New York Public Library for the Performing Arts presents Joanne Chang in Review
When East Meets West in New York City: 20th Century Western and 21st Century American Eastern Music
Joanne Chang, piano
Bruno Walter Auditorium, New York, NY
Thursday, November 1, 2018, 6 PM
You know you’re at an original recital when a Schubert/Liszt transcription and Debussy’s Suite bergamasque are the outliers. Joanne Chang had the inspired idea of presenting works from a variety of contemporary and/or less-often heard sources, with two of them composed specially for her. The range of nationalities in the unusual repertoire was vast: Syrian/American, Chinese/American, Taiwanese/American, Cuban/Spanish, Afro/Cuban, and African/American. It was in the contemporary works that Ms. Chang was most successful.
The center and heart of her program was a beautiful performance of three of Kareem Roustom’s five Aleppo Songs (How Beautiful the Light of the Rising Sun, Antiochian Hymn, Oh People, Leave me to my Sorrows ), a memorial to a once-vibrant city now nearly completely destroyed by civil war (It was not, as announced, a New York premiere, which was on Nov. 8, 2017). Ms. Chang’s sonorities were crystalline and perfectly gauged, and her expressive involvement with the music was obvious and deep. The first song, How Beautiful the Light of the Rising Sun was stunning.
This was followed by two works written for Ms. Chang, in their NY premieres. Man Fang’s Drunk in the shade of blossoms, inspired by a twelfth century Chinese female poet, set as a piano solo by a female composer. We need more representations like this to equalize the rather dominant male sector in classical music. This work had a beautiful central contrapuntal section that started with one voice, adding imitative voices to reach a quasi-fugal texture that was as austerely expressive as any by Bach. Ms. Chang was in her element, with the widest possible range of piano sonorities.
Ms. Chang then turned to Hsin-Jung Tsai’s Sutra of Emptiness, based on the composer’s (again female) practice of Buddhism. The work requires many types of technique, including “nontraditional” inside-the-piano playing, working with resonances of silently held notes, and “traditional” in the form of repeated notes, which Ms. Chang dispatched with complete confidence, never losing expression in the process. The work is cyclic, that is, material heard at the beginning recurs at the end, a formal procedure that greatly assists any listener who may feel “lost” in contemporary music. This work stood out from the rest in my mind.
The recital had opened with the Schubert/Liszt Gretchen am Spinnrade transcription, which seemed a strange choice to me, but was well-played. Debussy’s Suite bergamasque abounded in all manner of un-French rubato and draggy tempos that robbed the music of its eloquence (yes, even in early Debussy restraint is preferable). The pianissimi were not soft enough, and I wondered why Ms. Chang was not using the una corda pedal more. If there was any quibble about Ms. Chang’s playing, it was that she misjudged her forte dynamics in the extremely small hall that is Bruno Walter on a nine-foot concert grand. However, she played gorgeously soft passages in the contemporary works.
The recital closed with two groups. First, three of Ernesto Lecuona’s Spanish or Afro-Cuban inspired dances: Malagueña, Y la negra bailaba!, and Danza Lucumi. Once relegated to the salon, Lecuona’s music is taken much more seriously these days, with pioneering sets of his piano music on record. Ms. Chang played Y la negra bailaba! with nice lilt, but the other two pieces were stentorian. Malagueña, though it has many fff indications, also has many piano dynamics, and slurs, which Ms. Chang ignored for the most part. I didn’t detect much of the Lucumi (an Afro-Cuban ethnicity descended from the Yoruba who practice the Santeria religion) in the dance named for them.
Ms. Chang then finished the satisfying evening with a true rarity, two rags, The Thriller and Dusty, by a female ragtime composer, May Aufderheide. They were performed with enthusiasm, but too fast, ignoring Scott Joplin’s advice “Never play ragtime too fast.” Aufderheide herself made piano rolls of her own works, which are elegant.
I salute Ms. Chang for her adventurous programming, and hope that she continues in this way.
