“Waldeinsamkeit” (Forest Solitude)

Xiaofu Ju, piano

Judy and Arthur Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY

May 19, 2024

Writers and composers have celebrated nature and its salubrious effects for many centuries, but the concept of the forest might seem out of keeping with the routine of a metropolitan-dwelling musician, who often spends six hours a day imbibing the solitude of four walls and a piano. To be clear, this recital was neither confined nor ordinary. Xiaofu Ju, a cosmopolitan prizewinner with a burgeoning career in China and across the globe, does not play like a hungry competitor; it took only a matter of seconds onstage for him to tap into the wellspring of his own poetry (of which he has published two volumes) and to find himself at one with space and time in the expansive Zankel Hall.

The theme of the evening (literally, Forest Aloneness) drew references to the German Romantic poets, the art songs of Brahms (In Waldeseinsamkeit, 1878), Richard Wagner (“Waldweben” from Siegfried, 1876), and the Transcendentalist Americans Henry David Thoreau (Walden, 1854) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Waldeinsamkeit, 1858). Romantic or Post-romantic imagery, and miniatures in particular, provide the strongest lure to Mr. Ju and his artistry. He shines in the magic of the understated, pulling us into his psychological stillness. This would explain his affinity for Leoš Janáček and his choice of V mlhách (In the Mists) as a program opener.

The four Czech pieces from 1912 anticipate the aphoristic style and terse phrasing of Janáček’s operas, with more economy of means and a delicate translucence. Mr. Ju’s passion was controlled as he hovered over gently chiming octaves and repeated notes, abstaining from glamor or generic profundity. Although Janáček composed the set during a bleak period in his life, Mr. Ju’s performance of this and almost every other work on his program explored the more desirable spectrum of brightness and optimism.

His guarded energies continued to bloom ever so slowly in Schumann’s nine Waldszenen, Op. 82, as he focused on floating sound rather than on any emphatic pulsation. We heard few echoes of traditional Germanic motifs but, in their stead, a ghostly, chirping, nearly archless virtuosity marked by spontaneous and unbroken counterpoint. Schumann’s unstable frame of mind in 1848 was refashioned here in the hands and sensibility of a captive narrator, uncluttered by neurosis and basking in pristine reminiscence. Herberge (Wayside Inn, often translated as Shelter) plunged ahead with crisply dotted articulations, and Vogel als Prophet (Bird as Prophet) unfolded with wondrous pedals and streams of color. This poetic recitation suddenly brought to mind the Schumann of a promising young Yuri Egourov from ages past, but with a finer brush stroke.

The woodsy premise of the recital became merely a departure point for free association in the second half, as Mr. Ju transported us to Java with the 1907 Book Two of Claude Debussy’s Images. Cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells through the Leaves) might have been a religious vision, such was Mr. Ju’s hypnotic recreation of gamelan timbres which, if placed side by side with French percussion instruments, could have demoted the latter, in Debussy’s words, to “primitive noises at a country fair.” Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (And the Moon Descends on the Temple That Was) simmered in quiet ecstasy, bringing a palpable hush to Zankel Hall, and the line was finally let out for good in Poissons d’or (Fish of Gold), when Mr. Ju attained the summit of a near-disorienting, effervescent frenzy.

By the time we reached Liszt’s monumental Sonata in B minor, the forest was long gone and we were in the presence of a young man. Mr. Ju’s astonishing command of speed and superhuman discipline could make child’s play of double octaves or fugues, and his gossamer runs of spun silk could show him as master of every degree of pianissimo, but this was a lean Liszt B minor, slightly more attuned to a glorious Sposalizio or large character piece than to a symphonic warhorse. One shudders to contemplate what a few years will do to the apotheosis of Mr. Ju’s recap second theme, as he melds the absolute to the programmatic to the Hungarian, when his career has taken certain flight.

Following a program of such import, the pianist chose for encores Bach’s Chorale Prelude Ich ruf zu dir (arranged by Busoni) and, in what amounted to the highlight of the night, Scriabin’s Sonata No. 4 with its blistering chiaroscuro. The concert was billed by the Paulus Hook Music Foundation as a gesture of Sino-American goodwill. One could not imagine a more benevolent cultural gift.

Caitlin Broms-Jacobs, oboe

Adam Sherkin, piano

Tenri Cultural Institute, New York, NY

April 27, 2024

The Tenri Cultural Institute’s suitability for an ebullient Saturday night recital of living composers’ works included the benefit of bright lighting, the better for digesting fancied-up titles and a ten-page, cell-phone-only program. Canadian pianist Adam Sherkin, the curator of Piano Lunaire (a clever reference to Schoenberg and his mad mascot), named this tenth of eleven concerts for the premiere of his own composition Plastic Dawn, performed at the top of the program. Additional premieres by Mr. Sherkin and his Toronto colleagues were introduced by the composers themselves in attendance or on video projection, and a few oft-performed pieces better known to a niche crowd received their first New York hearings or revivals.

Trained at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory, London’s Royal College, and New York’s Mannes College, Mr. Sherkin shows classical restraint giving way to a philosophical propensity for eerie or even frightening images. He explains the symbolism of Plastic Dawn as a series of “manufactured beginnings” that fits nicely with the “Aubade” genre of his solo piano character pieces but leaves many tentative loose ends. Morning motifs abound in the five-movement oboe/piano work, which opens with a free solo oboe cadenza he describes as a sun salutation. The second movement adds choleric jabs and interjections from the piano, continuing its dialectical opposition until the fifth movement resolves all with glassy, transparent serenity in both oboe and piano. Mr. Sherkin’s piano work from 2022-24, New Aubades, flavors its morning coffee not with a primitive asana but with a joyful transformation of Ravel’s Scarbo, evolving from wild tremolos in two hands to short gestures and flashes, to a closing movement titled “Ineo” (literally, I go in [to something new]) in a more objective and comforting style.

At least two other offerings after 2020 share the Covid-laden premonition of apocalypse. The Tender Scars of Memory, published this year by Harry Stafylakis, unfolds nostalgically from a kind of New Age “Greensleeves” in a clearly organic form, with the composer’s characteristic texture of repeated notes influenced by guitar figures and Greek folk music. The score’s tempo directions range from “Something darker is being dredged up” to “Right back where we started,” although the idiomatic writing for both instruments needs no dramatic cues to make its mark. In the Garden of Endless Sleep, a 2020 tapestry by Kevin Lau, employs improvisational polyrhythms, expansive intervals, and recitative rather than cool 9/8 pastoral meters to capture Lau’s own longing and fear of the unknown. Repeated notes here are used as stationary vibrato, the negation of tonality mollified only by the mournful sighs of the oboe. The work’s closing punchline materializes as an A-minor song over the drone of the lowest note on the piano keyboard, with the dreariness of Shostakovich and the soothing regularity of a Bach prelude.

By default, Alexina Louie’s 2012 Filigree became a traditional repertory piece, although its Tenri performance was listed as a first in the U.S. Apart from exotic instrumental timbres, pedaling, and minimalist reiterations of broken clusters, Asian influences were not as apparent here as in some of Ms. Louie’s other works. Particularly memorable were the surreal opening, a transformation of Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige, the interplay of synthetic scales and fantastic dance rhythms, and the tribute to Messiaen’s Vingt regards in the piano’s magical treble sonorities near the end. A silly encore, Alex Shapiro’s Brat, left us with a touch of humor after the evening’s probing excursions into metaphysics.

At face value as an oboe/piano recital of new music, this successful concert received a rightfully deserved, heartfelt response from Tenri fans, who listened acutely to the latest installment of Mr. Sherkin’s cryptic programming. The playing was elegant and effective, taking advantage of the gallery’s immediate acoustic presence and luminous space with varied articulations, melismatic flourishes (Ms. Broms-Jacobs), growling chromaticism and pointillistic chimes (Mr. Sherkin), and visceral harmonic progressions that always moved forward and never settled into cinematic cliché. Ms. Broms-Jacobs showed her true colors as a principal orchestral player from Manitoba and Winnipeg by delivering a rhythmically crafted, supremely reliable part that was easy to follow and lyrical against the backdrop of every pianistic trick. Overbalancing of piano (conquering oboe) was, actually, an issue, perhaps attributable to where the oboist was standing or to the hall itself, or to the long piano stick.

The concert might have been equally enjoyable with a shorter set of written notes. The advertised “Pre-show chat” from 7:30 to 8:00 unfortunately referred only to the murmur of attendees in the foyer. The external enigma of the evening was Tenri’s presumed need to fill our ears with background jazz recordings while wine and snacks were served.

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 8^th 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 92^nd 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.

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 ads—but 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.

“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.

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 20^th 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.