Keyboard magic: French pianist touches all the right notes at a performance at Alliance Francaise

Fans of Western classical music were treated to Mirabel-Pitte’s performance.

KARACHI: Fans of Western classical music were in for a treat when they were treated to a piano recital by French virtuoso Martine Mirabel-Pitte at Alliance Francaise de Karachi.

Mirabel-Pitte’s cultural credentials are blue chip. She has a formidable musical track record and kept an audience spellbound for 60 minutes when she performed on Thursday evening.

As I belong to that tribe that believes that no programme of light music, especially if it involves a piano, can possibly be complete without a prelude or a nocturne by Franz Liszt, I did wonder at the choice of composers and the selection of pieces.

Could there have been a thread that stitched together the fabric of composers as different to one another as Brahms and Rachmaninoff? The clue lay in the time span. All pieces were composed between 1885 and 1915. With that object in view the selection was sharp and compassionate.

Mirabel-Pitte has an exuberant style that emphasises movement and sensuality. Her handling of the grand piano was both powerful and rhythmically subtle with astonishing evenness of touch.

The way she drained Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse of its emotional juices was also quite involving. She is privy to the music’s moods, nooks and crannies and above all to his flashes of Impressionist colour that have taken French music into a new dimension.

Before moving on I must point out that Achille-Claude Debussy was among the greatest and most important of 20th century composers. His use of black chords of harmony with a modal flavour and based on the whole tone scale, the delicate colours of his orchestration , his technique of layering sounds, the declamatory yet wholly lyrical writing proclaim him as an innovator of the first degree. The label he acquired of ‘Impressionist’, while accurate, nevertheless tended to obscure the strong sense of form that underlies all his works.

I am glad Mirabel-Pitte included Faure in her selection, especially as most recitalists these days appear to have given him a wide berth.



Gabriel Faure, now acknowledged as one of the greatest of French composers, was a master of the song-cycle, a poet of the keyboard and a profound composer of chamber music. His delicate and elegant but by no means harmonically unadventurous style has an unsuspected strength and emotional appeal. The Bacarolle and Nocturne were a study in pure elegance. She never put a finger wrong and played with remarkable fluency.

The audience also got a glimpse of the great Rachmaninoff.  His Prelude Opus 23 is a highly descriptive tapestry of sound that makes exceptional demands on the recitalist. In this exuberant variety there are passages of extreme muscularity, flashes of rhythm, passages that are subdued and meditative and others that are nightmarish and full of Stygian gloom. The visiting artist played them all with a raw passion elemental in its strength. Her vigour and warmth were awe-inspiring.

As a teenager when I first became aware of the beauty of classical music the members of my Big Five Club were Haydn, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and Schubert. The bones of these immortals were not exhumed at the concert, but one must nevertheless be grateful to Mirabel-Pitte for giving us an insight into the music of two of France’s greatest sons.

Perhaps next time we’ll also hear Ravel, Massanet, Saint Saens and Benjamin Godard, most of whose music regrettably has perished except the beautiful Berceuse from Jocelyn.

The writer is a senior freelance journalist and columnist

Published in The Express Tribune, May 4^th, 2013.