Ingolf Wunder’s second-place finish at the 2010 International Chopin Piano Competition propelled him to a coveted recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon and a fledgling international career. On Sunday at the Phillips Collection, the 30-year-old Austrian made his Washington debut with a promising, but uneven, recital displaying his robust and ambitious musicianship.
Ever fearless, Wunder opened with one of the most artistically challenging and elusive works in the piano repertoire: Schubert’s monumental final Sonata in B-flat. Wunder’s was a young man’s interpretation, full of febrile energy and volatile emotion. Where other pianists have found a cosmic spaciousness and poignant melancholy, Wunder emphasized surface drama and muscular sonorities.
The first movement, performed without the exposition repeat, began promisingly, with Wunder’s hesitant reading of the pastoral melody and the famous shuddering trill expressing disquiet and unease. But impetuosity soon overtook introspection, as Wunder raced to follow a succession of thoughts and feelings, often with a maddeningly unsteady pulse. In Wunder’s hands, Schubert’s farewell sonata was less a valediction than a statement of youthful defiance.
Chopin's epic "Polonaise-Fantasie" offered surer ground. Wunder was awarded a special prize for the best performance of the piece at the 2010 Chopin competition, and in recital he displayed the same command of structure, rich sonorities and secure technique that impressed the jury, if not quite the same competition level of focus.
The final programmed work was “Hexameron,” a set of variations on a theme of Bellini that was cobbled together by Franz Liszt from contributions from six composers. This rarely performed compendium of virtuosic cliches found Wunder at his most relaxed, allowing him to indulge in splashy displays of technique and bel canto bombast.
His most engrossing playing, though, came in romantically inflected readings of Mozart’s Adagio in B Minor, K. 540, and the Fantasia in C, K. 394 — both performed as encores. In these smaller-scale works, Wunder achieved a nearly ideal blend of beguiling poetry and tense drama. Next time in D.C., more Mozart, please.
