MUSIC AS A PANACEA*****
Francisco Javier Aguirre

Starting a piano recital with a Mozart sonata helps to inject the listener with a good dose of serenity and balance. That was achieved by Leo de María in the concert offered on Wednesday, the 3rd, within the XXV Pilar Bayona Cycle of Great Soloists. Music as a panacea.

The ‘Sonata in E flat Major, KV 282’, read with the sensitivity that the young virtuoso put into his playing, created an atmosphere of complacency that is much appreciated in these convulsive times that we are living through. The first allegro, the two minuets and the concluding allegro sounded in that intermediate space in which it is easy to reconstruct the sonority of the fortepiano.

From the classical framework to romantic emotions: the first with Granados, in his ballad ‘El amor y la muerte’, from ‘Goyescas’. Chromatic breadth and complex dynamics in a score with a markedly idiomatic character within the author’s catalogue.

With the great sonata ‘Dante’, by Liszt, the soloist delved into the transcendent and even metaphysical content of music, insisting on contrasts and deepening the low range of the keyboard, with a well-constructed set of scales. He fine-tuned the tonal transitions and modulation throughout his speech, which in some passages acquired symphonic resonances.

In his ‘Humoreske in B flat Major, Op. 20 ’, Schumann clearly shows his empathetic capacity, a happy, although eventual, counterpoint to his troubled existence. Leo de María made a clean reading, without gratuitous springs, with demure respect for the composer’s vibrations: simplicity and delicate texture, first, acceleration and euphoria, later, in the four alternative fragments of the work. He highlighted the rubato in their room.

He concluded the evening with a vigorous version of ‘La Valse’, by Ravel, a compendium of the most qualified impressionism. There were two tips.