This year’s 20th celebration of the Woodend Winter Arts Festival included a range of captivating events that offered exciting, stimulating and heart-warming performances in the intimate atmosphere of the popular rural region of the Macedon Ranges. Run by outstanding volunteer networks, the focus this year on Music, Words & Ideas, Theatre and Film offered visitors and locals the chance to celebrate Australian talent and meet our best artists in varied intimate performing spaces.
The King of Instruments for this year’s King’s Birthday weekend was the high quality Kawai grand piano, generously loaned to the Festival for the outstanding pianist Berta Brozgul, who offered a terrific selection of piano masterpieces for her recital. With beauty, humility and professional formality, Berta offered a high degree of artistry and interpretation of the most challenging repertoire. No words were needed to introduce each work – the pianist and composers would say all that was necessary in intelligently themed repertoire: Variations on a Theme.
Having completed postgraduate studies at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, Brozgul’s opening work Rondo in A minor was a perfect choice. Mozart clearly loved the main theme as it appears ten times, repeated with delightful ornamentations and inventive melodic development. Brozgul gave us an unhurried, lyrical exposé of the theme, maintaining thoughtfulness, classical beauty and delicacy in flowing staccato runs, cleanly delineated active semiquaver passages and purposefully exposed ornaments, carefully maintaining a pensive and questioning framework for what can otherwise become intense and anguished. Composed in 1787 towards the end of Mozart’s short life, the work is brooding rather than bleak, and Brozgul maintained an elegance and light pedalling, highlighting both the melody and chromaticism in this gorgeous yearning theme with its intricate variations.
Chopin’s Ballade No 4 in F minor is considered to be the most difficult and powerful of his four popular Ballades. From the opening single-note bell-tones a romantic flowing waltz circled, bass melodies surged and strengthened as a decorative transformation of the first theme grew with extensive contrapuntal lines. Brozghul demonstrated her strengths in building powerful crescendos and hugely resonating bass-lines. Both the Kawai piano and the hall provided a brighter and vibrant tonal surround where sometimes a more mellow and poetic rubato could have been employed, but in Brozgul’s passionate and accelerating chords there was melodic sparkle and admirable cascading technical fluency. Most impressive were rhapsodic climactic sections, full of dynamic contrast and energy, with emotional depth felt from Brozgul’s reinforced dark left hand tone sonorities.
In the opening bars of Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No 4 in F-sharp major (1903), Brozgul’s sensitivity in tone and touch took us straight into the highest notes on the piano, to the mystic spatial timelessness of the composer’s search for new sounds and tonal colours beyond the atmosphere of the planets. The opening Andante section at first was mysterious and questioning, spatial and heavenly, with starry high trills marked “quietissimo” in the score – very, very, very quiet. As textures became denser, tempos accelerated and Brozgul’s hands were spread widely, encompassing both ends of the keyboard, Scriabin’s short “experimental-like” phrases were given contrasting character, tonal colour and shine. With a smooth transition from the Andante into an ensuing Prestissimo volando (“Come on Get Going!”), opening themes were regularly re-stated as Brozgul again showed her trademark, building crescendos and increasing power and motion to exciting and maximum heights in a climactic coda.
Another masterpiece would conclude this fine program of significant Variations on a Theme. Brahms’ Handel Variations (25 variations on a theme of Handel) opened with a prominent trumpet theme, its melodic aria given a shiny, brassy treatment with prominent baroque ornaments, trills and flourishes. Handel’s elegant and precise aria melody was made buoyant with left hand marching rhythms, smoothly underscoring the important lyrical melody. Brozgul again impressed with colourful hints of Brahms’ symphonic styles. In challenging strident double octave sections, triumphant brassy and percussive fanfare episodes, each Variation became a distinct portrait; we imagined a music-box in contrasting bubbly sparkling lightness in the high treble register, and felt the heaviness of a short darker funeral march (with the unlucky number as the 13th Variation), with its low pulsating and syncopated left hand chords.
With much experience performing concertos by Beethoven, Bartok and Chopin, this intense 30-minute Theme & Variations with a final Fugue proved Brozgul’s stamina as she held the audience in rapt attention through cascades of chords and bells chiming, putting the brakes on carefully as power and melodic strength was at the forefront for the closing bars.
Several audience members rose to their feet to show their enjoyment and appreciation of such a fine performance of splendid piano repertoire. Quite a festival highlight.
Image supplied.
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Julie McErlain reviewed Berta Brozgul’s piano recital “Variations on a Theme: Works by Brahms, Mozart, Chopin & Scriabin”, given as part of Woodend Winter Arts Festival at St Ambrose Hall on June 8, 2025.
