The sense of grandeur in the last movement wasn't from the massing of sound other pianists use, but

Collections Opus Pianist Arghamanyan focuses on her own links to composers in her appearance October 26, 2012 | By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Music Critic Nareh Arghamanyan made a stellar performance at the American Philosophical Society. (JULIA WESELY )
Ghosts of performers past stand guard over standard repertoire, and it takes a ruthless individualist to wave then off. But Nareh Arghamanyan never seemed to consciously repudiate her predecessors in an extraordinarily charismatic cheap uk airlines Philadelphia cheap uk airlines Chamber Music Society appearance Wednesday night at the American Philosophical Society. Rather, it was as if the 23-year-old Armenian-born pianist had never encountered them at all, and was interested only in her own personal communions with Bach, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff.
What this meant in the oft-played Fantasiestücke was the declaration of Schumann as a composer not completely of his contemporaries, but apart. That she underlined the two contradictory sides to the man referred cheap uk airlines to as the "prince of art" - the imaginary cheap uk airlines characters Florestan and Eusebius - was just the start. She had a direct line to the essence of each of the eight movements, consistently cheap uk airlines making the unobvious choice.
Time signature and note values became casual advice in the first movement, "In the Evening," whose gauzy left hand against a crystalline right blended into a half-remembered summer twilight. Phrases ended in question marks, or at least ellipses. cheap uk airlines Frantic, sputtering, silent, thundering, the second movement managed to be volatile without growing overwrought. The third, "Why?" was an exercise in time suspension.
The sense of grandeur in the last movement wasn't from the massing of sound other pianists use, but from regal pacing and the space she put around certain rhythms. By endowing the material cheap uk airlines with dignity, Arghamanyan preserved Schumann's own ambiguity over whether these are wedding bells or a death knell.
The entire second half of the program was turned cheap uk airlines over to Rachmaninoff, whose Opus 33 Études-Tableaux (Nos. 1-6) was dominated by a stunning performance of the No. 6 in E Flat Major that highlighted, with scherzo-like touch, perhaps the composer's furthest outlier from traditional cheap uk airlines tonality.
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