I rarely attend solo recitals at Juilliard but made an exception yesterday evening for Drew Petersen. I've heard him perform chamber works several times with the Jupiter Players and have always been impressed by his talent. More recently, I saw a webcast of his solo performance at WQXR's Greene Space. It was an excellent program that began with Bach and then moved swiftly to the Romantic era of Schumann and Liszt.
In contrast, yesterday evening's program was divided into two parts. In the first half , Drew played two very different works for solo piano. The second half was then given over to the performance of chamber music and here Drew was assisted by a string quartet consisting of Stella Chen and Max Tan, violins, Bethany Hargreaves, viola, and James Kim, cello.
The first solo piece was Ravel's Sonatine (1903). What's most interesting about this delicate, ephemeral sounding three movement work is its genesis whose history is related in a post on the Henle Verlag blog. Apparently, Ravel wrote the Sonatine's first movement as an entry in a contest sponsored by a weekly cultural review. This is far different from the usual practice in which commissions are awarded by orchestras or even other musicians. In later years, Ravel shied away from discussing the origins of the piece and it's possible he was embarrassed by the chain of events, especially as there exists no proof that he won the contest and that it may in the end have been canceled for lack of entries. It hardly matters, though, why this work was created. It's a lovely piece and deservedly one of Ravel's most popular piano works. It has a haunting quality that at times can be almost hypnotic.
The second piano work was Elliot Carter's Piano Sonata (1945-1946). Before beginning the work, Drew spoke briefly about what the piece meant to him and also mentioned that the composer had once asked the pianist Ursula Oppens to play it because he felt it was not performed often enough. There are actually several reasons why this relatively early work is so rarely heard. One is that it's so technically difficult that few pianists can even attempt it. Another is its seriousness of purpose. In many ways it presages the works of Carter's late period to the extent that the two movement piece is throughout characterized by very abrupt changes in key and rhythm (Those who wish an in depth analysis of the work's composition are referred to a 1990 thesis entitled An Analytical Study of Elliott Carter's Piano Sonata.) Although in his introductory remarks Drew cited both Romanticism and jazz as influences upon Carter in this piece's composition, I had difficulty in recognizing their presence. As it was, after having heard Ravel's Sonatine performed immediately before, I found Carter's Sonata jarring and discordant. I still felt lucky to have encountered it, however, not only because it was a great work in its own right but also because it offered a key to better understanding the whole of Carter's oeuvre. I don't expect to have many opportunities to hear it again anytime soon.
After intermission, all five musicians appeared onstage to perform César Franck's Piano Quintet in F minor (1879), a work with a fairly scandalous history that one does not usually associate with chamber music. It seems that Franck, after having enjoyed for many years a proper bourgeois career as a church organist, suddenly in his mid-50's experienced a mid-life crisis and became infatuated with his pupil Augusta Holmès (who in her photographs hardly looks the part of a femme fatale). Throwing discretion to the winds, Franck thereupon composed his quintet, one of the most explicitly passionate pieces in the repertoire. In so doing, he not only managed to upset his wife but also his pianist, fellow composer Camille Saint-Saëns. Whether Saint-Saëns had feelings of his own for Ms. Holmès or whether he was simply put off by the unceasing modulations of the music, he made a scene at the end of the performance when he stalked offstage without accepting the manuscript Franck had dedicated to him. Leaving all this aside, the surging rhythms and shifting chromatic harmonies make this a truly gripping work that invariably stirs the emotions of the audience. (They also led Liszt to remark that the piece exceeds "the legitimate bounds of chamber music.") Personally, though, what I've always enjoyed most about the quintet is the piano's romantic melody at the beginning of the first movement.
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