Juilliard Faculty Recital: Ernest Barretta and Yoheved Kaplinsky

Yesterday evening's one hour faculty recital at  by Ernest Barretta and Yoheved Kaplinsky, chair of the Juilliard Piano Department, was another standing room only event at Paul Hall which was again packed with an enthusiastic audience.  It was also the second evening in a row I had an opportunity to experience great piano music of the twentieth century, first at Mannes and this time at Juilliard.  The recital consisted of two works, both of them for two pianos and the second for percussion as well.

The first piece was the Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos, Op. 17 (1901) by Sergei Rachmaninoff.  This piece was performed on one occasion by the composer and Vladimir Horowitz at the same party in 1940 where they premiered the two-piano version of Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances about which I recently posted.  The work, written immediately after the Second Piano Concerto, is most famous as a symptom of Rachmaninoff's recovery from the long three-year depression he suffered after the disastrous failure of his First Symphony.  The suite's third movement, the Romance: Andantino, is one of the most lyrical expressions of Russian romanticism ever composed.

The program closed with the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937) by Béla Bartók and actually featured two percussionists, Jonathan Haas and Pablo Rieppi, working with seven instruments that included everything from a gong to a xylophone to a snare drum. Though it must have sounded quite discordant when it was premiered by the composer and his wife in 1938, it won wide acclaim and has become a standard of the chamber repertoire.  I had already heard Friday evening at Mannes a performance of the composers Sonatina (1915) and Ostinato (1926) and found it interesting to compare them to this later work.

The sonata's second movement is characteristic of Bartók's "Night Music," Though it's difficult to find a succinct definition of the term, the Wikipedia article sums up its dark essence very well:

"From an audience point of view 'Night Music consists of those works or passages which convey to the listener the sounds of nature at night'. This is quite subjective and self-referential. Mostly, subjective and far-fetched descriptions are available: 'quiet, blurred cluster-chords and imitations of the twittering of birds and croaking of nocturnal creatures', 'In an atmosphere of hushed expectancy, a tapestry is woven of the tiny sounds of nocturnal animals and insects.' More concrete is 'Eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies.'"

Even now Bartok's music can sound wild and disturbing, a mixture of Western harmonic devices and primitive Eastern European rhythms that are capable of eliciting from the audience a wide range of emotional responses.