South Florida Classical Review

Zlata Chochieva performed a recital for Friends of Chamber Music of Miami Tuesday night in Coral Gables. Photo: Uwe Arens

Zlata Chochieva  is a formidable keyboard artist who has made occasional appearances in South Florida over the past decade. 

Chochieva returned on Tuesday night for a varied and generous recital at Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ, presented by Friends of Chamber Music. (She will repeat the program April 2 at Carnegie Hall in New York.)  The steely-fingered pianist can draw a huge sound from the instrument but she can also bring out the piano’s more songful, vocal impulses.

She opened with Bartók’s harmonically enriched transcription of the Lento movement from Bach’s Organ Sonata in G Major. Every detail emerged with clarity and Chochieva’s finely varied degrees of softness enhanced this unique arrangement. 

Avoiding the temptation to break the music’s rapt aura, Chochieva immediately commenced Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes without breaking for applause. She took a highly personal approach to pacing and phrasing of each etude, bringing out the dual nature of Schumann’s musical persona, Chocieva’s soft playing, meticulous precision and sonic beauty captured the score’s more sensitive moments. Never merely percussive, her shading and tonal variety made each episode distinctive. There was a light, playful impetus to the scherzo-like sections and the fast etudes were taken at a rapid clip but with total accuracy. The concluding pages were rendered in a burst of virtuosic brilliance.

Many pianists conclude their recitals with Schumann’s difficult score but Chochieva was just getting started. Brahms’ Romanze in F Major demonstrated the pianist’s more evocative side. The vignette’s long, lyrical lines were rendered with sweep and evenness of textures. Again Chochieva did not wait for applause, going right into the opening bars of Brahms’ rarely played Scherzo in E-flat minor. Chochieva’s lightning speed and expressive intensity contrasted with the more playful central segment which was imbued with charm.

The recital’s second half was devoted to Rachmaninoff, a composer who is a specialty of Chochieva’s. (A rare performance of Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Chopin was the high point of her Miami debut in 2014 for the Miami International Piano Festival.) Eight preludes from the Op. 23 and 32 sets demonstrated both Chochieva’s dazzling strength and nuanced subtlety. The Prelude in D Major is one of Rachmaninoff’s greatest melodic inspirations and Chochieva gave full rein to its expansive melancholy. Her fortes rocked the sanctuary in the C minor prelude with cascading figurations. Bold declamation accented the culminating pieces from the later Op. 32 collection.

Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42 was Rachmaninoff’s last solo piano work, composed in 1931. The twenty variations are based on the familiar “La Folia” theme which was not, in fact, by Corelli but was utilized by him (as it was by many others). The composer apparently never played the entire score, omitting variations based on his mood and an audience’s attention span. 

Chochieva played the complete, twenty-minute work. She stated the theme in a straightforward manner which made her virtuosic volleys later on that much more impressive. The romanticized variants were played with languid moodiness.  A beautiful rhapsodic moment was followed by a sequence worthy of a Paganini of the keyboard, given barn-burning thrust. The finale was taken at a breakneck tempo, followed by a subtle understated iteration of the soft coda. Chochieva’s reading did full justice to Rachmaninoff’s minefield of technical outbursts, enhanced by the church’s excellent Bösendorfer.

To conclude her ambitious program, Chochieva offered Rachmaninoff’s transcription of the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His version requires the artist to play at nearly twice the speed of Mendelssohn’s orchestral original, which Chochieva accomplished with an almost demonic verve, ending on a note of high bravura.

The Friends of Chamber Music season concludes with clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein and pianist Asiya Korepanova playing Brahms’ two sonatas for clarinet and piano and other works 8 p.m. April 29 at Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ. miamichambermusic.org

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