Earlier this week, I attended the first of this season's Wednesdays at One series at Alice Tully Hall. These one-hour recitals and concerts allow Juilliard students the opportunity to perform before a live audience and are always marked with a very high degree of musicianship. This particular recital featured five Juilliard pianists giving their renditions of works by the same number of composers - Beethoven, Masahiro Miwa, Scriabin, Ryo Takahashi and Chopin - some of whom were very well known and others whose music I was hearing for the first time.
The program opened with Wei Lin Chang performing Beethoven's Sonata No. 5 in C minor, Op. 10, No. 1 (c. 1796-1798). This piece was from the composer's Early Period and was written at a time when he was seeking to consolidate his reputation in Vienna as a virtuoso pianist as well as a promising composer. That's not to suggest, however, that this is any sense a "beginner" work. Some of Beethoven's greatest works, such as the Fifth Symphony, were written in the key of C minor and the sonata's final movement contains a clear anticipation of that symphony's motto-theme. The second movement adagio molto stands out for its delicacy, and the final movement's quiet ending after a turbulent beginning is indicative of Beethoven's growing stylistic maturity.
The next pianist to take the stage was Joey Chang who provided his interpretation of Masahiro Miwa's Rainbow Machine: Genesis of a Chant. This was a highly unusual work. The Tokyo-born composer, who began his career by forming a rock band while still in high school, is known for creating computer programmed music; the present piece, commissioned for the Hamamatsu Piano Competition, was indeed composed "automatically" from a computer algorithm. Miwa wrote on the score of the work:
"Only the pitch and timing of the music are indicated; how the notes are played, pedaling and articulation are left to the musician's own choice."
The next work was much more familiar - Scriabin's Sonata No. 5, Op. 53 (1907). I had heard last month at another Juilliard recital a performance of the composer's Sonata No. 3, and the difference in style between that and the No. 5, written some ten years later, is staggering. While the No. 3 is a thoroughly Romantic work and still indebted to Chopin's influence, the No. 5 is much more modern and displays a mystical inclination. This is not surprising when one considers it was written at approximately the same time as the revolutionary Le Poème de l'extase. Scriabin himself, when he completed the sonata, considered it the best work he had ever written. The pianist was Thomas Steigerwald who gave one of the best performances of the afternoon on a work so taxing that Sviatoslav Richter termed it "the most difficult piece in the entire piano repertory..."
Next came another work I'd never previously heard - Ryo Takahashi's Wearing Glass Slipper as performed by Akari Mizumoto. I could find no information regarding either the composer or this piece of music when I attempted to do research online. Does the title refer to the Cinderella fairy tale? All I can say is that it was a short work, approximately five minutes in length, and required an unusual amount of dexterity on the part of the pianist.
The program closed with Chopin's Scherzo No. 1 in B minor, Op. 20 (1831-1832). Though the term scherzo, literally translated, means "joke," there is little humor in this dark piece. This may have been due to Chopin's emotional involvement in the political situation in his homeland where the failure of the "November Revolution" had led to the complete absorption of Poland into the Russian empire. The Scherzo is a highly complex work that was intended to challenge the skill of even virtuoso pianists. It was here given a bravura performance by Anastasia Magamedova.
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