James Dick, Piano
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY
October 10, 2019
Kansas-born pianist James Dick has had a long and distinguished career. His major teachers included Dalies Frantz at the University of Texas at Austin, and Sir Clifford Curzon in England. He was a prize winner at the Tchaikovsky, Busoni and Leventritt International Competitions, and went on to perform numerous solo and concerto engagements. He received major awards, such as the Texas Medal of Arts and the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture, and he is an Honorary Associate of London’s Royal Academy of Music. In 1971 he founded the Round Top Music Festival Institute in Texas, where a distinguished faculty teaches nearly one hundred young artists every year, and there are year-round education and performance programs for audiences.
He is an artist of substance and refinement.
The B minor Sonata of Haydn, which opened this program, never impressed me as one of the composer’s most interesting works. Mr. Dick’s performance quickly taught me that I had underestimated it. Phrases, starting from the beginning of the first movement, were molded beautifully, and always headed somewhere. There was a charm that I hadn’t noticed here before. The slow movement was thoughtful, almost “deep.” The melodic leaps in the Menuet were played with great expressivity, and there were subtle shadings of both tempo and dynamics in the Trio section. The driven last movement was dramatic, the fast right- hand passage work played with a flourish, and the left- hand octaves that accompany it with determination.
The Bagatelles, Op. 126, are Beethoven’s last major work for piano. They are rather strange, but fascinating, and not at all “bagatelle-like” (i.e. lightweight). Mr. Dick played the first Bagatelle at a good, moderate tempo, and seemed to revel in the trills that then flow into notes running up and down the keyboard. The ending was very dignified. In the second Bagatelle he seemed to find a contrasting character between the impatient first four bars versus the calmer-sounding next four. An unusual effect came after the double bar, where outbursts are followed by rests. In this interpretation, the rests sounded full of longing rather than hysteria.
The third Bagatelle, which is like a slow movement, was not too leisurely, and had lovely little eloquences. The B minor section of the fourth Bagatelle seemed a bit laid back compared to other performances I’ve heard, but the B major part, with which it alternates, was dreamy and exotic (one could imagine a cult meeting with this music playing in the background!) The fifth Bagatelle, the shortest piece in the group, was warm, and Mr. Dick brought out the lovely dissonances played by the left thumb after the double bar.
The sixth and final Bagatelle is truly bizarre. It begins and ends with a six measure Presto, but what’s in-between, had it been written twenty years later, might well have been called a nocturne. This segment had intensity, as well as a very sensitive lead-up to the “moonlit” section in A-Flat major, after which we were then jolted back into the powerfully played concluding Presto.
The American composer, Dan Welcher, writes about his 1999 work, The Birth of Shiva: “This ten-minute work is a distillation of the first movement (‘Time’) of my 1994 Piano Concerto, which has the subtitle ‘Shiva’s Drum.’…The Hindu god Shiva, who was the protagonist of the concerto, is revealed in this new work to be an entire universe. Since Shiva is both Creator and Destroyer, and since this piece could not attempt to replicate a concerto that lasts more than thirty minutes, I decided to feature him solely in his Creator role…The piece proceeds from a ‘lightning bolt’ opening in which the cosmos is created….”
Indeed, The Birth of Shiva starts with a cacophonous explosion, followed by rushing notes in all directions, after which the hands alternate different sonorities. Patterns repeat over and over, as if to mesmerize. Later there is less dissonance, the music sounding more confident. There is a thoughtful, almost lyrical area, followed by a buildup of strength, then soothing, and finally a powerful end. This work seems to be very difficult to bring off successfully, and James Dick played the heck out of it!
The second half of the recital consisted of Schumann’s Carnaval. Mr. Dick gave an elegant reading of this demanding, almost half hour long work. There was much beautiful playing here, though one has heard some of the faster movements played at greater speed by other pianists. Some high points, after the strong start, and Animato section of the first movement, included the indeed nobly phrased Valse Noble, Eusebius, with the flowing intersection of, and interesting harmonies caused by the irregular right hand notes meeting the chords in the left hand, the assertive Chiarina, and the expansive Chopin segments. Aveu sounded nostalgic, and the Marche des “Davidsbündler” contre les Philistins at the end was vigorous. After that the entire enthusiastic audience rose to give Mr. Dick a standing ovation!
