Sonatas, Fantasies, and More – Azalea Kelley, Pianist In Review
Azalea Kelley, piano
Church of the Transfiguration, New York, NY
August 14, 2024
Young Azalea Kelley is already a veteran recital artist and winner of many competitions in the United States and Canada, and has played at Weill, Merkin, Klavierhaus, Steinway Hall, and other distinguished venues in and out of New York City. She comes from a family of accomplished professional musicians and was formerly a student of violin and ballet as well. This recital was presented at the Church of the Transfiguration, familiarly known to New York history buffs as the Little Church Around the Corner, on the date of her 22nd birthday. For an artist of her tender age, she is already a most impressive and mature player.
Ms. Kelley cuts a poised, graceful, and commanding figure at the keyboard. She plays the piano naturally, as if she were an aquatic life form diving into the water. Despite the strenuous and taxing program she chose, there never once appeared any sign of strain. She plays the instrument with fluid, effortless mechanics, yet has ample force and power, great clarity of fingerwork and attack, a steady, even sense of pulse, and a natural musicality of expression. There were no extraneous physical gestures, no reaching into the galleries for pure virtuoso “wow” effect, no facial contortions like too many of today’s headliners and strivers– just the music.
She opened her program with Beethoven’s 6th Sonata in F Major, the second of his three Opus 10 sonatas for piano. In this performance she favored the Germanic Beethoven approach of a Rudolf Serkin or Wilhelm Backhaus: an emphasis on the declarative rhetoric and forward motion of the music rather than contemplative underlining or contrasting tinges of light-heartedness. She took most of the repeats. There were many sharply etched moments: a bracing subito sforzando at the sudden faux modulation in bar 16-18 of the first movement; a nicely “lived in” feeling to the fermata at bar 16 in the second movement with an extended damper pedal; and the entirety of the challenging last two pages of the third movement. There, in Beethoven’s jumble of speeding contrary motion passages and virtuoso double octave tremolos, she fearlessly executed the fingerwork with a razor clarity and balanced symmetry of the two hands that would have done credit to a young Pollini.
Next came Chopin’s F-sharp minor Polonaise, Opus 44, a grandiose work that has always existed as a kind of somber heroic twin to the familiar, sunnier A-flat, Opus 53. Ms. Kelley went all in on the thunderingly martial and darkly dramatic elements of this work, pounding out the rhythm without ever banging, cleanly articulating the two-octave right hand octave run in bar 54 as if she possessed the wrists of Horowitz in his performance of this piece. She gave a juicy grand pause to the E major caesura at bar 79 at the lead-in to the A minor “roll of drums” middle section, and then segued to the doppio movimento Mazurka section keeping the forward momentum, without the tension relenting. Not much sunlight in this interpretation, but it was rousing and exciting.
Ms. Kelley piled Pelion on Ossa by following the virtuosic Op. 44 with the equally demanding Opus 61 Polonaise-Fantasie, the last large work for piano that Chopin wrote (he barely composed for the last couple of TB-racked years of his life). Here she shifted gears in her musical approach and relaxed the straight line, giving the first page of the piece a spacious, recitative-like, improvisatory feel. Throughout the rest of the work she unhurriedly brought poetry and varied color to its moody episodes, then escalated to the work’s impassioned climax with some real excitement and abandon.
Until very recently, Mendelssohn’s Fantasy in F-Sharp minor, Op. 28, also known as “Sonate Écossaise” or “the Scottish Sonata”, was rarely placed on recital programs. The pianists of the grand manner era only played his Songs Without Words, Rondo Capriccioso, Scherzo, Op. 16 No. 2, or on occasion his Variations Serieuses. Horowitz, who programmed the latter, once told David Dubal in a radio interview that he thought Mendelssohn was “too neat” as a composer; the serialist Milton Babbitt, on the other hand, opined in an interview late in life that received musical opinion had been “unfair” to Mendelssohn. Today the Scottish Sonata appears regularly in recitals, and Azalea Kelley made a good case for it at the beginning of the second half of her program, marking the double bar ends of its first two movements with longer pauses than they are customarily given (though Mendelssohn wrote each a transitional bar of rest with a fermata, they are generally played attacca). She brought out the quasi-Schumannesque quality of the second movement, and hurtled through the Presto with clearcut yet vertiginous velocity.
Perhaps her most musically compelling performance of the evening, after the Polonaise-Fantasie, was the Chopin B-flat minor Sonata (Ms. Kelley explained in remarks spoken to her audience that Chopin had composed the Funeral March movement first, then the rest of the sonata.). After an exciting, dramatic first movement, she carried the passion into the second movement, but, in the second theme of this second movement, for my taste she made a mistake in pushing the pace and not endowing it with more rubato, delicacy, softer dynamics, and wistfulness of mood, to contrast it with the heroism and robust virtuosic chords and jumps of the first section. The last two movements, however, were triumphs– she brought a plaintive, weeping quality to the familiar opening theme of the funeral march, and the “toccata macabre” of the last movement was suitably sepulchral.
Throughout the recital Ms. Kelley’s playing of the left hand demonstrated an admirable clarity and definition. This has its potential pitfalls. At the beginning of the development section of the first movement of the Beethoven, Op. 10 No. 2 at bar 77, her left hand punched the eighth notes as if they were brass oom-pahs. On the other hand, during the one encore she played, Chopin’s Nocturne, Opus 9 No. 1, the left-hand accompanimental figures were beautifully voiced, gracefully dressing the cantilena of the right hand line without becoming overpresent in the texture. Throughout the evening she had moments where she played with great delicacy and pianissimo, but her playing might speak even more eloquently if she tried introducing those palette colors more consistently into her interpretations, and to use the damper pedal more sparingly in some contexts where the change of sonority might be telling. Perhaps she could afford to take a more plastic approach to tempo and phrasing without losing her basic strengths, and bring some of the rhapsodic and reposeful qualities of her performance of the Polonaise-Fantasie to other works as well.
It should be noted that Ms. Kelley was playing the church’s resident 92-key Bösendorfer, a piano previously owned by the famed conservative commentator William F. Buckley. The treble range was very bright and piercingly loud at times, while the lower midrange strings had a nasal quality. The four keys below the traditional lowest A (some Bösendorfers, have nine extra keys) enhance the sympathetic resonance of the rest of the strings and the plate and soundboard. They also enable the performance of some rare notes in the published literature. For example, Ferruccio Busoni asks for the written G natural below the bottom-most A in the penultimate measure of the fourth movement of his Indianische Tagebuch. The extra keys also make possible low notes that are theoretically implied in some standard repertoire. In the tumultuous bar 49 of Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau, the left hand ends a downward series of G sharps on the lowest A natural, the composer assuming that in the accompanying rush of sound the pitch will not be perceived as nonharmonic. On an extended range Bösendorfer, that note can be played as the harmonically intended G sharp below the range of the 88 key piano.
Bösendorfer, Steinway, or other instrument, it is clear that Ms. Kelley makes a wonderful, musical sound at the piano, and her future is worth watching.
by Mark N. Grant for New York Concert Review; New York, NY
