Daniel Le in Review
Daniel Le, Pianist: Anzac Day Celebration Recital
Bruno Walter Auditorium, Lincoln Center, New York, NY
April 24, 2018
Brilliant young Australian pianist Daniel Le performed a richly satisfying recital this Tuesday at Bruno Walter Auditorium. Along with music by Schubert and Rachmaninoff, Mr. Le included music of his compatriots Carl Vine, Percy Grainger, and Andrew Howes, in commemoration of Anzac Day.
Mr. Le needs no special occasion as a premise to share his many gifts or those of his countrymen, but it was certainly fitting for an Australian pianist to offer such a program on the eve of Anzac Day, a day of great significance to Australians and New Zealanders. Initiated on April 25, 1916 to commemorate the 1915 landing in Gallipoli by the ANZACS (Australian and New Zealand forces in WW1), Anzac Day has since come to pay tribute more broadly to all Australians and New Zealanders who served in all wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations.
Mr. Le’s Australian program choices made for a meaningful tribute, though perhaps a brief New Zealand piece or two could have been added, as there are many fine ones (after all, without NZ it would be merely “Aac Day”)! That is not a criticism so much as a suggestion for future commemorations, because, given Mr. Le’s gifts for presentation, programming and performing, such a concert could certainly become an annual event. The program was enhanced by two poetry recitations by actor Jack D. Martin, first Wilfred Owen’s Spring Offensive and in the second half, Everyone Sang, by Siegfried Sassoon, both read with simple, sincere delivery to allow the moving words their own power and resonance.
As for the music, Mr. Le opened with Schubert’s Sonata in A major, D. 664 (often called “the little A major” to distinguish it from the later larger A major Sonata). He gave it a fittingly unaffected rendition, and though there were a few balance and voicing issues, which might have related to his initial adjustment to the piano (more on that later), it was a lovely opening. To try to draw specific connections from Schubert’s Sonata to themes of Anzac Day may be tenuous (and there were no program notes), but it certainly established the tone of bucolic lyricism from the composer’s less troubled times, while also establishing a poignantly peaceful backdrop to the Wilfred Owen recitation that followed.
The fireworks of the first half came with Carl Vine’s wonderful Sonata No. 1 (1990). This reviewer has long been a fan of this piece, which does not need to be categorized as a major Australian work from the twentieth century, but simply as a major twentieth-century work, period. Mr. Le handled its pianistic challenges and wide-ranging drama with mastery, from the brooding atmospheric chordal opening to the motoric driving sections which build to almost a frenzied jubilance at the climax. Mr. Le was more than a match for all of the virtuosic demands of the exciting first movement, and the toccata-like second movement was equally impressive. The voicing in this piece is layered in such a way that jazzy cross-rhythms emerge from the accentuation of melodic tops, and this pianist brought them all out brilliantly.
The second half opened (after the reading of Sassoon’s poem, Everyone Sang) with the world premiere of a work entitled Bird Songs (2018) by young Australian composer Andrew Howes (b. 1992). It was a powerful juxtaposition, with the line “As prisoned birds must find in freedom” still ringing in one’s ears at the start of the piano work. The movements, entitled Morning Song, Fisher Song, Empty Sky, High-branches Song, and Sky Song were beautifully idiomatic for the piano, billowing with fluid passagework which sounded like inspired improvisations. The music contained very little that one would liken to the language of birds in the way that, say, Ravel did in Oiseaux Tristes or Messiaen in his various Oiseaux, but they suggested more abstractly the soaring, the bleakness, and the grandeur of branches, the sky, and the aerial world, conceivably as related to human experience. This reviewer is completely new to the work of Mr. Howes, but he appears to be a musician well worth following. Mr. Le realized his music imaginatively and with a naturalness that was remarkable in what was announced to be his “iPad debut” using one of the relatively new page-turning technologies.
Veering back to familiar (and non-Australian) territory, the program continued with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Sonata No.2 in B-flat minor Op.36 (1931 revised). Mr. Le’s excellent technique served him well in this powerhouse piece, and it finished the program proper with ample fire, drawing cheers from his audience. This reviewer was quite fond of Mr. Le’s elasticity of phrase and tempo in the piece and had only rather minor reservations. There was for this listener a perhaps too generous use of the left-before-right quasi-rolled approach, which, aside from the actual marked rolled chords, can approach schmaltz if overdone. There was also the occasional quibble about voicing, including some excessive favoring of the treble in the slow movement, at the expense of the full texture, and what seemed to be an occasional miscalculation of voices in the first movement (in which as a result the opening treble chords almost sounded like an ascending rather than descending third in the top voice).
On the subject of voicing, there was the opposite favoritism in the Schubert, where the long treble lines occasionally paled against a slightly dominating bass. Without enough tone in the longer melodic notes, subsequent shorter notes occasionally seemed blurted out, resulting in some choppy lines. One wondered at first whether the piano was suffering from imbalanced registers, but when the Vine was then given such superb voicing and balance, that theory seemed implausible. Clearly this young pianist can do just about anything he wishes to do, but the demands of Schubert are never to be underestimated!
Following the Rachmaninoff, Mr. Le’s program listed “Percy Grainger Song Arrangements” – almost as built-in encores. To everyone’s delight he offered Gershwin’s The Man I Love and the popular favorite Country Gardens. It is a special pianist who can play Country Gardens perfectly, and Daniel Le is one who can and did. Deceptively tricky, the piece requires a large stretch and some rather unwieldy chord jumps – but the target practice must be done with the blithe ease of a small child picking daisies. It was all there, a delicious close to a fine evening, perhaps best likened to the classic “down under” dessert of Pavlova.
Mr. Le generously thanked a large number of people, including his teacher at the Manhattan School of Music, André-Michel Schub, who was present and, one imagines, justifiably proud.
