Review by Simon Jenner, April 9th 2025
Louis Viktor Bak began studying only from 14 and is now London based, completing a Masters in Performance at the Royal College of Music. Winner of several first prizes he most recently completed in the Leeds Piano Competition.
He returns to St Nicholas to give a performance of the two composers featured on his first disc: Debussy and his close slightly older contemporary Chaminade.
If you want to hear a performance there’s one on YouTube from February 2022 at St James Piccadilly.. that was with a Fazioli piano, generally regarded as the finest in the world. The Petroc brings a bright more direct sound In this acoustic. Bak modulates to a sound recognisable as precisely the same artist.
Photo Credit Luca Luciano
He begins with ‘Reflets Dan’s l’eau’ from Images Book 1. Never hurried, intent on teasing out the precision of Debussy’s colours and markings, tis first piece ripples and indeed Eddie’s more than ripples. Clear as the reflection.
Images Book 2 brings he sense of chimes through ‘Cloches a Travers Les feuilles’ managing to evolve the mysterious mechanical with both the mechanical naturalism and – like the clocks – a graduated winder, even mystery.
‘Et la lune descend sur le temps quite fut’ is more than a piece of French Chinoiserie.. It’s a hauntingly still and making-strange, work of contemplation. Bak’s colours are ideally blanched here and he manages the veiled tones and again a precise magic out of the loss of belief.
‘Poissons d’or’ is a coruscating change where Bak’s virtuosity, held in che K till now, blazes forth in flicks and glitters as the goldfish flashes and surfaces ripple es, even thrashes on he pool’s surface. This piece corresponds to the first Book’s ‘Mouvement’ not played here. It functions as an Allegro finale though there’s no corresponding opening allegro. There’s a muscle of water given smooth but eruptive agency in this work. In these pieces, even more than Ravel who in part inspired his older colleague, you see the 19th century dissolve like a pearl in iridescent solvent.
Photo Credit Simon Jenner
The 19th century is still very much alive in Chaminade (1857-1944) and in truth she never left it. There’s certainly no harm in that a d he works are in the past 20 years or so gaining well deserved recognition.
Her Piano Sonate Op 21 is quite early, from around 1890.
It’s unusual too in breaking off after a declamatory opening. The Allegro Appassionato buds in surges in a fine late romantic manner though one of Chaminade’s great salon melodies, and it and proves itself not salon at all, but what one suspects with Chaminade ‘s melodies: some are seemingly destined for grander things than the ‘piece’ they end up in.
Luckily here with its agogic hesitations and sudden breaks a d builds w can see Chaminade flex a compositional power she would bring to works with orchestra.
Bal is sovereign in this. He contrasts with the more simple-seeming Andante. But this is a work that again imports just a hint of Tchaikowskyian depth to its melodies. Listening to this work it’s not entirely clear if it sounds French. There are giveaways but less than you’d think. A simple ascending and descending figure suggests an almost prayerful accord with Ives’ Sonata No.2 slow movement: ‘The Allcotts’.
And French Piano Sonatas are thin in the ground. The two best known date from later. Dukas in 1900.and Dutilleux in 1946, the same year Boulez embarked in the first of his three over a decade.
Photo Credit Simon Jenner
Photo Credit Simon Jenner
The Allegro finale moves seamlessly from the Andante. It’s a chiming coruscation of a piece, and again Russian: something more distinguished than say the fine Glazunov Sonatas and moving towards some of the sound works of Rachmaninov in grander moments, and very early Scriabin. Perhaps most of all though Schumann seems a predominant influence, particularly his Piano Sonata No. 1 Op 11. Chaminade has made the genre and particular timber within it her own. There’s force as well a mercurial lightness
As the final pages romp home we feel secure in the hands of a young master pianist with enormous surging power in his precision, and limitless depth of tome and interpretive fathom. And through Bak in Chaminade a further discovery: full romanticism revealed in what we’ve been pleased to think of as a minor master of the French Piano. This Sonata proclaims something more.
Photo Credit Simon Jenner
Photo Credit Simon Jenner