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Reviews
Classical Music Guide Forums
Monday, August 3, 2009
Donald Isler
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11th International Keyboard Institute and Festival
Mannes College
New York City
August 1st, 2009
Haydn: Sonata in E-Flat Major, Hob. 16/52
Chopin: Ballade in A-Flat major, Op. 47
Alexander Kobrin
Albeniz: Evocación and El Albaicin from Iberia
José Ramos Santana
Gottschalk: The Banjo
Liszt/Horowitz: Rákóczy March
Steven Mayer
Intermission
Ravel: La vallé des Cloches (from Miroirs)
Scriabin: Sonata No. 2 in G-Sharp Minor (Sonata-Fantasy), Op. 19
Magdalena Baczewska
Liszt: Vallée d'Obermann
Liszt: Mephisto Waltz
Jerome Rose
This last concert at the Festival was originally supposed to be a recital by Olga Kern. But Ms. Kern was unable to appear, so five of the pianists who had already performed recitals at the Festival divided up the evening. And, whereas it can be a fascinating experience to spend an evening with one pianist, getting to know the various facets of his or her artistic personality, it can also be a pleasure to hear a group of fine artists, and appreciate the contrasts they present.
Mr. Kobrin sounded at all times very calm and controlled. He seems happy to play very quietly a good deal of the time. Some other details of his performance seemed unusual to me, ie. I have never heard the beginning of that Chopin Ballade played so slowly. And yet, his conceptions of the music were always interesting, and convincing. And some things, such as the slow movement of the Haydn, were particularly beautifully played.
Mr. Ramos Santana's playing of the pieces from Iberia were right on target, full of fragrance, sensuality and the uniquely Spanish feeling, and (especially in El Albaicin) rhythmic character.
As anyone who has heard Steven Mayer before (as I have) knows, he's a pianist with huge power and technique. His performance of the Gottschalk Banjo was terrifically exciting, played at both top speed AND volume (which is not easy!). With all the extra notes, octaves, and other challenges Horowitz added in his transcription of Liszt's Rákóczy March, one can't help wondering how many pianists can successfully play it. Well, Mr. Mayer left no doubt in anybody's mind that he can!
A complete contrast to that mood was offered by Ms. Baczewska's calm and beautiful playing of Ravel's Valley of Bells. Her performance of the Scriabin Sonata was also very effective, displaying both the stormy and hypnotic aspects of the first movement, and maintaining great clarity amidst all the swirls of notes in the second.
Jerome Rose did not reach his stride in the Vallée d'Obermann; he started in it right from the first note. This was some of the finest playing I've heard from him, passionate, virtuosic, and totally in the idiom of this music. He followed it, and finished the program, with an impressive performance of the Mephisto Waltz.
One looks forward to the twelfth season of the Festival!
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The New York Times
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Allan Kozinn
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The International Keyboard Institute and Festival has an embarrassment of riches this summer. With twice as many recent competition winners and established pianists as there are days in the festival, the recitals at Mannes College the New School for Music are offered in nightly pairs: one at 6 and a second at 8:30, both full-length programs.
The juxtapositions can be a bit odd stylistically. At the early performance on Monday, Sofya Gulyak, a Russian pianist who won the William Kapell International Piano Competition in 2007, played a varied program — Bach-Busoni, Clementi, Brahms, Schumann, Liszt and Shostakovich — all in a thundering, steel-tread style in which virtuosity is almost everything, and subtlety is an occasional footnote.
Yuan Sheng, the Chinese pianist who played the late show, addressed a more constricted group of composers: just Bach, Schubert and Chopin. But he created a distinct sound world for each, and he shaped the works at hand so thoughtfully that his program seemed kaleidoscopic.
Ms. Gulyak began promisingly. The Bach-Busoni Chaconne benefited from the style of solid, assured pianism that she brought to it, and there was something appealing about the apparent ease with which she sailed through this difficult, monumental score.
In Clementi’s Sonata in C (Op. 33, No. 3), you could convince yourself, briefly, that Ms. Gulyak was intent on presenting this largely overlooked Romantic as a fire-breathing proto-Liszt, decades ahead of his time. But Clementi’s music does not sustain that approach, and even when Ms. Gulyak shifted down, in the almost Mozartean central slow movement, the explosive spirit of the opening Allegro con spirito lingered.
Her approach to Brahms’s Fantasies (Op. 116) and Schumann’s Intermezzi (Op. 4) were also hard-driven. Even Liszt’s arrangement of Schumann’s bittersweet “Widmung” was transformed into a brisk, almost breathless showpiece. Occasionally — in the quiet section of the prelude from Shostakovich’s Prelude and Fugue in D flat (Op. 87, No. 15), for example — Ms. Gulyak showed a capacity for delicacy and introspection. But those moments were fleeting.
Mr. Sheng brings considerable power to his playing, too, but he husbands it carefully. His opening pieces, the A major and A minor Preludes and Fugues from Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” Book 1, were models of clarity, balance and proportion. That is not to say that they were straightforward or unmediated: Mr. Sheng made the A minor Prelude into a fiery drama, with the equally energetic but stunningly voiced Fugue as an otherworldly rejoinder.
The qualities that made Mr. Sheng’s Bach so appealing were also present, though configured differently and with a more Romantic brand of elegance, in Schubert’s Sonata in G (D. 894). Mr. Sheng knows how to make a Schubert theme sing, and when Schubert packs his textures with several melodies at once, Mr. Sheng’s ear for balance is unfailing.
In the Andante, for example, he created the illusion of a three-dimensional space in which themes and counterthemes, each with its own dynamics and coloration, appeared to move at different distances from the listener.
If the cerebral and the dramatic found common ground in Mr. Sheng’s Bach and Schubert, the prevailing passion in his Chopin, to which he devoted the second half of his program, was impetuousness. But as he demonstrated in his six selections, impetuousness comes in many forms.
In a stormy account of the Ballade No. 1 (Op. 23) it was an insistent swirl that pulled you in; in the Berceuse (Op. 57) it was a gentle fleetness. In two dances — a Mazurka (Op. 30, No. 4) and a Tarantella (Op. 43) — the attraction was entirely visceral. And in the Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise (Op. 22), Mr. Sheng revisited all those qualities and ratcheted up the fire as well.
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New York Times
Friday, July 24, 2009
Anthony Tommasini
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It can be deeply affecting to encounter the artistry of gifted young musicians who exude artistic seriousness. Yet during a program of formidable piano works by Liszt and Ravel on Wednesday night at Mannes College the New School for Music, the 21-year-old Russian virtuoso Vitaly Pisarenko was so serious in his manner and musical approach that he seemed unhappy.
His program, sponsored by the college’s International Keyboard Institute and Festival, a two-week offering of concerts, lectures and master classes, was part of its Prestige Series, presenting emerging pianists in daily recitals at 6 p.m. Mr. Pisarenko played with prodigious technique, myriad shadings and scrupulous accuracy. His account of Ravel’s “Miroirs” had wondrous delicacy and moments of tender sensitivity.
But when accepting applause, Mr. Pisarenko, a slight and shy-looking young man, appeared to be miserable. A certain reticence, even stiffness, in his otherwise impressive performances suggested that playing the piano is a somber discipline for him.
The contrast could not have been greater when, later that evening, in the festival’s Masters Series, the American pianist Jeffrey Swann, well known to New York audiences, presented a program called “The Philosophical Piano,” playing the “Emerson” movement from Ives’s “Concord” Sonata, Liszt’s Sonata in B minor and Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 in C minor. Mr. Swann, 57, may not have technique to burn like Mr. Pisarenko. But he is an accomplished and resourceful pianist who obviously loves playing his instrument, sharing music with audiences and talking about the pieces he has chosen, something he does with avuncular charm and insight.
I was eager to hear Mr. Pisarenko, who took first prize last year in the International Franz Liszt Piano Competition in Utrecht, the Netherlands. His account of Liszt’s Polonaise No. 2 emerged with punchy rhythmic vitality and, when this evocation of a Polish dance turns unexpectedly frenzied, with demonic fervor. And it was refreshing to hear Mr. Pisarenko’s serious-minded performance of Liszt’s exuberant Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. In his hands the spiraling passagework, thick with pungent cluster chords, anticipated the harmonies of a much-later Hungarian master, Gyorgy Ligeti.
Still, it was hard not to worry a little about this immensely gifted pianist. His program bio stated, almost as a point of pride, that starting the morning after his victory in the Liszt Competition, Mr. Pisarenko began an extensive international touring schedule. The pace seems not to have let up. Does he have opportunities to work with mentors, to mature, to participate in a summer chamber music festival or even to take time off?
What a difference from Mr. Swann’s recital. When the affable Mr. Swann appeared onstage, he could hardly wait, it seemed, to tell us about the philosophical resonances of the pieces he had selected. The fitful, searching “Emerson” movement from the “Concord” Sonata is Ives’s musical description of a philosophical state of mind, Mr. Swann said, whereas Liszt’s B minor Sonata, inspired by Goethe’s “Faust,” is a metaphorical depiction of a great philosophical work. But Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32, his last, Mr. Swann suggested, is “itself philosophical.”
Mr. Swann’s account of the daunting Liszt sonata lacked some virtuosic dazzle and sonic power. He somewhat mangled a few passages of octave outbursts and leaping chords. And his fingers got a little tangled in the fugal episode in the first movement of the Beethoven sonata.
Still, he played all three works with musical authority and pianistic flair. During each performance I kept thinking about how astonishing these pieces are. If a pianist can convey this, he is a master in the ways that matter most.
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Aspire! Piano & Fine Arts
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Canaan Parker
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As summer closes, I like to take a look back and savor the summer’s highlights. I’m a ’summer person’ so I have to say goodbye to every summer. Take a deep breath and savor, so I’ll never forget.
There’s no arts event in New York I enjoy more than the Summer Keyboard Festival at Mannes School for Music, that is, the International Keyboard Institute & Festival (ikif.org) Gracing the last two weeks of every July, IKIF hosts a torrent of music activity–piano recitals, master classes, and the Dorothy MacKenzie Piano competition. All wonderful enough, but it’s the social energy among piano music lovers that sets IKIF apart for me. Festival-goers are the welcome guests of arts impresario Jerome Rose and Festival Director Julie Kedersha. International means exactly that. All around the lobby and concert hall, old friends from Russia (Israel, China, Korea …) exclaim in delight as they run into each other for the first time in ages. You’re likely to run into friends of your own, and meeting new friends is as easy as asking ‘what did you think of the Beethoven?’ Everyone there loves the piano repertoire. ‘I heard Serkin play that piece . . . Yes, yes, Berman does it best.’ And everyone has an opinion: ‘The largo was a little too largo.’
Pianists say how much it energizes them to play for an audience that listens closely. The atmospheric charge of focused listening is palpable in the concert hall at IKIF. Believe me, no one here falls asleep in the slow movement. The audience knows the repertoire intimately; many have played the pieces themselves. I’d bet a quarter of the audience are master level students or performing pianists. Look around the room, there’s Hamelin, there’s Kobrin, there’s Leslie Howard. There’s Dubal, there’s Shakin, there’s Leyatov. And when something truly special happens — like Ukrainian Mykola Suk staking a daredevil’s claim on the Liszt Sonata — it’s the talk of the Festival for days. Might I add that something special happens often at the Keyboard Institute.
There’s a touch of The Magnificent Seven about Mannes. Night after night, another world class virtuoso rolls into town and throws down at the keyboard. One night the Appassionata, the next night, Four Chopin Ballades, the next the Schumann Carnival. Momentum and excitement build from one night to next, and there always seems more to come.
Then there are the Master Classes at the Keyboard Institute. Running all day, every day, our next generation of grand prize winners and Alice Tully debutantes take intense instruction from the Institute faculty and festival artists. So how’s this for excellent? Van Cliburn gold medalist Alexander Kobrin teaching the Rachmaninov 2nd Sonata to a brilliant Russian prodigy, for whom the technical demands of the piece are less than an afterthought. (Master and student were kind enough to conduct the lesson in English for my benefit.) I heard Mykola Suk teach the Liszt Sonata before exemplifying his insights in his own revolutionary performance. But two summers ago it was the same, Chinese Master Fou T’song illuminating Mozart’s Rondo in A Minor phrase by phrase, after performing the masterpiece in his recital–simply delicious. Then its Jerome Rose coaxing a young competition medalist, who plays her Chopin Sonata ‘too perfectly’, to the next level of artistry. And as these developing stars debut at Lincoln Center in a few years–be assured, they have and they will–you can say you heard them in the Master Class at Mannes.
I’ve come to appreciate very much the contributions of artists like Jerry Rose, Julie Kedersha, David Dubal, and so many others who create events that bring music lovers together to share our passions. There’s always a concert to go to, but arts events like IKIF, with that extra dimension of musical community, especially enrich my enjoyment of the masterworks we cherish.
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The New Criterion
Monday, September 1, 2008
Jay Nordlinger
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IKIF was founded by Jerome Rose...and he invites a slew of his fellow pianists, for master classes, recitals, and other events. One of his invitees was Menahem Pressler, long of the Beaux Arts Trio...Pressler's general mastery was unquestionable; and so was his extraordinary love of music. Jerry Rose once said to him, "Menahem, you love playing so much, you should pay me to listen to you."
Another invitee was Philippe Entremont, the French star...he can still play, as he proved at the Mannes School...Entremont was his elegant, tasteful, very musical self - particularly in the French rep (Debusssy, Ravel).
The last recital was given by a sort of Frenchman - Marc-Andre Hamelin, of Montreal. The biggest piece on his Mannes program was the "Concord" Sonata of Ives. This is a vast, sprawling, quirky work, and Hamelin played it with technical brilliance and idiomatic understanding.
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The New York Times
Friday, July 25, 2008
Anthony Tommasini
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In the 1950s, when the French pianist Philippe Entremont emerged on the international scene, he was hailed as a distinctive artist who combined Old World French refinement and youthful virtuosity. His recordings of concertos by Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saëns and Ravel were big sellers.
In the 1970s Mr. Entremont shifted his focus to conducting, taking posts with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra (for nearly 30 years) and the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. Opinion was divided about his conducting. I recall some quite ineffective concerts he presented with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra during the 1980s, when his work both as conductor and pianist, leading Mozart concertos from the keyboard, was mannered, listless and overly plush.
Now 74, Mr. Entremont gave a piano recital at Mannes College the New School for Music on Wednesday evening as part of the International Keyboard Institute and Festival. Jerome Rose, who directs this annual event, has made a point of including veteran artists who have been out of the loop for a while. The auditorium was packed, evidence of the regard Mr. Entremont built up as a pianist during a long career.
He opened the program with Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A (K. 331), the piece that ends with the “Turkish Rondo,” a staple of the student pianist’s repertory. As Mr. Entremont began the main theme of the first movement, some fudged passages and blurry pedaling seemed worrisome signs. But he soon settled down and played with poise and sensitivity. By taking his time, making the most of each lyrical turn of phrase and observing all the structural repeats, Mr. Entremont had this single movement, a theme and variations, seeming like a significant 15-minute piece unto itself. The Menuetto was hardy and jocular. He played the rondo with dash, delicacy and whiplash articulation of the rolled left-hand chords that evoke the Turkish drums and cymbals.
Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata might not be the wisest choice for Mr. Entremont, given his diminished technical resources at this stage of his career. His finger work, for the most part, was nimble and clear, but leaps and bursts of fortissimo chords gave him trouble. This was a rather atmospheric account of music usually mined for its rhythmic intensity and sudden dynamic contrasts.
The all-French second half offered works by Debussy and Ravel. There were curious moments at which Mr. Entremont’s playing of surging passages in Debussy’s “Images,” Book 1, especially the middle section of “Reflets Dans l’Eau,” turned clangorous and steely. But mostly he played with an ear for intriguing inner voices and hazy colorings, as well as effortless glissandos in his exuberant account of Debussy’s suite “Pour le Piano.”
If a phrase here and there was muffed in Mr. Entremont’s performance of Ravel’s finger-twisting “Alborada del Gracioso,” it was enjoyable to hear him cutting loose to relish the piece’s snappy dance rhythms and sultry harmonies.
For an encore, Mr. Entremont played Chopin’s Polonaise in C sharp minor, conveying both the burly vigor and the ruminative tenderness of this mercurial work.
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Classical Music Guide
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Donald Isler
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To give you an idea of how highly Yuan Sheng is regarded, let me begin by saying that, at the end of his recital, Harris Goldsmith and I were agreed that he can play anything. We just had not come to a complete understanding on whether it's because of his wonderful technique, or his excellent musicianship.
I had heard Yuan Sheng, who studied both in China and in this country, and now teaches at Beijing University, twice before. I was particularly looking forward to hearing him play Bach again, and was not disappointed.
Yuan Sheng makes one believe that Bach actually wrote these works for the modern piano, so "just right" do his interpretations sound. There is thought and meaning behind every note, and a consistently beautiful tone. The Prelude and Fugue were surprisingly dramatic, and the Partita, though it included every repeat, never seemed too long, because he always knew to change the volume, or the nuance, or SOMETHING in the repeats. The audience responded with exceptional enthusiasm at the end of this large work.
One of the things I noticed this evening was the extent of his dynamic range. It's not unusual for pianists to enjoy playing LOUD, but not many play so softly and so expressively at the soft end of a tonal palette.
A rousing performance of the Chopin Barcarolle was followed by two very interesting, and contrasting works by composer Ping Gao, who was born in 1970. Just A Moment was quite lovely, and had as a motif something that sounded like a tone cluster in which the notes are played separately, not together.
Night Alley was longer, and more dramatic. Its main motif sounded like a Morse Code signal, which gets elaborated upon. However, many other things also come in during the course of this work, including fragments of a Chopin Waltz, which, played at the very low dynamic level he uses so well, seemed like a delusion at first.
La Valse, which concluded the official program, was a tour de force, with, at different times, charm, elegance, and terrific power. A standing ovation marked its conclusion.
But Mr Sheng wasn't finished. Two encores followed.
The first was the Poeme, Op. 32, No. 1 of Scriabin, and it was another highlight of the evening. At times simple, at other times psychedelic, but always wondrous and tonally gorgeous I couldn't imagine this piece being played any better.
Mr. Sheng ended the concert with a piece Josef Hofmann was known for playing, Moszkowski's Spanish Caprice. An already fearsome piece, featuring interlocking chords and complicated repeated note sections, he played it at top speed, and with great flair.
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The New York Times
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Allan Kozinn
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Jeffrey Swann is sometimes billed on his recital programs as both pianist and lecturer, but even when he is billed as merely a pianist, as he was on Thursday evening, he does a good deal of talking between pieces. Lecturing is something performers need to think about seriously before embracing: too much chattiness can try an audience’s patience if the musician doesn’t have the talent for it or hasn’t prepared.
Mr. Swann doesn’t have that problem, partly because he assembles his programs imaginatively, often with an extramusical theme that connects seemingly disparate works, but also because his comments, however lengthy, are packed with both obscure and commonplace information and are clearly prepared carefully, even though they give the impression of being off the cuff.
Mr. Swann’s program on Thursday, an installment of the International Keyboard Institute & Festival at Mannes College the New School for Music, was called “Music of Ghost Stories, the Fantastic, the Bizarre” and looked at the ways composers grappled with the otherworldly, mostly of the demonic variety that captured the imaginations of 19th-century authors and composers.
He began with a perfect example: Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” performed here in Liszt’s solo piano arrangement. In Schubert’s vocal version, the macabre text and the darkly rippling piano line share the work of evoking horror, but Liszt’s transcription creates the terrifying atmosphere on its own, even without the tale of death pursuing a sick child as his father tries to carry him to safety. Mr. Swann’s forceful, sharply accented reading brought its own electricity to the score.
Two less frequently heard Liszt works — the thunderous “Unstern!” and the light-textured “Mephisto Polka” — were of only modest interest but were reminders of Mr. Swann’s technical versatility. That quality had an ample workout in Schumann’s “Kreisleriana,” an eight-movement portrait of a musical eccentric by a composer who could certainly empathize. Mr. Swann avoided overstating the contrasts between extroverted, speed-demon passages and quieter, ruminative ones, letting Schumann’s writing take its own weird twists. But in the final movement — Schumann’s evocation of a descent into madness — Mr. Swann wisely abandoned restraint.
After the intermission, he played another rarity, Smetana’s “Macbeth and the Witches,” a study in contrasts: the witches cavort wildly, painted in almost Impressionist harmonies, with interruptions for occasional glimpses of Macbeth, a distant, saturnine silhouette. Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit” closed the program, its three panels — the chromatic shimmering of Ondine, the water sprite; the eerie swinging of the hanged corpse in “Le Gibet”; and the zesty, hard-driven depiction of the goblin Scarbo — each illuminated by the clarity and virtuosity of Mr. Swann’s nuanced interpretive style.
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The New York Times
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Allan Kozinn
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By any measure, the International Keyboard Institute & Festival is the grandest offering in the procession of hybrid seminars and concert series that make up the summer schedule at Mannes College the New School for Music. It runs two weeks, more then twice the length of the other institutes. Its daily schedule is packed with master classes (four most days) and concerts (two every evening), as well as a competition.
This year’s installment began on Sunday evening with a recital by Jerome Rose, the institute’s founder and director. Mr. Rose is a pianist who never met a triple forte he didn’t like or couldn’t make just a bit more thunderous, and he favors repertory that rewards this preference.
Why not? He has the fingers, the power and the sense of color and drama to present the barnstormers of the Romantic repertory in a fiery light. At times during his account of Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz” No. 1, which closed his program, the ambient haze produced by strings of fortissimo chords suggested the sulfurous cloud that Liszt might have imagined surrounding his protagonist.
That isn’t to say that muscularity and outsize gesture were all Mr. Rose had in his arsenal. The gentler sections of Schumann’s “Humoreske,” if never quite supple, were elastic enough to touch on Schumann’s tender side, if only briefly between more impetuous outbursts. Parts of Beethoven’s Sonata in A flat (Op. 110) were enlivened by phrasing that suggested an almost improvisatory ebb and flow, and in the work’s closing fugue, clarity and proportion were as crucial to Mr. Rose’s high-energy reading as tension and drive.
Other comparatively graceful moments took root in the descriptive passages of Liszt’s “Vallée d’Obermann” and the more meditative strands of his “Sonetto 47 del Petrarca.” But these moments seemed not to engage Mr. Rose nearly as much as the feistier, flashier ones, and in retrospect, most seemed less like poetry than like glorified placeholders: instances of contrasting calm between waves of forceful, broad-boned piano sound. Those waves could be thrilling in a purely visceral way, particularly in the Liszt works. But it was hard not to feel the lack of something more enduring.
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New York Times
Monday, July 30, 2007
Steve Smith
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To the ardent pianophiles who flock to the International Keyboard Institute & Festival at Mannes College the New School for Music every summer, the Canadian virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin is royalty. Never mind that he played in New York most recently in late March, or that he will make his debut at the Mostly Mozart Festival next week. The line of patrons waiting to hear him in the Mannes Concert Hall on Saturday extended down a staircase, across the lobby and through a locker-lined hallway.
The concert began with two Haydn sonatas featured on a delectable recording Mr. Hamelin recently issued on the Hyperion label. The precision and clarity he brought to the brisk outer movements of the Sonata No. 23 in F suited the music’s scampering gait; in between came an exquisitely molded adagio, during which time seemed to stand still. Mr. Hamelin’s phrasing in the Sonata No. 41 in B flat underscored the bold peculiarity of Haydn’s syncopated rhythms and unpredictable melodies.
“Sonata in a State of Jazz,” composed by the French pianist Alexis Weissenberg in 1982, offered formidable Cubist allusions to popular forms. A tartly dissonant tango in three-quarter time was punctuated with glimmers of nostalgic melody; a spiky Charleston emphasized sharp-edged rhythms. Dense harmonies in a blues-inspired movement suggested a young Schoenberg brooding over the keys in an after-hours Harlem joint, while complex lines in the closing samba section swayed like a drunken mathematician.
An account of Chopin’s Barcarolle, Op. 60, was a thing of breathtaking beauty, every texture and transition sensitively judged. But despite a tender introduction and passionate conclusion, some passages in the Ballade No. 3 sounded starched and curt.
Mr. Hamelin performed two works of his own devising. The Etude No. 8, “Erlkönig,” was a vivid, Lisztian setting of a Goethe poem. (In his introductory comments Mr. Hamelin noted that the melody closely adhered to the German verse; a shame that printed texts were not provided.) The Etude No. 7 was a skillful arrangement for left hand of Tchaikovsky’s “Lullaby.”
Godowsky’s Symphonic Metamorphoses on Johann Strauss Jr.’s “Wine, Women and Song” concluded the program on a note of flamboyant excess. Far more charming — and far gentler to its source — was Mr. Hamelin’s sole encore: “En Avril à Paris,” a selection from the obscure Belgian album “Mr. Nobody Plays Trenet.” The Trenet in question, of course, was the French singer Charles. And Mr. Nobody? That turned out to be Mr. Weissenberg.
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New York Times
Monday, July 23, 2007
Steve Smith
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The scene at Mannes College the New School for Music on Friday night was one of mild urgency, if not exactly chaos. The occasion was a recital by the Russian pianist Olga Kern, presented by the school’s invaluable International Keyboard Institute & Festival. Near the appointed hour the Mannes Concert Hall was filled to near capacity. But a sizable number of would-be patrons lingered in the lobby, hoping to be squeezed in.
The festival’s chief attraction is a series of evening concerts that allow the public to hear pianists in a room large enough to hold some 300 patrons yet intimate enough to qualify as a chamber-music setting. Demand increases sharply when a bona fide star is on hand; a recital by the Canadian virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin scheduled for Saturday sold out quickly. To judge by the mild frenzy, Ms. Kern, a gold medalist at the 2001 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, is becoming that kind of star.
She is undeniably an exciting player despite her taciturn stage presence. She demonstrated abundant power in Chopin’s Sonata No. 2, at times threatening to fly off the rails during the opening movement. The opening of the scherzo lacked clarity, but there was a supple beauty in the way she lingered over the movement’s wistful second subject; it was less a waltz than a narcotic recollection of one. The dolorous Funeral March was well judged; the finale, a rousing but indistinct blur.
Chopin’s Bolero in C (Op. 19) was a marvel of gamboling rhythms and precise articulation. But Ms. Kern’s phrasing in the Polonaise in A flat (Op. 53) seemed choppy and mannered, even at the breakneck tempos she chose.
A change of gowns for the second half elicited a gasp of pleasure from audience members. Ms. Kern brought a suitably lyrical touch to Rachmaninoff’s Sonata No. 2, including gracious descending cascades in the opening allegro agitato. What was missing was a sense of continuity; the work sounded like a series of disconnected episodes and bone-rattling climaxes. Still, it drew lusty shouts of approval.
Ms. Kern was at her best in Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, here outfitted with a tricky Rachmaninoff cadenza. Freed of rhetorical demands, her playing danced and stomped. She offered three encores: an elegant Scarlatti Sonata in D minor (K. 9), Rachmaninoff’s flashy transcription of the gopak from Mussorgsky’s “Sorochintsy Fair,” and Moritz Moszkowski’s scintillating étude “Sparks.” Each showed an amiability that had been in short supply during the main event.
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New York Times
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Bernard Holland
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Writing a history of 20th-century music is best done by one of those Hindu gods with many arms. Too much happened at the same time. All of it different.
Talking and playing the piano Tuesday night at Mannes College the New School for Music, Jeffrey Swann offered six composers, none of whose music really had much to say to any music around it. The concert was part of the International Keyboard Institute & Festival, an annual convocation of performing, teaching and lecturing.
Mr. Swann brought along the Berg Sonata and its umbilical connections to Wagner, the Stravinsky Sonata with its cool appraisal of Baroque bounce and ornament, and excerpts from Hindemith’s ardent, erudite and yet curiously businesslike “Ludus Tonalis.” After intermission came gee-whiz theatrics from the first volume of George Crumb’s “Makrokosmos,” David Del Tredici’s strange yet somehow touching retreat to the Chopin of the 1840s and the unclassifiable beauties of Ligeti’s Etudes for Piano, here two examples from Book I.
As a pianist Mr. Swann is a very satisfactory musical polyglot. He also speaks well about historical contexts, although given his audience of students and professionals he was probably talking to the already initiated. He feels the melodic tensions of the Berg, and where others find a smaller, more intimate piece, he emphasizes the Sonata’s grandness. Touching too was how touched Mr. Swann himself was by the lyrical impulse that Hindemith insists on, even in the midst of his highly organized writing.
Mr. Swann seemed to have a good time with Mr. Crumb’s extracurricular strummings inside the body of the piano and his spoken and shouted bits of texts. An important wing of 20th-century music was its community of inventors, entrusted with finding new instruments and new applications of old ones. If patents for innovative sonorities existed, Mr. Crumb would hold a few of them.
Mr. Del Tredici’s “Virtuoso Alice” is well described by its title, with great flurries of scales and arpeggios commenting on sweetly melodic music. At the end came Ligeti’s “Arc-en-ciel” and “Automne à Varsovie,” their layers of irreconcilable time schemes making this music a pleasure for the ear and a nightmare for the performer. Mr. Swann dealt very well with them.
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New York Times
Monday, July 31, 2006
Bernard Holland
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Unusual physical skills at the piano make good things happen, but they function as stigmas as well. The start of Marc-André Hamelin’s public career carried with it a reputation for extraordinary fluency, a technique that could bring Balakirev’s “Islamey,” Albéniz’s “Iberia” and other horrific tests of virtuosity to their knees. Maybe Mr. Hamelin’s musical mind and heart have emerged from behind that blur of flying fingers and crashing octaves. Maybe they were there all the time, and we just didn’t pay enough attention.
Mr. Hamelin’s appearance on Saturday at Mannes College indulged his taste for the big and the florid (Paul Dukas’s E-flat minor sonata) but also returned to one of the repertory’s sacred gospels, the Schubert B-flat sonata from the composer’s last year. This was all part of the International Keyboard Institute and Festival, which finished yesterday. The college’s modest upstairs auditorium was packed with students of the instrument young and old.
Dukas lived his musical life alongside Ravel and Debussy but did not write a great deal, occupying his time early on with music criticism and later with academia. What survives in memory 71 years after his death are the vocal and instrumental pieces, so the piano sonata from the turn of the 20th century arrived on Saturday as a minor revelation to many. Its four movements are products of a culture that had more time, more love of rhetoric, and a patience to sit back and to absorb it.
The heart then was fixed perhaps more prominently on the sleeve, and with no microphones to be had, the loud voice was a medium of choice. The piece is filled with little surprises: unexpected changes of key, sudden loud-soft shifts and, at the end of the Scherzo movement, a particularly interesting series of comic doodles and silences.
Elsewhere there are a lot of notes, all handily digested by Mr. Hamelin. It was a fine opportunity to hear a piece other pianists don’t play, but I wonder how many in the audience would jump at the chance to repeat the experience. There is the hint of a swayback in this long, effusive and ambling war horse. Maybe if we had more time, maybe if we were less in a hurry. …
In 1828 the Schubert sonata sat on a line separating the Classical tradition of Mozart and the open Romantic abandon about to be let out into the world. Performers can go either way and do it legitimately.
Mr. Hamelin chose to look ahead, with generously formed phrases, tempos unafraid to bend and contract, big modern-piano effects and rhetorical silences. Here was virtuosity well used: a performance as scrupulous and considered as it was deeply felt.
One of the less-mentioned wonders of this wondrous piece is not the first movement or the second, but the gap between the two. To come unwarned upon the C-sharp minor chord that begins the Andante, and to do so with the lingering B-flatness of the first movement still in the ear, adds a dimension of mystery like no other I can think of.
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New York Times
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Bernard Holland
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Fou Ts’ong, a British pianist by way of Shanghai, was something of an international presence 40 years ago. We hear less of him on this side of the Atlantic, but he is still active as a player and competition jurist, and he showed up at the International Keyboard Institute and Festival at the Mannes College on Tuesday night. At 72, Mr. Fou commands a technique that is restrained but functioning. Most of his program was chosen for its musical interest rather than its technical challenge, this being as much by necessity as by good taste. Chopin’s F-minor Ballade at the end sounded more like laborious negotiation than free-flying virtuosity. He was more interesting in Haydn’s A-flat minor Sonata, music with a surprise around every corner, and in Mozart’s Fantasy in D minor (K. 397), operatic in declamation but with physical difficulties well within the reach of a reasonably gifted child.
Mr. Fou’s playing has characteristics of an older point of view, one that favors freedom over scrupulosity and coherence. A collection of Chopin mazurkas was improvisatory in style, and sometimes in fact. Mr. Fou likes to separate the hands slightly for melodic emphasis in the old-fashioned way, and he always has time to draw out phrases and create pregnant silences.
His tendency to sever Chopin’s linear writing in midflow and then leave it to dangle in musical space borders on the eccentric. The Mozart group, which included the Baroque-like Gigue in G and the great Rondo in A minor, worked better by being a little less free. In Chopin’s Berceuse Mr. Fou tried assiduously to disguise the monotony of the left-hand rhythm, when perhaps monotony was what Chopin intended.
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New York Times
Friday, July 21, 2006
Anthony Tommasini
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One of the most awestruck fans of the jazz pianist Art Tatum was the classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who heard the nearly blind Tatum play live in New York jazz clubs and collected his records. Like Duke Ellington and Oscar Peterson, Horowitz was inspired and intimidated by the inventiveness and sheer virtuosity of Tatum’s playing: the intricate rhythmic riffs, the constantly shifting harmony, the hypercharged keyboard-sweeping runs. “I wish I had a left hand like Art Tatum’s,” Horowitz once said.
Tatum, who died in 1956 at 47, has another admirer from classical music in the pianist Steven Mayer, who has transcribed by ear, note for note, numerous Tatum improvisations and recorded them to acclaim on a Naxos Classical release. On Tuesday at Mannes College of Music in Manhattan, Mr. Mayer concluded a varied recital program, part of the school’s two-week International Keyboard Institute and Festival, with three of his transcribed Tatum solos.
Though you can question the point of trying to replicate Tatum’s ingenious improvisations, you have to be impressed by Mr. Mayer’s devotion to the music and his technically brilliant playing. Actually, Mr. Mayer adds his own touches to Tatum’s solos. Still, his renditions are amazing facsimiles. Tatum took the Harlem stride style of Fats Waller and reinvented it, pushing it harmonically, polyphonically and pianistically beyond anything imagined.
Yet, though Tatum sometimes repeated his solos almost exactly in different performances, the pieces emerged as improvisations and always sounded fresh. For all the ferocity of his playing, there was a devil-may-care quality to his style, a seemingly impossible mix of intensity and impishness. Though Mr. Mayer plays Tatum with admirable panache, inevitably his performances sounded somewhat practiced and dutiful.
Mr. Mayer is a musician with wide-ranging interests who has played standard concerto repertory with major international orchestras. He began this recital with a boldly expressive account of Mozart’s Rondo in A minor, followed by a rhapsodic performance of Schumann’s early Sonata in F sharp minor, a technically awkward, sometimes intractable yet noble, haunting and fantastical work that is too seldom heard.
He was at his best in Ives’s “Celestial Railroad,” an astounding essay in color, texture and energy that sounded more radical than ever in Mr. Mayer’s compelling performance. He also gave engaging accounts of two works by Gottschalk and, as a warm-up to the Tatum, more of his transcriptions of early jazz piano pieces: James P. Johnson’s “Blueberry Rhyme” and Jelly Roll Morton’s “Frances.”
It’s reassuring to see classical pianists of Mr. Mayer’s accomplishment thinking outside the box. Still, even Horowitz, a renowned transcriber, never took on Tatum.
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New York Times
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Allan Kozinn
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The International Keyboard Institute and Festival is the biggest of Mannes College’s back-to-back schedule of summer programs. It runs for two full weeks, with master classes, lectures, demonstrations and recitals open to the public every day from 9 a.m. to about 10 p.m.
Audiences are usually packed more tightly into Mannes’s concert hall for the keyboard event than for the college’s other festivals (which examine Beethoven, contemporary music and the classical guitar). There is even an official T-shirt (for $20) in the lobby.
Jerome Rose, the festival’s founder and director, gave the opening recital on Sunday evening in a program calibrated to his strengths, which include the sonic heft, broad gestures and grand scale of Romanticism.
Even so, Mr. Rose began with two works from outside the Romantic repertory, which isn’t to say that he recognized such a distinction. He played Mozart’s Sonata in C minor (K. 457) as a full-fledged Romantic score with a big, strong tone that made its textures sound thicker than they are. With that tonal weight established, proportions of all kinds inevitably change. So while Mr. Rose’s dynamics were essentially those of the score, their effects was magnified to Lisztian proportions.
Paul Schoenfield’s “Intermezzo” (2002) is a graceful, slowly building rumination in a language so conservative that it could almost pass as a lost Chopin work. That was how Mr. Rose played it, and it was an approach that worked once you accepted that Mr. Schoenfield, always an eclectic composer, was intent on pursuing an unequivocally nostalgic notion here.
Mr. Rose closed the first half of the program with a thundering account of Schumann’s G minor Sonata (Op. 22) that put the music’s audacious outbursts into high relief, but didn’t skimp on its gentler qualities, like the singing melody line in the Adagio. Similar qualities — with a greater emphasis on poetry and lilting themes than on thunder, though there was some of that as well — enlivened the four Chopin Ballades, which Mr. Rose played after the intermission.
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New York Sun
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Fred Kirshnit
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Every generation has its "last Romantic," a pianist who captures, to an extraordinary degree, the windswept spirit of the late 19th-century Lisztian camp. Josef Hofmann was the first last Romantic, bringing into the 1930s and '40s the wisdom of the previous century. A decade later, Vladimir Horowitz followed suit. The 1960s brought Artur Rubinstein, who learned from masters who learned from masters of the original stripe. And in more modern times, the last Romantic was the cult figure Shura Cherkassky.
Jerome Rose might be considered the last Romantic of our own age. A Liszt specialist, he was known in his youth as a formidable advocate for the golden age's most virtuosic piano music. Later, he became a scholar and eventually founded the annual International Keyboard Institute & Festival at the Mannes College of Music. The festival, which features no less than 28 concerts over two weeks, opened Sunday evening with a recitalist none other than Mr. Rose himself.
His appearance did not go unnoticed: The hall was bursting. Fans sat on the floor, stood at the back, even perched cross-legged atop some of the spare pianos in the room. All was in place for a superb recital. But the recitalist started off on the wrong foot. The leonine Mr. Rose presented the opening work, Mozart's Sonata in C minor, K. 457, as if it were written by some minor acolyte or epigone of Liszt. Stylistically anachronistic, the performance was also surprisingly inaccurate: Entire passages were seemingly uttered extemporaneously and fingered cavalierly. I feared it was to be a bumpy night.
Thankfully, Mr. Rose righted the ship immediately thereafter. With the following work, the world premiere of "Intermezzo" by Paul Schoenfield, the pianist employed both printed music and a page-turner, and appeared to reproduce the score, even the occasional minor second that rendered this otherwise melodious music discordant, faithfully.
Once Mr.Rose plunged headlong into the Romantic, he was in steady waters. Curiously, there appeared to be a direct ratio between the degree of technical difficulty and Mr. Rose's facilities with a particular piece. This unique recitalist soundly traversed Robert Schumann's notoriously devilish Sonata in G minor, Op. 22. He made child's play of many of its most difficult passages, producing a limpid and powerfully drawn rendition.
For better or worse, everything about Mr. Rose — his aesthetic, his style, and his sporadic shortcomings of dexterity — came together for a memorable reading of Chopin's Four Ballades. Yes, all four were played in order, even though the composer never intended for them to be offered as such. How Mr. Rose chose to perform these magnificent essays will certainly create controversy, and that is a good thing for music that depends so much on its frisson. He insisted on living on the edge throughout, creating generous slathers of rubato, heart-stopping pauses, big dynamic contrasts, and runs and trills begun just slightly after their downbeat.
If hearing all the notes in their proper place is your cup of tea, then you will probably not care much for Jerome Rose. But if the tingling sensation of the unexpected in your spine is the reason you come to hear such emotional music, then you could do much worse than a program by this necromancer who celebrates the Romantic pianist as the kissing cousin of that other emerging artist of the 19th century, the circus performer. For me, these daring experiments were mighty as a rose.
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