★★★★½ Forceful renditions of Debussy, Bach and Beethoven reveal inspired insights.

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne
June 23, 2016

For five decades, eminent Australian pianist Roger Woodward has enjoyed a glittering international career, with recordings and concert performances receiving consistent critical acclaim. Although justly famous for core 19th-century Romantic repertoire, Woodward is an open and versatile pianist.

Like his exact contemporary Maurizio Pollini (both were born in 1942), Woodward has steadfastly championed modernist works by contemporary composers including Iannis Xenakis, Toru Takemitsu and Morton Feldman, also Australian composers Anne Boyd and Barry Conyngham, among many others.

An understanding of these composers as stops on the same ever-evolving musical continuum as Bach, Debussy and Beethoven is central to Woodward’s deep musical intellect, and thoroughly informs his approach to performance.

Woodward began with the two books of Images by Claude Debussy, from 1905 and 1907. Each set consists of three pieces that give expression to different facets of the composer’s abandonment of traditional key systems (steadily occurring over the preceding decades), which paved the way for further Modernist dismantling throughout the 20th century. Woodward rendered these aural snapshots with great delicacy and simultaneously forceful precision, every gesture imbued with a thorough exactitude that produced a...