FROM LEARNING TO KNOWING

Calcutta Telegraph – Calcutta,India

A very different kind of recital review from Calcutta, that connects Chopin with ’70s crooner Morris Albert: “When singing in public from little slips of paper has become de rigueur with the Tagorean orthodoxy in Calcutta, it was most reassuring to hear 20-year-old Gaurab Dutta perform with increasing aplomb a long and devilishly difficult programme of Classical and Romantic music for the piano entirely from memory. This was Dutta’s debut concert as part of the Monsoon Concert Series at the Calcutta School of Music on July 19…”

After the interval, Dutta played Schubert’s Sonata in A minor, beautifully interpreting the exquisite melancholy of its Allegretto quasi andantino. He then played one of Moritz Moskowski’s Études de Virtuosité, which was the cleverest way of preparing himself for the profoundly meditative Nocturne in E minor and a rousing Valse Brillante, also in E minor, both by Chopin. For the encore, he played, with a sort of inspired audaciousness, an arrangement of Morris Albert’s mid-Seventies popular song, Feelings, managing to make it sound like something Chopin had composed in his early teens. There is a difference between ‘learning’ a piece of music and ‘knowing’ it — a difference that a sensitive listener would pick up at once. Everything that Dutta played that evening with such impressive technical daring was impeccably learnt and committed to memory. But the first Scarlatti, the Schubert Andantino, the Chopin Nocturne and, oddly enough, Feelings at the end sounded like music that he has come to know deeply, and has begun to make his own

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