Mannes: The Mystics

The final recital by the Mannes Piano Department this season was aptly entitled The Mystics and featured the works of a number of twentieth century composers in a 90 minute program performed yesterday evening without intermission.

For me, the highlight came at the very beginning with performances of two pieces by Arvo Pärt, an Estonian composer with whose work I had not previously been familiar.  The first of these, Fratres, was actually not a piano work at all.  Instead, it had over the years been composed in a number of different versions and revisions, including string quintet (Fratres I, 1977), string orchestra and percussion, solo violin (Fratres II, 1980) and cello ensemble (Fratres III, 1980).  The version played at this performance was an arrangement by Jeffrey Ziegler for eighteen cellos.  The work was very difficult to describe, but it might best be termed a minimalist composition that made use of the tintinnabuli style developed by Pärt; it was an exciting piece that nevertheless instilled in this listener a curious sense of quietude. The second work by Pärt was Für Alina (1976), a slow-moving meditative piece for solo piano that here was performed brilliantly by Gvantsa Zangaladze.

The next piece was Bacchanale for prepared piano (1940) by the innovative genius John Cage.  The use of a prepared piano gave certain notes a strange "tinny" sound when they were struck.  This was followed by The Messenger (1996), an ethereal piece by Valentin Silvestrov played with the top panel of the piano placed down.  After this came Regard de l'Esprit de joie which was No. 10 from Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus (1944).  Purely through coincidence, I had just heard the No. 10 played several days ago at Matthew Odell's recital at Juilliard.  Next was another unfamiliar work, Svani Tower (1969) by the Georgian composer Otar Taktakishvili.  Finally the program ended with music by Alexander Scriabin beginning with three etudes (Nos. 4, 11 and 12) from his Op. 8 (1894).  These were from the early part of his career and still showed the influence of Chopin's music upon the composer. The Sonata No. 4 in F-sharp, Op. 30 (1903) which followed was from Scriabin's later period when he had more fully developed his idiosyncratic "ecstatic" style.

In addition to Ms. Zangaladze, several other Mannes students participated in the program over the course of the evening.  These were Teng Fu, Baron Fenwick and David Mamedov.  The level of proficiency displayed by all these pianists was remarkable, so much so that it was difficult to remember at times that they really were still only students.