A panoply of piano players
An interesting gathering have been fingering local keyboards of late
By Alan Rich
It’s the way things happen sometimes: We’ve been overrun by pianists lately, legendary and local, all to the better. I’ll report in no chronological order, simply in the order that their memory remains the most vivid.
That means, of course, that I begin with Martha Argerich, famously fragile – she cancels a lot – but famous even more when she plays. There’s a mystique here that words do not penetrate. She plays simple music – early Beethoven, very slow Schumann – and those supernatural fingers of hers can turn the most unlikely music into ice sculptures. They can also hypnotize. With the Philharmonic this time she played the Ravel Piano Concerto, and what I remember most is the middle movement, a quietly unfolding lyric line. It starts with solo piano, strolling; somewhere along the way a solo flute just naturally joins in. It’s all basically one-finger stuff, which Argerich just sat and let happen, transforming the Disney stage into a long stream of moonlight. In a quiet ecstasy beyond description I found myself breathing in the slow, measured rhythm of the music itself. Only a few musical artists in the classical world – which is the world I know the most about – have that power over an audience. There’s a DVD of Argerich at the piano, just talking about what the music she happens to be playing (Schumann, mostly) is doing to her. Wherever she performs, she brings that spirit to whatever she plays. Normally, the Ravel Concerto isn’t all that much of a piece; its attempts at jazziness are charming but naïve, but Argerich made it matter that night. After the performance, instead of the customary fluffy encore, she and the conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, sat at the piano and stroked out some more Ravel, four-hands, and transformed the vast Disney stage into a happy, intimate space.
There was nothing intimate about Evgeny Kissin’s recital on that same stage. Some kind of preservative has delivered him, at 37, in exactly the same condition as the steel-fingered teenager whose New York debut I witnessed at Carnegie Hall in 1990. The steel has not rusted, remaining intact and intensely uninteresting. He played Prokofiev and Chopin, those only; delivered a dazzling demonstration of steely command but exerted no gesture of love toward music or toward the capacity audience that yelled itself hoarse with declarations of love which, as far as I could see, remained unrequited.
Meanwhile, among the local heroes, I would hazard the guess that the award for delivering the most notes-per-second among all recent virtuoso ventures might easily go to a slender chap named Danny Holt, who knocked ’em dead at the last Jacaranda concert with a performance of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ “Rudepoema” a couple of Saturdays ago. Jacaranda is the highly inventive chamber series given monthly at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian; they’ve been celebrating the centennial of Olivier Messiaen’s birth in delightfully roundabout fashion with many composers who were or should have been influenced by the noble Frenchman, and they finally got to this murderously difficult piece, a portrait of the virtuoso Artur Rubinstein which Villa-Lobos composed in 1927, somewhat before Messiaen’s time but what the hell. Danny Holt, composer, improv artist and phenom, turned this virtually unplayable piece into huge entertainment, on an enterprising program that also included music for six cellos and, at the end, the Ravel Piano Trio superbly rendered. If you don’t know the Jacaranda series, which, I know, I tend to push with mucho fervor, you should.
Then there is Piano Spheres, a series of recitals currently based in Zipper Hall at the Colburn School downtown, founded by Arnold Schoenberg disciple Leonard Stein and thus dedicated to new music. Susan Svrcek is one of the five member-performers; her program last week offered a quite nice variety of small pieces: coloristic bits by Tom Flaherty and Jeffrey Holmes and a delightful set of folk-like dances by Witold Lutoslawski, the Polish composer who lingered long and happily in Southern California and left both influences and happy memories behind.
One further keyboard event drew my attention. While I am no admirer of the pipe organ, in the concert hall or in church (except for the silent movies in Disney Hall on Halloween) I did look in on Dame Gillian Weir’s recital at Disney on the assurance that (a) she was unrelated to the composer Judith Weir, whose music I abominate and (b) she was a Messiaen promulgator. She did indeed devote one-quarter of a program to Messiaen, (hardly enough) which included two parts of his “La Nativité du Seigneur,” which immediately fell into place among the most beautiful music I have ever heard. So who needs pianos?
Published: 03/25/2009
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On the day we heard Martha, in addition to the Ravel duet encore with the conductor (himself not a bad pianist), she blessed us with the most exquisite Chopin Mazurka imaginable, might have brought a tear to Arthur Rubinstein.