Sunday, September 27, 2009
A SOUND LOST
Alicia de Larrocha, Pianist, Dies at 86
When we subscribed to the Boston Celebrity Series, year after year, we would always pick an evening with Alicia de Larrocha as one of our season selections.
I read here that she was small of stature. Four foot nine. I am astonished to read it.
I remember a large woman full of energy striding across the stage, sitting and beginning almost immediately with great focus.
She looked a bit like a teacher. A formidable teacher.
But the sound. Rich, warm, engaging. It would reach out and wrap around us.
She was a formidable classicist first and an interpreter of the Spanish composers second. They didn't bring her in so we could hear Albanez with a spanish lilt. She had the whole repertory down.
You would bathe in the germanic sounds and then, magically, be brought into a different world with the spanish masters.
She was an annual visitor to us until she retired from touring just about the time we left Boston. She played her last concert in Carnegie Hall in 2002.
“There are two kinds of repertory Alicia plays,” Mr. Breslin said in 1978. “Things she plays extremely well, and things she plays better than anyone else. But what I think makes her a phenomenon is that she doesn’t give the impression of being a great personality. She’s cool as a cucumber. Onstage, she doesn’t even like to look at the audience. So what the public is responding to is something in the music.”
