Quirky But Sometimes Beautiful

Distinguished Italian pianist Carlo Levi Minzi at the Goethe Institut Auditorium, Bangkok, Thailand, following his March 22, 2013 piano recital.

Goethe Institut Auditorium. Bangkok, Thailand. March 22, 2013. Professor Carlo Levi Minzi has a distinguished resume and plays the piano very well, but that doesn't mean that I liked his playing. After all, music is an emotional experience and attempts to explain what one hears, or why one likes or dislikes the way a certain work is performed, have only limited utility. Minzi plays with his fingers flat, and not from the bridge. My guess is that he believes that he achieves a warmer tone with this approach, a tone that is usually attributed to the old world piano masters of a bygone age, such as Shura Cherkassy, Joseph Levine or Joseph Hoffman. However, what Minzi misses is that he fails to utilize the entire range and dynamics of piano playing, which is possible with the modern concert grand. He plays everything super-legato, which results in a bland performance, and, after listening to several works played by him, ultimately, boredom.

Some of Minzi's playing in Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, Schubert's Wanderer Fantasie, and Chopin's Ballade Nos. 1 and 2, were quite beautiful, but all were marred by Minzi's erratic phrasing and frequent tempo changes, which in some instances produced nothing short of distortions of the music. Minzi was most successful in his last two works, Chopin's Ballades 2 and 3, but by that time, I was nervously waiting for one of his jagged phrases to interrupt the smooth line of some nice Chopin playing.