Geoffrey Thomas

The concert was a single harmonious flow from the beginning to the encore.

Thomas also proved to be a splendid improviser with almost inexhaustible imagination and uninhibited delight in playing.

Main-Echo
Main-Echo (Aschaffenburg) 16.6.2004
Christian Giegerich

Inexhaustibly imaginative

Geoffrey Thomas as Guest in the Aschaffenburg Bach Hall

Geoffrey Thomas, Harnoncourt student and director of the Budapest Baroque chamber orchestra, provided listeners in the Bach Hall interesting insights into the new sound ideal of a time when the strings of keyboard instruments were no longer plucked by quills but were sounded by means of small hammers. Thomas brought a copy of an early piano from the Baroque era. Like the conventional harpsichord the “thin” strings run perpendicular to the keyboard. Pressure from the keys is brought to bear upon leather-covered hammers by means of a simple, but precisely functioning action, which snaps against the strings from below and drops back immediately.

Now the well-disposed reader will think that this is exactly how the modern piano functions. So what is the difference? These early pianos have a sound that is much more sensitive than the “chemically cleaned” sound of today’s pianos. These early pianos, on which “piano” and “forte” is already possible to some degree, sound “beautiful” in a completely different way from modern instruments. A harpsichordist or organist will initially struggle with the sensitive touch. If one plays with “harpsichord fingers”, the instrument immediately revenges itself with “wiry” tones instead of “golden-brown” sounds!

The concert was a single harmonious flow from the beginning to the encore. Geoffrey Thomas interpreted the pieces, according to stories of his own invention, for instance Franz and Lieselotte in the D-major sonata of Joseph Haydn. Lieselotte dances friskily, like the hammers in the piano, and asks Franz, whether he can dance as well. Apparently he cannot, because the minor movement becomes increasingly darker. Franz is oppressed with the thought of becoming a soldier. Finally love triumphs, he learns to dance and the two dance in the final movement like the fingers on the keys. It was very much to the taste of “Papa Haydn” and to that of this listener.

For the movements of the partita in E-minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, Geoffrey Thomas invented the tale of a knight. It was music to a sophisticated silent movie, with a breathtaking concentration of activity. Johann Nicolaus Forkel, the first Bach biographer, wrote concerning the significance of Bach’s keyboard partitas: he who can perform some of these pieces well can make his fortune in the world. Subsequently Geoffrey Thomas also proved to be a splendid improviser with almost inexhaustible imagination and uninhibited delight in playing. In the three movements of the sonata E flat major, which he composed for a young Englishwoman Joseph Haydn may have been describing marital happiness. With stones softening the nagging of his Aloysia Appolonia he stamps with chordal pillars, turns about and switches to cheerful a register. What did Forkel write? …he could make his fortune in the world! “ Geoffrey Thomas, at any rate has the means to do that; the applause proved that.