Louis Lortie - Queen Elizabeth Hall Chopin Etudes

Hi I wasnt sure quite where to put this post. I saw Louis Lortie in London last night play all the Chopin Etudes. I was so left feeling unmoved and empty at the end of it. A friend of mine came with me who has no musical knowledge and said they sounded like a "bunch of technical studies for the piano" - which is about right! What I didnt get was how someone labelled a virtuoso had such limited power - all that eccentric effort waving his arms and jumping on his seat just to hear this un-impressing sound (esp the bass). Actually it looked at first as though he was doing the "punching your teacher in the face" techniques in the 8ve section in Alan's book. But the power was drained. Furthermore his shoulders are so scrunched up. What baffles me is that he is still able to produced blistering double 3rds(op25) and chomatics (op10.no2) - albeit his shoulders were down for this - but then completely sink into his eccentric habits. I just felt he had no (orchestral colour) range of sound other than warm - no brilliance in his octaves or fingerwork, no boom in the bass in op10.1, no

I saw Louis Lortie play the 24 etudes in Montreal the first time he did it in public, back in the 80's. I had heard through friends that he was planning to tear the keyboard apart in Op. 10 #1, that it would be so brilliant that nothing like it had ever been heard. I was disappointed. So I understand very much where you are coming from with this post. Sorry to hear that what he offered back then hasn't changed much - no maturation process in the 25 intervening years... The sad thing is, his pianistic lineage would APPEAR to be the same as mine but in fact is not. He studied with Marc Durand who was a student of Yvonne Hubert, the doyenne of Montreal piano teachers who had been Cortot's assistant in Paris for many years and who produced Ronald Turini, Andre Laplante, Janina Fialkowska and other greats. I studied with Phil Cohen who was Hubert's assistant for many years and now is curator of the Hubert archives at Concordia U. in Montreal. Somehow I feel Cohen offers his students the gold of that teaching but every Durand student I've ever heard somehow misses the boat. I don't know why it is that two students of the same great teacher should have such radically different teaching styles and results but there you have it... On the up side, I can promise you some much more satisfying etudes very soon - I am currently involved in editing Kemal Gekic's versions recorded earlier this year in Japan and can tell you that none of the complaints you list above apply to these performances... AFF PS By the way, Lortie is a dedicated and thoughtful musician. After completing his piano studies at Universite de Montreal, he went back to school at McGill as a theory student, and one thing he did was to learn and perform all the Bach 2-part and 3-part inventions. I admired his desire to learn the heart of the music he was playing and NOT just be a "virtuoso." Perhaps in the performance you heard, the spirit was willing but the flesh was weak?