A Pleasant Hour with French Pianist Amandine Habib

Bangkok. July 4, 2010. Sunday night’s hour-long recital by French pianist Amandine Habib was a pleasant way to spend an evening. Of course, the excitement of major artists performing at renowned venues is unique, as are such outstanding events as the Singapore Piano Festival or the London Piano Competition, which I attended recently. Still, an accomplished pianist like Habib, performing in an intimate hall like the Goethe Institute’s in Bangkok, is a different kind of event that goes down well, unless, of course, one expects too much.

Habib has an adequate technique to play the difficult pieces she selected. After a few minutes into her performance of the first movement of Schumann’s Fantasie, one could stop worrying whether Habib would be able to get through the demands of the music, but it was clear that we were not in the presence of a superior performer, one major fault being erratic pauses of her own invention, in this and several other pieces. The Rachmaninov Prelude in c sharp minor followed, and then two Bach-Busoni transcriptions, one a chorale, and the other the famous Chaconne in d minor, which I thought was very musically played. The evening ended with a fluid performance of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz, again, nicely, although not spectacularly, played. It was an evening of good music, performed in a pleasant and enjoyable way.