A Honens Winner that Deserves Attention

My past experiences with the Honens International Piano Competition date back to 2011, during my tenure with Examiner.com; and they were not particularly sanguine. The Competition was launched in 1992 and held in Calgary in Alberta, Canada. 2011 was the year in which the Competition began to release a series of CDs of studio recordings by competition laureates; and I was sent the initial round of four of those CDs. These accounted for the first-place laureate from 2006, and the first, second, and third place winners in 2009. Writing about these releases served to trigger a rant against the whole idea of such competitions.

Pianist Illia Ovcharenko on the cover of his Live at Honens 2022 album (courtesy of 8VA Music Consultancy)

My thoughts about competitions have not changed very much over the following decades. Many readers may already know that this is the case even when the competition is limited to a single institution, such as the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Nevertheless, 8VA Music Consultancy informed me of the latest Honens CD, featuring 2022 Honens Prize Laureate Illia Ovcharenko; and I was impressed with the Ukrainian pianist’s approach to repertoire. As of this writing, however, it appears that the album is only available in the digital domain, and Amazon.com has created a Web page for MP3 download.

Most important was that the album began with Alberto Ginastera’s Opus 22 (first) piano sonata. While Hilary Hahn’s latest album, released this past October, included Ginastera’s violin concerto; it is most likely the case that Ovcharenko’s album was my first encounter with any of his piano sonatas. There is a refreshing energy to the rhetoric that pervades the four movements of this sonata, and that freshness may remind some listeners of early piano compositions by Aaron Copland. Nevertheless, Ginastera’s voice was consistently his own over the course of his lifetime; and I could not have been more satisfied with the opportunity to listen to Ovcharenko interpret this particular sonata.

The same can be said of the final two tracks, the last two movements of the second of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 30 violin sonatas, composed in the key of C minor. Those wondering what a violin sonata is doing at a piano competition should be reminded that Beethoven’s own title pages described all ten of his sonatas as scored for piano and violin (in that order). While the first two movements are often cited for their “Eroica” rhetoric, the third movement scherzo is downright playful; and that sense of play spills over into the final movement. Much of that play emerges from the keyboard work, and Ovcharenko was not shy in presenting the sense of humor behind Beethoven’s preferences.

The middle of the recording is an account of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 414 piano concerto in A major. Accompaniment was provided by bass player Sam Loeck joining the members of the Viano String Quartet: violinists Lucy Wang and Hao Zhou, violist Aiden Kane, and cellist Tate Zawadiuk. This particular concerto definitely lends itself of a chamber music setting, and the string players are dutiful accompanists to Ovcharenko’s solo work. Nevertheless, when compared with the rest of this CD, his approach to a Mozart concerto sounds more like an act of obligation than an inspired account of the playful side of the composer (which does not differ than much from the playful side of Beethoven).

Thus, while I continue to be skeptical about competitions, I found that there was more than enough to engage my attention in this recent Honens release.