Juilliard Piano Recital: Scarlatti, Debussy, Scriabin, Beethoven, Ravel, Chopin

I went yesterday afternoon to Paul Hall to hear a recital by Juilliard's Piano Performance Forum that featured four pianists playing works by Scarlatti, Debussy, Scriabin, Beethoven, Ravel, and Chopin.  The recital also introduced the school's brand new piano, a Shigeru Kawai built in Japan

The program began with Christian DeLuca performing without pause Scarlatti's Sonata in D major, K. 96 (c. 1745), Debussy's Reflets dans l'eau from Images, Book I (1905) and Scriabin's Sonata No. 5, Op. 53 (1907).  The result was a study in contrasts.  The elegance and clarity of the Scarlatti piece was followed by the dreamy impressionism of the Debussy.  The composer was all his life fascinated by the sea and continually tried in his music, most notably in his long orchestral piece La Mer, to express the ever changing movement of bodies of water.  He confided to a contemporary, pianist Marguerite Long, that he envisioned the opening of the present work as an image of a pebble falling into a small circle of water and creating ripples expanding ever outward.  The work has often been compared to a painting for its use of tone colors.  On the other hand, the mystical Scriabin piece, composed while the composer was living in Switzerland, had an explicit literary program that it shared with the orchestral work Le Poème de l’extase written at the same time.  The sonata is a puzzling piece whose tempos shift rapidly from one moment to the next before coming to an abrupt end.  Though it never completely discards tonality, this ambiguous piece moves away from the composer's early Romantic tendencies and anticipates the works that were to characterize his late period.  In its roughness and abandonment of the traditional sonata form, the one-movement work seems more an expression of the unconscious mind rather than a carefully planned composition.  In his playing of all three works, the pianist showed remarkable poise in moving seamlessly from one piece to the next even though they were so totally different in mood.

The next pianist was Christine Wu who played only a single work, Beethoven's Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111 (1822).  This was really the centerpiece of the recital and the longest work performed.   I have heard this iconic piece many times, most recently this past November in a recital given by András Schiff at Carnegie Hall.  It is, of course, the last of Beethoven's piano sonatas and one of his final works for that instrument.  Written in only two movements, it leaves far behind the influences of Haydn and Mozart and even of Beethoven's own middle period.  Here, as in his late quartets, the composer seems to be testing the limits of what is possible in musical expression.  It was performed exceptionally well and with a great deal of sensitivity at this recital.

The one-hour program then ended with two shorter works.  First, Christopher Staknys played "Ondine" from Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit (1909).  This is another work in which the composer, like Debussy before him, reveals his fascination with the play of water.  But here it is seen as a shimmering veil from behind which the seductive water nymph addresses the mortal man who beholds her.  Based on the collection of poems by Aloysius Bertrand, "Ondine" is the first of the three movements that comprise Gaspard.  Although perhaps not quite as difficult as the infamous "Scarbo," this is still very much a technically challenging virtuoso piece that demands a light touch as the pianist moves from one nuanced phrase to the next.  Christopher Staknys here did an excellent job of conveying the sense of dreamlike unreality the composer intended.

The final work was Chopin's Scherzo No. 3 in C-sharp minor, Op. 39 (1839) performed by Anna Han.  Like all the other works on the program, this was a virtuoso piece obviously chosen for its difficulty.  As the Wikipedia article notes: "This [the main theme] is particularly difficult to perform, due to the technique needed to accurately and quickly execute the running octave patterns."   Written while the composer was staying with George Sand at the Majorcan monastery Valldemossa, the piece creates its dramatic intensity by moving from its home key to that of D-flat major before returning to C-sharp minor and then ending in C-sharp major.  The pianist here gave a brilliant performance of the work that brought the entire recital to an exciting close.