Margaret Fingerhut sat down to the piano with the determined air of a woman with a mission, which was echoed by the title of the record she was about to release: Ukraine: A Piano Portrait. As she had explained to Radio 3’s In Tune the night before, she cherishes the fact that her grandfather was born in Odessa, “and who would not be proud of being connected to the incredible musical heritage of Jews from that city?”
Quite so. Think of the great violinist David Oistrakh, and the pianists Emil Gilels and Shura Cherkassky; think of George Gershwin’s parents and Bob Dylan’s grandparents. All hailed from buzzingly cosmopolitan Odessa, now suffering daily bombardment on the shores of the Black Sea.
History has not been kind to Ukraine, whose citizens have grown up in a relatively “new” state which Putin now asserts is not a state at all. Yet the Ukrainian nation has a long and illustrious past. Hence the purpose of Fingerhut’s programme.
Only one of the seven composers whose works she played is still alive – Valentin Silvestrov, a celebrated protester against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and now a political refugee in Berlin. And as we heard, his music – which was initially densely experimental – has become progressively more refined and intimate over the years.
Fingerhut’s grandfather was born in Odess (Photo: Darius Weinberg/Wigmore Hall)Fingerhut’s other composers worked under the Soviet yoke but, on this showing, that didn’t stop them evolving a common nationalistic style. Folk songs and dances underpin many of the works we heard in this performance, and the Ukrainian landscape itself played a role. The first piece, by Sergei Bortkiewicz, was based on a succession of dark chords evoking the awesomeness of Crimea’s craggy contours.
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Ukraine’s inextinguishable fighting spirit was much in evidence here, but one other thing that struck me was the way these pieces displayed echoes of better-known composers who didn’t have to work in a political void. I heard hints of Liszt, Debussy, and Rachmaninov, not because they had been plagiarised, but because those composers were aesthetically cognate with their Ukrainian counterparts.
I also heard pieces whose loveliness should earn them a place in the pianistic repertoire, rather than being forced, as at present, to blush unseen. Mykola Lysenko’s Rhapsody on Ukrainian themes – gilded by Fingerhut’s sensitive touch – had an ineffable sweetness, while Viktor Kosenko’s Nocturne-Fantaisie had a dreamily hypnotic effect. This latter composer braved extreme poverty to devote his life to composing music for children to play – and until 2022, many Ukrainian children did indeed play it.
It isn’t often that a single concert can reveal an unknown musical world, but the Wigmore Hall is to be congratulated for doing just that.
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