offered by Daniel Ciobanu at the Conservatory of Córdoba within the framework of the Orozco Festival. In this era that we live in great technical perfection and scarcity of voices with something of their own to say in the musical, it is comforting to find such a huge talent, so absolute dominator of all piano registers, reduced precisely to what it really is, an instrument, that is, a means, through which to make an expressive approach to music. An overflowing personality, a creative and volcanic interpreter, launched, without limits, to an execution of great sound display where in every turn, in every nuance, there was an idea, an intention. Along the way there were accidents and memory lapses, but those 'unforgivable sins' in the ears of today's public add, if possible, even more astonishment to the proposal. Of course, it is not suitable for all tastes or for every day, but it is a pleasure to find so much commitment and desire to say new things.
He started the concert in a stunned way, with a change of program that caught the audience unaware and without time to settle in. That initial nervousness of the room caused some whip in the pianist, who, after a Bacchanal by Silvestri, which passed like a sigh, was tempered with a magical piece by Enescu, the Carillon Nocturne , where he distilled poetry and a sense of timbre and tonal ambiguity in a work of rare beauty that crosses post-impressionism and folklore and tends towards silence. In the following Mussorgskyan Pictures at an Exhibition , where frame by frame, we discover new things, going from amazement to perplexity: that harsh Gnome, that Castle in the fog, those Catacombs with an unusual game of pedals, that furious Baba Yaga or that Great Gate of Kiev, where the pianist took orchestral chords out of the instrument, deserved more applause than received and with it the first part of the program was closed.
Second part of the exhibition, where the pianist showed himself in his element. The winds of Transylvania arrived with a brief descriptive piece, with zapateado and finger snapping included, by Romanian Dan Dediu, Levantiscas op. 64. Virtuosity of law in a very elegant Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 by Liszt and in Chopin's Waltz's minute, harmoniously 'ragued' by composer Marc-André Hamelin. The curvilinear Sarcasms of Prokofiev finals served to confirm where the spiritual world of Ciobanu is, between the display of accents and the variety of moods. Again little applause harvested and abrupt end of the concert with the immediate ignition of the room lights.
Eclectic and restless personality that of the young Romanian pianist Daniel Ciobanu, silver medalist and audience prize at the Rubinstein in Tel Aviv in 2017 or winner of all the awards of the 2015 edition of the Moroccan Piano Festival. Festival promoter, magazine editor... We are talking, therefore, about a cultural animal whose activity overflows beyond the sphere of concert. The program and its implementation was a statement of interests and abilities. Of many interests and many abilities. And without limits.