Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
February 24, 2003
"Reconciliaton of contrasts"
“Precisely on the day Clara Schumann had been nominated 125 years ago to a top position in the teaching staff of Dr. Hoch’s Conservatory, a former student gave his first great concert in Frankfurt – the evening with Ulrich Roman Murtfeld met with wide response… Murtfeld presented Beethoven and Liszt, but also Janáček and Dutilleux; together with Brahms at the start and Debussy (‘Feux d’artifice’) as encore he displayed a six fold-shaped spectrum of advanced pianistique which always searched and found the balance between superior technical playing – most pronounced in the French compositions – and intensity of expression, between the vividness of Beethoven’s Sonata ‘Les Adieux’ and its spiritual abstraction… The counterpart to the different levels of style, clearly emerging, was found in the balance between architecture and sonority… Still more sudden than in Brahms’ Balade g-minor and his Intermezzo a-major, contrasts burst in Liszt’s ‘Dante Sonata’, between the furyof the infernal tempest and the
Heartfelt recollection of lucky times. Also here Murtfeld achieved a convincing balance between the extremes… The revelation of the evening: the third movement from Dutilleux’s Sonata…demanding from the pianist true fireworks of pianistic virtuosity – a challenge which was mastered by the pianist with souvereignty and precise brilliance.”