This brilliantly presented recital takes us on a journey from fantasy and excess to catastrophe. Opening with Alfred Grunfeld's concert paraphrase on Johann Strauss's 'Die Fledermaus it closes with Ravel's 'La Valse' and includes complementary works by Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Liszt, Mahler and Schoenberg. This is a heady mix indeed, the sense of diversion erased by an equal sense of progression . Paying tribute to Vienna, in his own words, ,'this legendary city' Pontier writes of his fascination with pre-revolutionary eras. The rhythm of the waltz(pervasive throughout this recital) is inseparable from Vienna, a city that 'set the whole world dancing,' yet unwittingly already carried the seeds of its destruction. As Joseph Roth, quoted by Pontier, puts it, Vienna was a city that 'moved almost in an instant from the performance of an operetta to the appalling theatre of world war.' As in the kingdom of Illyria in Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night,' instability and extravagance hover on the edge of tragedy.
More positively, Pontiner's programme ranges far and wide. His Straus-Grunfeld paraphrase could hardly be more scintillating or more alive with ear-catching nuance, and in Godowsky's 'Alt Wien' he is at the very heart of its sighing, bitter-sweet nostalgia. His Rachmaninov Polka tells us that the composer was not always 'six foot two of Russian gloom'(Stravinsky) and in Tchaikovsky's Valse-scherzo he whirls us across the dance floor, every inch the white-tie-and-tails ballroom dancer. There is a beguiling variety of sonority at the close of the Kreisler-Rachmaninov 'Liebesleid' and if the introduction to the Strauss Schulz-Evler Blue Danube is missing(once described as 'sending fabulous spangles of sound spinning through the air') the performance is supremely idiomatic and accomplished. The second of Liszt's Valse oubliee rather than the well-tried first is an example of Pontier's enterprise, and in his own arrangement of the Sinfonietta from Mahler's Sixth Symphony he conjures a stillness as remarkable as the hyper-virtuosity of his other often floridly virtuosic offerings.
Finally, Ravel's 'La Valse' where the Viennese idiom(complete with its characteristic rhythmic 'lift') is mocked, seen as it were through a distorting mirror, before the final apocalypse. One of Ravel's masterpieces 'La Valse' is made the ironic crown on all that has gone before.
Bryce Morrison