Ingrid Fliter tickles the old classical ivories

Author: Shahar Fineberg

It was not until the very moment that the doors opened that Ingrid Fliter had the piano tuned and tempered. She instructed the tuner mainly to adjust the hammers for a fuller sound, rather than change the pitch of the notes. Initially, I regarded this as a standard procedure, one done by any pianist. But once the crowd was seated and the concert began, I realized at once that I had witnessed one of Fliter's many secrets: she must have tuned our Center for the Arts piano to a heavenly register, as the music wafted out from it, spreading throughout the Concert Hall and raising it to a perch just beneath the clouds.

From the time Schubert's movement began to when it ended, "D. 959 in A Major" the Sunday afternoon sun had been refracted through the music, it diffused and transformed the hanging triangular light fixtures wrapped in Styrofoam into clouds.

The Schubert sonata had come after an infrequently performed Beethoven piece, "Thirty-two Variations on an Original Theme in C minor," which was essentially a temperamental experiment whose rumbles excited the audience. Audience members were leaning over in their seats after the piece was played and promptly fell into the rapture of luxury, calm and voluptuousness in Schubert's sonata.

As I stepped out to intermission, I wondered how the second half of the concert, consisting entirely of Chopin pieces, could measure up to the first half. Schubert's rich, meandering strolls on the lakeside would surely be cut too short by Chopin's linear, Salonic elegance. In retrospect, though, my fear was unfounded, as the program had been cleverly assembled: the Beethoven piece was in fact as different from Schubert's as Schubert's was from the ensuing Chopin. The three composers were presented in chronological order, a fact I say the setting sun had noticed as well, as it brought forth the darkening day to shine a bit heavier through the windows, mirroring the progression into Chopin's chamber.

But it was not into Chopin's chamber that we were led. Filter managed to point out each composer's defining characteristics without necessarily evoking their stereotype, or what we have come to expect of them. In Chopin, for example, she emphasized the Prussian officer riding along the ridges of the Ural Mountains rather than chatting or dancing away at the Salon.

This concert was possibly the best one this year, and as Fliter completed the program with "Chopin's Ballad No. 4 in F Minor," the audience applauded and called to her until she eventually performed an encore of a modern piece, which is a gesture most who come to Middlebury do not make. In many concerts there are short pauses between a piece and the audience's applause, likely because the audience has lost track of the movements. In almost every concert, however, a standing ovation is given, somewhat indifferently to whether it had been deserved. This concert was one where no indifference was to be found, to which the performer, program, audience, hall and cosmos responded to produce a Sunday afternoon of ideal familiarity.

It is a shame this review is written after the fact, and that not each one of you could sit today with the handsome Vermont crowd of old dandies. Until Fliter returns for another concert, then, it is only possible to snatch her albums and elevate ourselves up into the clouds.