by Angela Sutton
Thursday night saw the end of a long road for pianist Ian Hobson—two months' worth of Brahms programs at the DiMenna Center, encompassing all the solo works and most of the chamber works invoving the keyboard.
Fittingly, Thursday's program featured two groups of late piano pieces, Opp. 117 and 119, collections of short, highly introspective works that were Brahms' farewell notes to the piano. Hobson gave solid readings of the quiet numbers of Op. 117, but widened his expressive palette for the concluding Op. 119; his delicate stirring of the bubbly Op. 119/3, for example, gave way to the stormy Op. 119/4, a tempest that almost got away from him.
These short works framed the program's main event: both books of the fearsomely difficult Paganini Variations. As in our previous visit in September, the bigger works called forth the greater response from the pianist, who galloped through all 28 variations with great aplomb. Although the theme—the melody from Paganini's evergreen 24th Violin Caprice—transforms all of its principal features at one time or another, Hobson traced the process of its dismantling and recombination admirably, such that one was always oriented towards Brahms' particular tactic in each variation.
Unlike the relatively sober late piano pieces, in these variation sets Brahms made use of every pyrotechnical trick he could think of, setting off explosions of sound from all the registers of the keyboard. At least one audience member came out of his seat in order to better attempt to figure out the feats of prestidigitation required to present this wild score.
After a well-deserved applause, Hobson gave a muscular performance of Chopin's F minor Ballade as an encore, a pleasant surprise that left us with one more big work to remember him by.