Once upon a time, pioneers of historically informed performance made all sorts of proclamations about the “rightness” of their mission.
In recent years those were overtaken by a stronger sort of correctitude, coming from a union of scholarship, virtuosity and feeling that convinced without dogmatic utterance.
Kristian Bezuidenhout’s fortepiano recital Friday night at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago had that kind of rightness. Even though it represented but a single way of playing the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, for two hours it easily made the case that it was the only way.
The fortepiano is a small, delicately made ancestor of the modern piano. Its tone is soft, intimate, varied and, particularly in the bass register, extremely clear. Mozart wrote his keyboard music for the fortepiano. C.P.E. Bach composed for harpsichord, clavichord and fortepiano.
Bezuidenhout played on a contemporary instrument by R.J. Regier based on late-18th century fortepianos by the great Viennese craftsman Anton Walter. It was on loan from Chicago keyboard artist David Schrader, and, in part because of the room’s friendly acoustics, the sound was at once crystalline and warmly beguiling.
The program held six compositions by Mozart, two by C.P.E. Bach. The juxtaposition further emphasized the quirkiness of Bach’s Rondo in C minor and Sonata in E minor, giving a fresh, off-kilter quality to the evening.
Mozart selections in the first half included several lesser-known dance pieces in the style of Handel and J.S. Bach — the Suite in C major (K. 399) plus a Menuet (K. 355) and Gigue (K. 574). These received fairly strict performances, crisp and rhythmically stable, though colored by poetically varied touch.
Robert Levin’s completion of the Suite’s Sarabande — Mozart wrote only five bars — introduced a wistful, aching element that signaled greater Romantic freedom in Bezuidenhout’s playing, in the famous Rondo, K. 511, and, after intermission, the Fantasie, K. 475, and Sonata, K. 333.
The Fantasie, in particular, was theatrically paced, with the addition of higher color, a wider range of dynamics and more rhetorical pauses. The Sonata’s concluding movement had a positively swooning ritard combined with hushed playing that might have sounded too precious on a modern piano but here proved full of irresistible yearning and imaginatively right.
There were no encores.
Alan Artner is a freelance critic.