Regina Shenderovich in Review

Regina Shenderovich in Review

Twelve Preludes and Fugues (Nos. 13–24), Book II from

24 Preludes and Fugues, op. 87 – Dmitri Shostakovich

Regina Shenderovich, piano

Marc A Scorca Hall, The National Opera Center, New York, NY

March 8, 2024

Eventbrite advertising drew a small but attentive group of listeners to Marc A. Scorca Hall on March 8th for a rare treat: a performance of the second volume of Preludes and Fugues by Dmitri Shostakovich, a documentary project reserved for pianists of exemplary mettle and inner strength. The success of such an undertaking in a live concert also involves forging a delicate sense of trust with the audience, who must process complicated (although beautiful) details for more than eighty minutes without intermission. The pianist Regina Shenderovich, self-reliant and supremely up to the task, sat at the side of the stage until concert time, introduced her own program chattily without a shred of nervousness, and turned her own pages, emerging at the end of this test of fire as fresh as if she could quite happily have repeated the show.

Would that the life of the composer had been so unafflicted. Shostakovich spent his days in apprehensive contemplation of the fate that would befall him if the authorities should deem his music offensive or “formalist,” worthy of political imprisonment or even execution if he overstepped arbitrary creative boundaries. The favorite aesthetic insult could be interpreted and manipulated by any committee of bureaucrats; but a direct phone call from Joseph Stalin to Shostakovich overrode all threats when the Soviet Union needed a spokesperson at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in New York in 1949. Shostakovich complied and was safe, but never recovered from his psychological scars.

The 24 Preludes and Fugues were written in 1950‐51 for the young Tatyana Nikolayeva, winner of the bicentennial International Bach Competition in 1950. Nikolayeva performed them until the very end of her life, from memory and in pairs of concerts. In 1993, I flocked to the 92nd Street Y with a cohort of students to sit bravely through both concerts of one cycle, sheepishly realizing that some preparation might have illuminated this transformative experience. Two weeks later, Nikolayeva left our world, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while performing the Preludes and Fugues in San Francisco.

The individual pieces, modelled on the much shorter originals of J. S. Bach, are organized not in rising half tones but in the manner of Chopin’s Preludes, by ascending fifths and relative minor keys. They are an effective staple of the repertoire of students and concert artists and satisfy expressive as well as mathematical cravings. Presented as a collection, they are more forbidding. The first fugue of the second book, near the outset of the concert, is a five-voice challenge in F-sharp major. Shostakovich alludes constantly to Bach while venturing into the ethos of the postwar (and Cold War) Soviet Union, with a churning, punctuated waltz (D-flat major), tremolo figures and monolithic church themes (E-flat minor), giddy passagework in every range of the keyboard (B-flat major), and Brucknerian architecture building to a cataclysmic eruption of reinforced octaves (D minor), in a cathartic climax that could incite an instant standing ovation if played to a full house.

Ms. Shenderovich hails from St. Petersburg’s Special Music School via Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Illinois. She bears an unusual likeness to the youthful Nikolayeva. An artist of prodigious musical resources, she brings out the fluidity of lines with sophisticated textural layering, subordinating basses to an infinitely colored right hand, and launching into pyrotechnical finger-twisters without fear. Particularly memorable were F minor with its poignant major/minor thirds à la Josquin, and dreamy F major with its Bach transcription-like sincerity and optimism. Where Nikolayeva capitalized on an imposing authority, Ms. Shenderovich lets us know we are always in good hands but never oversells her wares. She has a promising future with this tour de force if she decides to invest the time to memorize a daunting program, and if she can find a brilliant publicist.

Steering clear of the darkness and pessimism in the Preludes and Fugues may have obliterated traces of irony and sarcasm essential to Shostakovich, but at the same time Ms. Shenderovich appeared to be healing his pathological undertones with a much-needed, soothing balm.

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Jiwon Han—Début:Recording in Review

Jiwon Han—Début:Recording in Review

Jiwon Han, piano

Chopin–Ballade No. 4 in F Minor, op. 52

Chopin–Barcarolle in F-sharp Major, op. 60

Liszt–Sonata in B minor, S. 178

Stravinsky–Three Movements from Petrushka

Isang Yun–Five Pieces for Piano (1958)

Recorded at Yagi Studio, Seoul, Korea, 2014

Fortified with two performance degrees and an artist diploma from South Korea, a second artist diploma from Cincinnati, two doctorates in piano from Michigan State University, and an admirable list of prizes, recordings, and jobs as conductor, educator, and collaborative artist, Jiwon Han should have little need to prove his status as an expert in the field. Judging from his album “Jiwon Han—Début,” recorded nine years ago at the age of twenty-seven, we can already hear Mr. Han’s formative tastes spanning the range of pianistic warhorses, pieces which define the real article and demand the utmost of a performer. These audio files present the young, pre-Doctor Han as a probing yet conservative virtuoso steering all ears toward an eminent future.

The chronological arrangement of the YouTube playlist, Jiwon Han—Début , begins in 1842 with rather late Chopin, although one could only imagine the effect of Mr. Han’s incisive fingers on a Baroque or Classic masterwork (perhaps something to anticipate in another release). Meticulous to a fault in the preparation of every musical detail, he squeezes the last drop of tone from each voice in Chopin’s multi-layered counterpoint and leaves no note to speculation. The poetic genesis of the Fourth Ballade is nascent and the woven, operatic gondola songs of the Barcarolle, among Chopin’s last and most reflective experiments in sound, are given highly burnished treatment marked by discipline and unflinching concentration. To be sure, audio engineering and the YouTube format place us in a digital environment quite different from that of a concert hall—which would not jostle our meditations with jingles and blaring adsbut the “acoustic” is somewhat distant, treble-centric, and wet, even when Mr. Han seems to be pouring both hands into a chordal tirade. Liszt’s symphonic and tumultuous B minor Sonata unfolds acrobatically yet earnestly, pacing out the glorious arrivals of second themes and fugal upheavals with an almost micro-managed conductor’s sense of time. We marvel at Mr. Han’s power and facility while we search for a trace of the Hungarian rhapsodist who would transmute absolute structure and tonality within several years of the Sonata’s publication in 1854. Perhaps owing to the limitation of computer speakers and the sprinkling of commercial breaks between sections of this one-movement traversal of the human spirit, Mr. Han’s assiduous interpretation leaves us longing to hear him live, in a setting in which we might actually hold our breath.

Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka becomes an instant magnet for Jiwon Han, who recorded the three excerpts at nearly the same age as the composer of the original ballet (Stravinsky was twenty-eight in 1910 when he realized his orchestral vision of a magician instilling human energy and emotion into puppets). Indeed, the piano suddenly leaps into the room as Mr. Han conjures a model soundscape of electric octaves, staccatissimo accents, and carnival folk themes. His superb rhythmic articulation and dry ostinato, so well matched to the exacting style of the regimented Russian, could be lifted into a freshly choreographed performance if Vaslav Nijinsky’s mocking reincarnation were to reappear onscreen, as Petrushka’s ghost hovered over the stage at the end of the Shrovetide Fair scene in the ballet. A pianist, however, as the sole element absent a full tableau, must be set designer, theatrical costumer, director, and choreographer, and in this regard, we hear Mr. Han’s neoclassic character primed to discover more Slavic savagery and sheer zaniness in his brilliant playing.

In a surprising detour from the showy persona exemplified by the rest of his program, Mr. Han ends on an unsettled note, with the expressionist Korean-German Isang Yun’s Five Pieces for Piano, or Fünf Stücke für Klavier. These comprise the earliest work of a Korean-born composer who studied in Japan, Paris, and Berlin and befriended Cage, Boulez, and Stockhausen in his quest for the unification of Eastern and Western styles. In 1958, before his political imprisonment and voiced strivings for the reconciliation of North and South Korea, Isang Yun was influenced by a mix of twelve-tone serialism, Taoist naturalism, Buddhist chants, and Korean instrumental timbres. It is to his credit that Mr. Han champions such mathematically constructed and intricate music. The five pieces evoke strains of Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, op. 25 and Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux, with new ideas: extreme curves of high and low register, colorful grace notes, imitations of vibrato, glissando, and pizzicato techniques, and fortississimo or pianississimo fermatas as isolated sounds trailing off into silence. Mr. Han portrays the contrasts effectively and freely. There may be an even higher level of control indicated by the composer’s careful progression of rhythmic values (triplets, quintuplets, septuplets) that could warrant a sense of restraint in the performer’s instinctively Romantic rubato, but the result is dramatic and alluring.

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Sejong Soloists Young Virtuoso Series Presents Juhee Lim in Review

Sejong Soloists Young Virtuoso Series Presents Juhee Lim in Review

“Nacht und Träume”

Juhee Lim, piano

Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY

October 6, 2022

The typical trajectory of a wunderkind’s career—the firebrand phase of blazing confidence opening the door to a slow infusion of poetry and psychological depth—has been turned on its head by the high stakes of joining today’s music profession. Pianist Juhee Lim, at age twenty-two, sponsored by the Sejong Soloists and the Samsung Foundation of Culture, began her Weill Recital Hall program Thursday night with a requiem and visions of death in Lera Auerbach’s searing 1992 triptych, Memento mori. The raw intensity of Ms. Lim’s statement bypassed all pianistic pleasantries and underscored the ironic double meaning of the concert’s title, “Nacht und Träume.” Far from a tribute to a familiar Schubert Lied about peaceful slumber, the symbolism here was of death, nightmares, and dwindling hope. (Is this the horizon on which a modern creative artist must gaze?) Despair hovers around us—this month marks the centenary of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, to follow the poetic tangent further. Perhaps Ms. Lim’s philosophical icebreaker was just an impressive warm-up, but the message hit home.

The other two works of the evening, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and Brahms’s Sonata in F minor, Op. 5, presented more literary nocturnal associations (water spirits, a hanging corpse, goblins, twilight) and assuaged the realism of Ms. Lim’s opening gambit by returning us, in reverse chronological order, to a more traditional world with which we could cope.

The diminutive Juhee Lim is a colossal pianist with a palette of ten thousand colors. She revels in drama, delicacy, rhetorical outbursts, and sophisticated handling of time and silence. A veteran soloist, having received engagements with the Mariinsky Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic, and the Juilliard Orchestra, among others, Ms. Lim showed no barrier of nerves and plunged straight into her work. Her feather-lightness and faultlessly articulated double notes in Ravel’s Ondine may have been magnified by the easy brightness of the Steinway in the completely full Weill Hall. The morbid theme of the evening continued with the stock-still gallows motif of Le gibet and reached its zenith in Scarbo with its trembling repeated notes and welling-up of passionate ninth chords, all performed with integrity and reserves of stamina.

Ms. Lim’s penchant for muscular majesty encountered a different sort of Everest to scale in the Brahms Sonata. In her hands, this “absolute” music (which does not actually depict anything, although the poetic quote about twilight in Jane Vial Jaffe’s beautiful program essay makes for nice inclusion in the dream sequence) veered daringly close to the aesthetic line famously drawn by Eduard Hanslick in the Romantic Brahms-Liszt divide. Ms. Lim’s coy-to-ferocious character changes and liberally pedalled cadences seemed more evocative of Schumann’s wild Florestan than of the fledgling Brahms who played his new sonata for Schumann at the age of twenty, and inner voices which are often given a sonorous treatment resembled ethereal, post-Romantic filigree. (Premonitions of Ms. Lim’s future performance of a Liszt Sonata came to mind.) A stylishly Viennese Scherzo movement and allusions to the mature Brahms’s A German Requiem recapped the thesis of the concert. For any listeners still pining for a soothing Schubert song as promised in the recital’s billing, his G-flat Impromptu from Opus 90 was an ultimately fulfilling encore.

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Recording in Review: Christopher Jessup, piano

Recording in Review: Christopher Jessup, piano

  1. Debussy: Minstrels, No. 12 from Préludes, Book 1, L. 117
  2. Grieg: Sonata in E Minor, op. 7 (II. Andante molto)
  3. Haydn: Sonata in B Minor, Hob. XVI:32 (I. Allegro moderato)
  4. Ravel: Sonatine, M. 40 (I. Modéré)
  5. Jessup: Le revenant
  6. Mozart: Concerto No. 19 in F Major, K. 459 (III. Allegro assai), Ben Rhee, Camerata Artists Orchestra

Recorded at Oktaven Audio, New York (1–4), live at Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall (5), live at Merkin Concert Hall (6)

Immediacy is the new gold standard. Never mind preening or buying tickets to an exciting début recital at Weill Hall. Now the piano recital comes to you, the program has been pared to its standout moments, and for 99 cents you can own one piece.

The promising 23-year-old American artist Christopher Jessup, a recent Juilliard graduate, takes full advantage of everything technology has to offer. In a smorgasbord of divine sound bites, Mr. Jessup introduces us to a 28-minute playlist of the pieces he delivers as well as anyone: Debussy’s “Minstrels,” the slow movement of Grieg’s Piano Sonata, opening movements of Haydn and Ravel, an original composition, and the Finale of a Mozart concerto with orchestra. The playlist comprises six audio YouTube links showing a profile of Mr. Jessup on the screen, with the exception of track 3, an actual (and very welcome) performance video in a drawing room filled with books. The selections are available for purchase: To purchase on Amazon  To purchase on iTunes

Mr. Jessup’s playing is refined and eloquent in all of the styles he presents here. It is refreshing to witness the first act of a career which does not seem to indulge in virtuosic daredevilry, and although the artist is still searching for his special strength in a varied program overflowing with creative ideas, it may be safe to assume that he will sidestep pure athleticism as he gains wider recognition. His exquisite pacing is never beat-bound, he listens intently for balance and sound quality, and he is not afraid to pull the tempo along as the architecture of each piece unfolds. His expert training in composition not only allows him the freedom to immerse himself directly into the character of each paragraph he utters, but also affords his audience a glimpse of a new actor in that panoply of composer-performers who have shaped the pianistic idiom through the eras. The enthusiastic cadenza of the Mozart Concerto’s third movement which follows Jessup’s original work, Le revenant (The Undead? We would love explanatory notes!), shows us a more traditional version of the pianist’s love of improvisation.

At his best in capricious, spontaneous gestures, exaggerating the flexion of the raised musical eyebrow, Christopher Jessup uses his fine aural conception to lead us smoothly from manic to morose and toward the hyperactive once more, albeit in quizzical fashion. This play of opposites already has established itself in Jessup’s consciousness and in our own, as he traces an odd reverse chronology: from the comical face of Debussy in 1910 back to the Norwegian folk-influenced Edvard Grieg in 1866, to the arch-Classical Haydn of 1775, suddenly parachuting us forward again to France at the turn of the 20th century, and so on. If the artist has a plan, it is to ask for philosophical cohesion amid an oxymoronic batch of dissociated thinkers. But it is far more likely that he has not worried about the jarring juxtaposition of musical appetizers which lack a main course, and this may not be a productive path as he navigates the concert world.

In keeping with our consumeristic trends, radio stations often use the fallacy of listeners’ abhorrence of empty space to skip movements or delay announcements of titles, shifting images in such a neurological shuffle that listeners become gradually disoriented. The playlist may be a background for other comfortable activities: running, cooking, waiting for customer support. In Mr. Jessup’s demo, even the composers’ names are deemed peripheral, leaving audiophiles to guess them and puzzle over Le revenant,  whose composer, as performer, is almost hidden in plain sight. When one factors in YouTube’s frequent interruptions for ads, Amazon’s running mashup of non sequitur samples, and the absence of program notes on these sites, the result is a rather trivial treatment for a musician who most certainly should be given our serious attention.

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Wa Concert Series presents Wind Power in Review

Wa Concert Series presents Wind Power in Review

New York Woodwind Quintet
Carol Wincenc, flute; Stephen Taylor, oboe; Charles Neidich, clarinet; William Purvis, French horn; Marc Goldberg, bassoon; Bryan Wagorn, piano (guest)
Tenri Cultural Institute, New York, NY
April 12, 2019

 

The beneficent ghost of Samuel Baron (1925–1997) was undoubtedly smiling in attendance at the New York Woodwind Quintet’s April 12th concert at the Tenri Cultural Institute. Mr. Baron, founder of the Quintet in 1949 and, for a half-century, a beloved conservatory mentor to flutists (and their collaborative pianists), was also a conductor, a champion of new composers, a musical entrepreneur, an arranger, a member of the Bach Aria Group, New York City Symphony and City Opera, and a captivating lecturer on subjects psychological and practical. In this April installment of the Wa Concert Series, titled “Wind Power,” quintets by John Harbison and György Kurtág preceded a rendition of Mr. Baron’s sextet transcription of the Brahms G minor Piano Quartet, Op. 25, comprising throughout a glorious tribute both to Baron’s own legacy and to the Quintet’s seventieth anniversary.

Mr. Baron viewed the principal winds, the core of the symphony orchestra or the “leaders from within,” as bearers of a crucial responsibility in the realm of chamber music; in place of their standard role as simple executants of an orchestral conductor’s wishes, the players in a small ensemble could—and must—be interpreters and magical conjurors, channeling the composer’s ineffable spirit. To this aim, the most spectacular of the Quintet’s achievements on April 12 was Kurtág’s Woodwind Quintet, Op. 2 (1959), with Harbison and Brahms trailing close by.

György Kurtág, who is 93, has often been compared to Anton Webern, albeit in Central European Jewish guise. Kurtág was lucky enough to sidestep the horrors of World War II by studying in 1940 in the inconspicuous locale of Temesvar (Timişoara), Romania, later emigrating to Hungary in 1946. A pithy writer heavily influenced by Kafka, he underwent a brutal course of psychoanalysis during his years of study in the late 1950s in Paris, where he recounted the reverse metamorphosis of a “cockroach striving to change into a human being, seeking light and purity.” Perhaps stemming from art therapy sessions in which Kurtág was asked to create confessional sculptures from matchsticks, his penchant for divining expressive significance from the most ascetic of materials led to his rough-hewn, aphoristic early style.

Kurtág’s Quintet for Winds traverses eight movements in as many minutes, implanting microcosmic layers of intent within every terse utterance. For the breath-stopping duration of these miniatures, the bright and sterile concert room of the Tenri became a murky, post-war therapist’s lair, in which out-of-doors motifs of Bartók were exhumed and the birdcalls of Messiaen (with whom Kurtág studied) twisted themselves around a skein of intimate associations. Whirs and jabs floated, pierced, fell by microtones, and leapt questioningly from flute to oboe to clarinet and bassoon, all over a sustained horn (Mr. Purvis appeared to have a mountaineer’s lung capacity). This sort of identification with black dots takes place only under the obsessive tutelage of a composer, and although the twelve-page program booklet neglected to offer notes on the music (or even the correct key of the Brahms), we were treated to helpful verbal explanations of Kurtág’s coaching and the nurturing process behind what we were hearing.

The stage-setter for this catharsis came from the opposite end of the Schoenberg-Stravinsky spectrum. John Harbison, 80, is one of our national treasures and has been especially fêted in the current season. At the height of his career, the renowned composer is unveiling new recordings, world premieres, a book, and numerous performances to add to an enormous catalogue of symphonies, concerti, choral works, and operas including “The Great Gatsby,” commissioned by the Met. Mr. Harbison, winner of countless accolades in addition to a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize, hails from the Northeast (Harvard, Princeton, MIT) and is active throughout the United States, with many of his compositions receiving performances worldwide.

His five-movement Quintet for Winds, a Naumburg commission from 1978—both Mr. Neidich and Ms. Wincenc are former Naumburg Competition winners—is an aural feast as well as a cerebral one; traditional dissonances and tensions between mismatched notes speak the language we know from Bach and Stravinsky, merely updated and laced with Americana, lyricism, and humor to bring us home. Harbison is all about communication, from before the music starts until the performers walk offstage, and this group’s burnished blend could react to the gesture of a shifting eyeball on the part of Mr. Goldberg. The clever choice to open the concert with Harbison’s animated declamation (Intrada), filled with sevenths, expressive doublings, and stratospheric explorations of every instrument’s range, was outdone only by the players’ attention to highlighted balances and well-honed intonation, leaving no harmony to chance. A moment for Mr. Taylor to shine in the plaintive Romanza opened forth into a series of escalating, quirky punctuations, perfectly calibrated, followed by the most seamless and ridiculous barrage of perpetual natterings in clarinet, flute, and bassoon (Scherzo: Prestissimo), paving the way for a somber Adagio and a hilarious, multi-tongued, gimpy march to close.

Considerations of balance were evidently central to Mr. Baron’s arrangement of Brahms for piano and five winds (the original calls for piano and three strings). Pre-concert publicity and print had conspired to secrecy about the name or even the existence of a pianist in this piece, leaving the introduction of a mystery guest to Mr. Neidich. When he arrived, however, Bryan Wagorn was a game contributor to the festivities. Already an established figure in the vocal world, Mr. Wagorn has performed with legendary singers and worked as assistant conductor at the Met. His presence at the Tenri’s seven-foot Steinway, a Wittgenstein family bequest, was dazzling and evocative, and certainly Mr. Baron’s arrangement of the G minor Quartet is a thrill to hear. The piece presents new challenges in wind territory, as double-reeds and brass tend to drive the tone much more than bowed nylon and titanium, and the horn’s dominating lines kept bringing to mind stretches of unwritten Mahler symphonies. The molto piano, con sordino pulsating triplets in the Intermezzo were recast as vibrantly tongued attacks, a timbral stimulant to the piano’s whimsical folk melodies. If one was looking for completion from the earnest, soul-searching Brahms, his reassuring voice warmed the air in transitional moments such as the piano’s Bachian cadenza in the Zingarese finale and a heavenly flute entrance joining its afterglow.

The Wa Series is also highly recommended for its culinary post-concert delights, courtesy of Ayako Oshima.

 

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Korea Music Foundation 30th Anniversary and Korean Cultural Service NY 35th Anniversary Concert in Review

Korea Music Foundation 30th Anniversary and Korean Cultural Service NY 35th Anniversary Concert in Review

Korea Music Foundation 30th Anniversary and Korean Cultural Service NY 35th Anniversary Concert
Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, New York, NY
June 6, 2014

 

Immersed in the stylish, staccato chatter at Alice Tully Hall on the evening of June 6, it was easy for one to surmise a thirty-year triumph for the Korea Music Foundation (KMF) and a fulfilling thirty-five-year stint for the Korean Cultural Service NY. Started in 1984 as a non-profit platform for Korean rising talent (somewhat less extensive than our Young Concert Artists, which provides management services for international winners, or Great Britain’s Young Classical Artists Trust, which promotes stars resident in the U.K.), the Korea Music Foundation invests in New York début recitals, orchestral concerts, chamber music, and fundraising events for its younger protégés and more established Korean performers. The Korean Cultural Service NY offers an array of annual concerts, exhibitions, films, and educational presentations on its premises at 460 Park Avenue. The convergence of these two groups’ respective celebrations resulted in a sure-to-please Lincoln Center gala of silks, flowing pastels, and generously delivered oceans of virtuosic passagework, conveyed by KMF favorites through a captivating, predominantly nineteenth-century program of solo and chamber works.

Four pages of insightful commentary by an unnamed author filled in the listener’s overwhelmingly upbeat experience. Even the most desolate of the program’s four substantial works, Ernest Chausson’s Chanson perpétuelle, Op. 37, for soprano, piano, and string quartet, a woman’s sensual suicide letter to a lover who has defaulted on their pact, was given a buoyant and transparent reading in the honeyed colors of Yunah Lee’s rich soprano and the tender, tremolando swells of strings and piano. Relying on exaggerated dynamic hairpins but never covering the voice with their muted chromatic undulations and immaculate intonation, the strings (Judy Kang and Anna Park, violins, Jung Yeon Kim, viola, Alina Lim, cello) and piano (Beth Nam) might have beckoned to Ms. Lee from a plush summer landscape rather than from the grief-stricken numbness of eternity; the sextet’s perspective seemed to stress the latter element in Poulenc’s 1950 description of French music as a coexistence of “somberness and good humor.” Poulenc surely knew of the work; Chausson’s last completed composition before his tragic end in a bicycle crash in 1899 preceded Poulenc’s forty-minute operatic soliloquy on the same subject (La voix humaine) by sixty years. The eight-minute Chausson may be performed in a version for soprano and orchestra, which might give an even more harrowing treatment to the stanzas of Charles Clos.

The Norwegian composer Johan Halvorsen supplied the concert opener, his 1894 Passacaglia based on the last movement of Handel’s Keyboard Suite in G Minor, HWV 432. Arranged here for violin and cello (Ms. Kang with Na-Young Baek), the piece overlays Handel’s durable harmonic progression with a Grieg-like double-concerto quality, gilded double stops and runs, pizzicato and spiccato variations, and festive twitters. The transcription is a perfect pleaser for any crowd, purists notwithstanding. Ms. Kang and Ms. Baek fed the delighted ears of a giddy weekend audience with tailored string acrobatics and tonal effects burnished to order, although the most fascinating sonorities emerged from their sul ponticello excursions over the bridge and the sustained polyphony produced by double stops in mock quartet texture.

The program’s central spotlight was rightfully reserved for HaeSun Paik, the solo pianist in Beethoven’s Fifteen Variations and Fugue in E-flat Major, Op. 35 (nicknamed “Eroica” for the Third Symphony, Op. 55, which used the rustic original theme in its finale). Ms. Paik, the most experienced of the evening’s performers, is a faculty member at the Cleveland Institute and a laureate of many of the world’s prestigious piano competitions, and her collaborations with recognized conductors and ensemble partners has only fortified the inner structure and warmth in her playing. Undaunted by the grandeur of the large-scale form and its nickname, Ms. Paik maintained drive and exquisite control while bringing out the playfulness in Beethoven’s silences, giving effervescence to double-throws and hand crossings in the early variations and casting the fugue as a youthful, untroubled precursor to those in Beethoven’s late sonatas. Most poignant in her delivery were the Minore (Variation 14) and its sequel, the timeless Largo (Variation 15), which left behind the country dance and basked in a soft-hued cadenza, gathering strength for the final spectacle of trills and meticulously sculpted articulations. That said, one could plead a case for an occasional lapse of sheer beauty and intimacy in Beethoven’s stormy op. 35; the concurrence of this piece with the realization of increasing deafness and isolation documented in Beethoven’s heart-wrenching Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, the year of composition of the “Eroica” Variations, would warrant at least a hint of irony, a germ of the Teutonic strength that could ignite the century’s defiant spirit.

Adrenaline peaked in Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet in A Major, D. 667 for piano and strings, with Min Kwon, piano, established violinist Chin Kim (faculty member at three New York conservatories), Ms. Kim and Ms. Baek, viola and cello, and Rachel Calin, double bass. Five dramatic soloists united to produce an exuberant, visceral version of this well-chosen, conventional masterpiece, closing the anniversary gala with a show of appeal in every sense. Mr. Kim provided seasoned leadership and snappy dotted rhythms, although these were not always echoed as brightly in the piano’s imitations. Of special mention was the superbly mellow, elegant tone of Ms. Calin, who played a Carlo Giuseppe Testore double bass from 1690. It is curious that the deadlines of our modern administrative machinery whirr by without advance knowledge of the interpretations that will follow in real time: the adjectives “expansive,” “leisurely,” “tranquil,” and “conversational” in the Notes on the Program could not catch up with the lightning vibrato and glittery urgency of this ensemble, whose effective conception might have been more suited to the late romantic; although Schubert’s Scherzo was Presto, and impeccable.

 

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Pianist Liam Kaplan in Review

Liam Kaplan, piano
Mannes College, The New School for Music, New York
September 28, 2013
Liam Kaplan

Liam Kaplan

Bach-on-the-piano activism is not the eyebrow raiser it once was. The tenet that J. S. Bach’s lifetime of keyboard works dealt only marginally with a plinky-hammered, Lilliputian forebear of a concert grand has been superseded, even among retro-fashionable harpsichordists and clavichordists, by the iconic status of the music and the deferential acknowledgment of equal access, if not equal temperament, to all performers who wish to claim it as their own. Now that the activists are at peace, the spotlight has shifted back to its original point, a discussion of the tuning systems which unlocked music forever when Bach composed his eloquent and sprawling “Well-Tempered Clavier.”

Temperament is a deliberate sweetening or souring of ordinarily pure consonances by a keyboard tuner, who distorts certain intervals slightly in order to retain the usable intonation of all twelve different notes in the octave. The choices of notes to mistune would determine the most aesthetically permissible keys through the centuries, but pieces had to stay near the keys related to the sweet notes or the instruments would have to be retuned around new keys. The search for a single operating system which could service all keys at once was so hotly argued that eventually the whole case was settled by the discovery of the twelfth root of the number two, an all-purpose multiplier for each note’s pitch in order to reach that of its northern neighbor, and no one has ever looked back. Meanwhile, on the sly, Bach safeguarded the family heirloom temperament and displayed the sacred formula not as a Wall Street pie chart but as a doodle on the title page of his book, according to the musical cryptographer Bradley Lehman and his supporters. Simple and harmonious, tuned in fifteen minutes, centered around B major, Bach’s Good Temperament distributed the tartness little by little en route to the brighter keys, stressing the recognized Affekt or emotion inherent to each of the twelve major and twelve minor tonalities. (Modern expense prohibits the use of Bach’s temperament in a usual recital setting.) The live demonstration in 1722, a prelude and fugue played in every one of twenty-four keys, landed Bach a teaching job in Leipzig and a demand for a spin-off collection of twenty-four even more complicated preludes and fugues. Chopin liked to warm up with them.

Fifteen-year-old Liam Kaplan is the latest candidate to have traversed Book One of “Das Wohltemperierte Klavier” in a single concert, at the Mannes College on Saturday evening. An unavoidable intermission bisected the majesty of the marathon but refueled the artist’s prodigious memory. Young Mr. Kaplan, a composition and bass student as well as a pianist at Mannes Prep, is finding his adult voice in a milieu rich with possibility. His inborn gifts of Swiss-watch rhythmic pulse, polyphonic lightness, and formal proportion were obvious from the start. Mr. Kaplan hears like a composer, albeit a rare composer who tells time and who communicates motives as well as harmony. He relishes excursions and surprises, layered balances, extended sequences and coda sections. Many of his performances could be lifted directly into a music history survey with complete satisfaction. Mr. Kaplan draws the listener into his world, a place of discipline and dignity, of sunny and attainable ideals. Although he seems as yet untouched by sorrow or even the theatrical portrayal of darkness, suspended in his refined atmosphere of feathery pointillism and trotting tempos, Mr. Kaplan is eminently likable. Some questions ensue if we fall captive to the cerebral perfection of his fugues in C-sharp minor or A major, or the expertly tailored articulation of his whirlwind preludes in G major and frothy B-flat: at the end of the day, Mr. Kaplan prefers to coax only a mezzo-piano out of a nine-foot Steinway. He seems not to need power or tragedy, to distinguish a poignant tonality from a soothing one, or to play a piano like an organ. He spreads chords ahead of their beats and crushes his leaning grace notes without spice. He is humble and happy not to show off.

Time will tell, of course. To evince such an abundance of fundamental musicianship at fifteen is no small feat. The self-control in Mr. Kaplan’s work is a proven predictor of success and a quality that few performing artists can hang on a shingle. In comparison with the rowdy boys in Bach’s charge at the St. Thomas School in Leipzig (some of whom burned mice over a candle and left them as trophies for the professor), Liam Kaplan might have made Bach a very proud mentor.

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Seunghee Lee, Pianist in Review

Presented by MidAmerica Productions
Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY
November 24, 2012

The arts are in a jumble, but America remains the coveted destination for those who seek higher education and a head start in a classical performance career. As college costs aspire to reach the stars, so do many of our foreign students, who are being trained superbly, and increasingly, outside of the typical metropolitan capitals of the country.

On Saturday, November 24 at 2:00 pm, the Korean pianist Seunghee Lee gave a recital at Alice Tully Hall presented by MidAmerica Productions (now in its 30th season of forging concert liaisons here and abroad). A graduate of SangMyung University in Seoul, Ms. Lee chose to make her next stops at Ohio University and the University of Kentucky, whence she has emerged in the spring of this year, fully equipped to join the profession as instructor at SangMyung University in Seoul, with a doctoral dissertation on Korean contemporary piano music in hand. Ms. Lee’s biography cites a number of prizes and credits, including concerts in Brazil and a master class coaching with Kimura Park (presumably the pianist Jon Kimura Parker).

Ms. Lee established her porcelain signature sound from the outset on Saturday in a pair of unrelated Scarlatti sonatas, the tender K. 197 in B Minor and the top-ten favorite K. 159 in C Major, with its stuttering staccato thirds and cheery grace notes, deftly enunciated. Consistently attentive to clarity and polished treble, Ms. Lee prefers to butter her Baroque textures lavishly, but her sound retains its characteristic simplicity and integrity at all times.

If Ms. Lee is discovering a personal statement independent of the common sincerity of all music-making, this statement may be in its germinal phase: Saturday’s recital was a heavenly musical pot-luck. Its major works were the Bach-Busoni Chaconne and Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel (listed familiarly as “Handel Variations”). The Bach-Busoni was a late substitution for the “Corelli Variations” by Rachmaninoff, publicized on the outdoor marquee. A penchant for Baroque themes with their sets of full-blown Romantic variations would be an intriguing specialty, but the association would warrant an architectural perspective as well as an effervescent one. Ms. Lee’s cultivated sound and beautifully proportioned sense of rhythm did much to compensate for the absence of tragic declamation or exhilaration, respectively, in Bach-Busoni and Brahms. To decrease the cumulative effect of repetition and downplay the arrival of the fugue, Ms. Lee showed the courtesy to keep things moving and omitted nearly every repeat in the Brahms, as if for a timed audition. The through-composed Variation 13, in which Brahms extravagantly reiterates phrases in the upper octave to prolong the sway of the Hungarian lassan, contrasted noticeably with the compactness of the piece. After a dozen progressively thornier segments, the expected main course fugue proceeded as a blip on the radar, proficiently executed but minimally histrionic.

Partial responsibility for this non-starter of a cultural event should fall to the MidAmerica audience, which seemed especially papered with musical novices. Just as we were getting to know Ms. Lee and her lithe, violinistic style in the Bach Chaconne, the handsome crowd erupted into intermittent applause as if to cheer a home run every time she traversed the keyboard with razzle-dazzle. The offending persons did not stay beyond the first half, but we were treated to security ringtones, flash photography, electronic chimes, and exiting audience members during the remainder of the concert.

The most successful aspect of the recital was the grassroots parallel Ms. Lee drew between Samuel Barber’s Excursions and two atmospheric Korean dances by the composer Young Jo Lee, who is lucky to have such a devoted interpreter of his new piano works. Barber’s ostinato figures were comfortably controlled and his violin square dance full of fun, while the octatonic barcarolle and sicilian rhythms in Young Jo Lee’s Korean Dance Suite extended throughout the piano’s range and began to resemble Henri Duparc’s L’Invitation au Voyage gone to the dark side. Christian Sinding’s Rustle of Spring was a fluent and colorful encore.

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Park Avenue Chamber Symphony in Review

Park Avenue Chamber Symphony
David Bernard, Conductor
Terry Eder, Piano
All Saints Church, New York
October 28, 2012

David Bernard conducting the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony

Where do musically inclined Manhattanites go to exorcise their day-job demons when they would prefer following a conductor to watching one through binoculars? The City offers a handful of choices compared with the array of amateur and semi-professional groups one can find in, say, London, where a hidden world class talent might be launched on the collective buoyancy of an auspicious gathering. Here, our community social life facilitates contact and much-needed creative entertainment for the worn out; a conductor’s role is one part music educator, one part maître d’, one part recruiter/fundraiser, and one part Toscanini-tempered-with-David-Letterman. Concerts, presented after about six weeks of growing hubbub, can be the highlight of a participant’s week or month, as many instrumentalists do what they can at home and save their all for the show. The decision to enroll in one ensemble or another can hinge on the location or ambience of rehearsal space as much as the season’s repertoire or the conductor’s acceptance of an unburnished riff.

The first-rate Park Avenue Chamber Symphony holds its rightful place at the forefront of New York’s handful. Chamber seems a misnomer when one surveys seventy musicians, counting a hefty corps of low brass, packed into the apse of All Saints Church, the orchestra’s home for the past four or so of its thirteen years. On the eve of devastating Hurricane Sandy, with nary a hint of low pressure rattling its large wooden doors, the church saw a loyal and jubilant tide of admirers within as conductor David Bernard directed a program of German standards. The Sunday concert was the second of a weekend pair titled “Wit and Radiance.”

Maestro Bernard cuts a benevolent figure on the podium, more Cheshire cat than tyrant, but his musical instincts (and memory) are superb and his subjects are with him at every lift of a finger. Schubert’s mysterious but ubiquitous “Unfinished” Symphony was surprisingly fresh and limpid, with gracefully shaped song floating atop a securely anchored cushion of bass. Indeed, texture can be a tricky issue when balancing such an abundance of reedy and dark-hued instruments, as was evident in Strauss’s enormous Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche. An ambitious undertaking for any orchestra, this virtuosic, cackling tone poem calls for quick reflexes to capture the dash of vinegar in Strauss’s mock-Tristan chords, the sudden reliance on sumptuous strings, or the treacherously ironic French horn and E-flat clarinet solos. All effects were met with resources of confidence and precision.

The conundrum arrived after intermission in the form of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, with accomplished artist Terry Eder unwittingly cast as miracle worker for the afternoon. This frustration she shouldered with an angelic smile and a healthy dose of rubato. Attempts to coax glistening scales and shimmering trills from a piano less than imperial were moderately successful and unforced. The solidity of orchestral bass was a salvation here: apart from some ragged close calls in the first movement development, Maestro Bernard expertly filled in missing low fundamental frequencies and pulse, providing a generous gift to the soloist’s left hand. A muted and evocative slow movement erupted into a romping, slightly girlish rondo whose Viennese syncopations took on a rather dance-hall quality.  Ms. Eder was clearly playing with abandon,  and the final runs of the concerto shone with taut facility in the pianist’s seamless inflections.

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CD in Review- Sophia Agranovich, piano

Liszt: Un Sospiro; La Campanella (arr. Busoni);
Rhapsodie Espagnole; Sonata in B Minor
Sophia Agranovich, piano
Armonioso ($25.24)
www.sophiagranovich.com
61 minutes
Engineer: Sean Swinney
Recording Dates: October 13 and 22, 2011

Sophia Agranovich

Franz Liszt needs few plugs to keep his name alive. Arguably the most comprehensive virtuoso performer, composer, charismatic stage personality, career strategist, and altruistic pedagogue to have shared our planet, Liszt the pianist represents the historical development of our genre, and a bit of him persists in the daily keyboard regimen of each of us whether we like to pay tribute to him or not. Tribute is paid, however, with full-scale explanation of the artist’s pedagogical pedigree for those willing to read the fine print, by the Ukrainian pianist Sophia Agranovich in her 2011 Liszt bicentennial CD, self-released on the Armonioso label. (There is no identifying number on the cover or spine.)

The CD’s packaging states: “Recorded on Franz Liszt’s birthday, this dedication to his Bicentennial features his most profound and virtuosic compositions.” Ms. Agranovich chooses conservatively from the plethora of possible recitals, opting for the tried-and-true “Un Sospiro” and B-Minor Sonata, with additional vorspeisen including the “Rhapsodie Espagnole” and piano transcription of Paganini’s violin caprice “La Campanella.” The latter is heard not in Liszt’s most virtuosic edition but in Busoni’s re-transcription.

Requisite athleticism notwithstanding, Ms. Agranovich displays finesse in the recurrent, introspective sighs of high treble filigree and chromatic runs throughout her program (she might have considered “Un Sospiro” a befitting title for the release). Coy pacing in the “Follia” variations of the “Spanish Rhapsody” and crisp articulation in the Sonata add supportive touches to her ardent portrayal of the sentimental-irascible “soul divided against itself.” To be sure, Ms. Agranovich possesses capable hands, facility, and authentic schooling, as documented, and her affinity for double notes and octaves takes us through landscapes of occasionally cautious, sometimes all-out exciting, and predominantly incident-free Liszt. At the far end of the spectrum, however, Ms. Agranovich’s instincts have led her to intersperse sour chords in moments of climactic import (homage to the one-take masters?) as well as extravagantly distorted phrases which give fresh meaning to the concept of rhetoric. “La Campanella” never loses itself in zigeuner-caprice but does lose pulse and thunder in a veritable collage of outtakes. Not working in the pianist’s favor is a studio sound deprived of nine-foot bass resonance. The curiously boxy quality necessitates sweep and strength from the performer for satisfactory fulfillment of Liszt’s larger-than-life message, and Ms. Agranovich’s transcendental attitude does help her break even, yet the volume controls still need adjustment mid-Sonata to avoid obscuring the end of the piece altogether. This recording could use some attention in order to be made suitable for broadcast, but the attention should probably include a few more tries at difficult passages.

Is the chaff inseparable from the wheat by design? One can see the exhilarated artist rushing to complete a marathon production on Liszt’s special day, cutting corners for expediency, budget rapidly dwindling with the setting sun. Recordings do outlive their occasions, and an overdue commemoration with a producer (and copy editor) on board would have been preferable to a flawed, prematurely delivered one. Ms. Agranovich deserves a more strategic spotlight.

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