Juilliard's Piano Performance Forum recently sponsored two recitals at Paul Hall on consecutive Wednesday afternoons. The first, on October 18th, featured the works of four composers that taken together spanned the interval from the Baroque era to the present day.
The program opened with Mozart's Rondo in A minor, K. 511 (1787) as performed by Derek Wang. This is one of the composer's darkest works. Much has been made of Mozart's use of G minor to express tragedy, but it may have that A minor held for him an ever greater personal significance. The only other major work in this key I know of is the Piano Sonata No. 8, K. 310/300d written in 1778 immediately following the death of the composer's mother during the disastrous visit to Paris. Underlying both the rondo and the sonata is a sense of almost unassuageable grief. Why Mozart should have experienced such deep pain is much less obvious in the case of the rondo than it is in that of the sonata. Mozart had composed the rondo after just having returned from Prague where Figaro had proved a resounding success. If anything, the composer should have been exuberant at the reception his opera had received. The source of his unhappiness may actually have been occasioned by his return to Vienna where his initial popularity had waned dramatically, or it may have been that there had occurred some biographical incident of which we are unaware. In any event, the rondo remains one of Mozart's greatest and most heartfelt works for solo piano. It's impossible to listen to it without being deeply moved.
The next musician to take the stage was Chuyue Zhang who performed Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme of Corelli (1931). For anyone with a love of the composer's Russian Romanticism, this work is something of a disappointment. It's deftly done but is more in the nature of an academic exercise that makes no appeal to the emotions of the listener. Perhaps Rachmaninoff felt the same way - he never recorded it and, after having performed it in recital for two or three years, he never played it again. Rachmaninoff composed twenty variations on the La Folia theme (which is not, in fact, an original Corelli composition), but I'm not sure they were all played at this recital; the performance seemed to brief to have included them all. Then again, Rachmaninoff himself had no trouble skipping any number of the variations when, as he claimed in a letter to Medtner, the audience coughed too loudly.
The third piece was by a composer with whom I had not previously been familiar. Pianist Aran Qian performed Duo Ye by Chen Yi. There is a very erudite (and lengthy) dissertation by Xiaole Li of the University of Hawaii available online that treats this work in great depth. In it, the author makes the point on page 156 that:
"Because Duo Ye grows out of folksongs, dance, and traditional ensemble but with creative twentieth-century techniques, Duo Ye has been accepted by the judges of the National Piano Composition Competition and by music critics as a model balancing of traditional and modern elements."
I found this analysis highly interesting because in listening to the piece I had failed to detect in it any Chinese folk elements whatsoever. This, however, may have simply been due to my general ignorance of the Chinese folk tradition. When thinking of contemporary Chinese music, I usually call to mind the music of such composers as Tan Dun. It's confusing to me then that this same dissertation quotes a critic who condemn's Tan Dun's music, specifically his Feng Ya Song, because "it represents a tendency of being xiandai pai [modern school] - a synonym of decadent Western modern arts."
The recital ended with YuChong Wu performing J.S. Bach's Ouvertüre nach Französischer Art ("Overture in the French style"), BWV 831 (1733, rev. 1735). This was a suite in B minor that was published as the second half of Clavier-Übung II, a series of keyboard exercises, though certainly not intended for beginners. It begins with an overture followed by nine dance movements and ending in an echo. Some of the dances - the gavotte, passepied and bourrée - are used twice while the allemande is omitted. Though the title and dances reference the music of the French Baroque, there is little here of its galant manner. Instead, the work is written in Bach's usual polyphonic style. This is the composer's longest keyboard suite, and it's mesmerizing in its complexity.
No comments:
Post a Comment