Henry Wong Doe: University Music Theatre

By WILLIAM DART

Young Henry Wong Doe is a pianist with attitude. Watching him play on Sunday night, with arms, face and whole body catching the intensity of every nuance, was as much a theatrical experience as a purely musical one.

He does not give his audiences the expected. Last year's recital was built around a Dutilleux Sonata; this time the concert opened with Busoni's Sonatina Secunda and included works by Soren Nils Eichberg that were almost hot off the press.

The Busoni was perhaps the finest single offering: a lovely, luminescent work, shedding its own light on the dark soundworlds that Liszt had unearthed late in his career. Wong Doe illuminated it all, caressing melodies out of the fragile blur.

His account of Beethoven's great A major Sonata of Opus 101 may have shocked some. There were lapses and occasionally fury pushed logic aside. Even in the gentler passages, there was a tendency to mannerism, as Wong Doe stressed Beethoven's direction to be played with innermost feeling.

But, in the flesh, no doubt about it, this was an electrifying event. No museum attempt at revivification this; the music lived, breathed and more than once even seemed to pant.

There were living composers in the second half, from Ligeti's great Devil's Staircase Etude, transformed into frenetic boogie woogie, and eight of Eichberg's Scherben, a collection of 19 Etudes and Postludes written for the Busoni International Piano Competition. Wong Doe caught every shift of mood and there were many, plucking out the ringing sonorities of the eighth and offering a dazzling workout in the mirrored counterpoints of the 13th.

Schumann, as we know, was a man of many personalities and, in Wong Doe's account of the Fantasiestucke Op 12, these clashed more than was good for the music. At times Des Abends seemed to suspend itself in mid-air; Aufschwung was too terrifying in its intensity, the Rossini scamper in Fabel perhaps too manic.

There were revelations - the askew folk dance of Grillen was one - but liabilities, too, like subjecting Warum to death by rubato.

Schumann's question is, I suspect, a simpler and deeper one than Wong Doe makes it out to be.