Dag Lundin, Eskilstuna Kuriren, Sweden
Quite clearly Smith is, without a lot of fuss and affectation, a master pianist.
You couldn’t say that the music lovers of this community were fighting for tickets to the Sunday concert in the Mariefred Church. But the aristocratic American pianist, Dan Franklin Smith, one of the most heroic exponents of the piano ever to have visited us, gave a classical concert of the most brilliant kind.
Beethoven’s rarely played six variations, Op. 34, began the concert, displaying all the technical brilliance that Beethoven often requires of his interpreters. Playful and capricious, with an alluring timbre, this performance quickly showed that Smith, as a pianist, is among the upper-class elite.
The luxuriant sonorities of Late Romanticism in six Rachmaninoff Preludes from Op. 23 and 32 showed generously, throughout the entire scale, the Russian master’s art of the keyboard. Smith etched out the melancholy Slavic melodies with their very particular harmonies. Here he let unabashed sound flow from the depths of the grand piano, here were nostalgic sighing timbres as well as dramatic flaming chordal piles and enormous culminations. The well-known G-minor Prelude was interpreted in a more controlled rather than heroic way: in place of the usual clangs of Russian splendor and primitive passion, a breath of fashion gave the piece its color. The crystal-clear, aristocratic playing was spiced by a finely articulated temperament.
To put Schubert’s rarely played A-major sonata (DV 959) on the program is a daring and defining act. Smith took on Schubert with total extravagance. His quiet concentration resulted in a finely chiseled rendering, movement by movement.
Whether Schubert himself managed to play the sonata, posterity does not know. Smith, without making his fabulous technique an end in itself, showed us an authentic master’s skill. In his first-class interpretation the listener was allowed the possibility of discovering completely new aspects of Schubert’s music. This possibility is not often offered in our concert halls.
After the standing ovation–very unusual in a Swedish audience!–the elegant maestro Smith ended with a quietly philosophical interpretation of Brahms’ A-major Intermezzo, Op. 118, Nr. 6, hardly an exhilarating piece of fireworks, but endlessly intimate and personally interpreted.
Quite clearly Smith is, without a lot of fuss and affectation, a master pianist. Reserved and modest, he gives a performance of tremendously impressive art. Dan Franklin Smith is one of the most brilliant pianists I have ever had the pleasure of hearing and reviewing!
—Dag Lundin, Eskilstuna Kuriren, Mariefred, Sweden, 1997