Juilliard Piano Recital: Mozart, Chopin and Scriabin

On Wednesday afternoon, Juilliard's Piano Performance Forum staged their first recital at Paul Hall this season.  The program lasted approximately 80 minutes and featured three performances that included works by Mozart, Chopin and Scriabin.

The recital began with Mozart's Sonata No. 14 in C minor, K. 457 (1784).  This is among the most noteworthy of Mozart's piano compositions for several reasons.  First is the choice of a minor key.  In composing his music, Mozart did not choose keys haphazardly and, to an extent, his choice revealed his state of mind at the moment.  Whenever he worked in a minor key the piece was invariably of a more personal nature than those simply intended for public performance.  Secondly, and most unusually, the work is not usually performed as a standalone piece as it was at this recital but is more commonly played together with the Fantasia in C minor, K. 475 composed several months later.  It was Mozart himself who set the precedent for this and one wonders at his purpose in devising the obvious association between the two works, both of which are complete in themselves.  Perhaps he found, in this instance at least, the classical sonata format too constraining and wrote the Fantasia as a means of further expressing the ideas first set forth in the sonata.  Third, K. 457 differs from most of the composer's sonatas in that it does not end with an upbeat climax but rather with an allegro assai that possesses an unusually dark and introspective character, one that has led some critics to see in this movement an anticipation of the Romantic era.  Certainly, there is a correlation between Mozart's sonata and Beethoven's own Sonata in C minor, Op. 13, written fourteen years later.  At this recital, the sonata was performed by Daniel Parker who displayed a great deal of sensitivity in his interpretation.

For the next work pianist Yandi Chen performed all 24 Preludes of Chopin's Op. 28 (1835-1839).  Chopin is often criticized for never having composed any longer works, such as a symphonies, but instead only shorter pieces, the overwhelming majority for the piano, as though this circumstance somehow consigned him to the ranks of lesser composers.  Be that as it may, the preludes stand as masterpieces of miniaturization, each of them self contained and evoking in the listener a different response to each.  Their complexity and depth is all the more amazing considering that the majority were written during the tumultuous winter Chopin spent with George Sand on Majorca, an ordeal Curtis Cate describes in detail in his biography of the novelist.  Though the project itself may have been inspired by Bach, a copy of whose Well Tempered Clavier Chopin had taken with him to the island, the pieces themselves are thoroughly Romantic in character.  The performance at Wednesday's recital was extraordinary in itself as the pianist, over the course of 45 minutes, played all 24 from memory and expertly shaped each with its own distinct identity.

The final work on the program was Scriabin's Sonata No. 3 in F-sharp minor, Op. 23 (1897-1898) as performed by Randy Ryan.  This was an appropriate work to follow the Chopin since at the time he wrote it Scriabin was still deeply under the influence of the Polish composer.  Perhaps for this reason the sonata is one of Scriabin's more popular works for the piano.  Its Romantic tendencies are apparent throughout, and the work is filled with a sense of pathos.  The composer himself referred to it as "Gothic" and saw in it a musical representation of a ruined castle.  It's quite colorful and filled with youthful elan; there is little in it to suggest the dissonances that would mark his later and more innovative work.

The Piano Performance Forum recitals are an overlooked resource for lovers of piano music here in New York City.  The programs always contain extremely challenging works and the Juilliard musicians who perform them do so with an expertise one would normally only expect to encounter on the main stage at Carnegie Hall.