Hilda Huang

When the young Rosalyn Tureck submitted “The Well-Tempered Clavier” (in place of the single prelude-and-fugue Bach requirement, as her sister Marge used to tell) for her Juilliard entrance examination, she was prematurely aware of her life’s calling and her indefatigable dedication to Bach performance. A career path forged with determination and more than an ounce of friction helped to provide a smooth ride for many of the world’s future single-genre repertoire specialists, men as well as women.

The young Tureck withstood recalcitrant managers and presenters, staid record producers, inattentive sound engineers, prudish musicologists and opportunists alike, with a sense of ownership and oracular prophecy for the perpetuation of her ideal. Tureck’s message, conveyed on a piano and occasionally on other keyboard instruments through meticulous finger articulation and dynamic control, an unwavering sense of rhythm (coupled with an avant-garde Baroque rubato), stylized ornamentation, and faultless memory, was nevertheless Old World: at its heart, her motivation for the mastery of Bach pianism stemmed from a fear of comparison with her harpsichordist archetype, Wanda Landowska. As her detractors called for more spontaneity or parodied her reported séances with the composer, Tureck (who lived until 2003) wrote and edited pedagogical texts and branched out into Busoni and contemporary music, while remaining “the high priestess of Bach,” with a lifetime decoration from the German government (a decoration which she once left behind in my room after a stay, despite her faultless memory). Her legacy took hold in the adulation of audiences, record collectors, university scholars, and, from her point of view, imitators who similarly devised their own mystical personae and interpretative fetishes. Having captured the mantle of Landowska, Tureck was increasingly wary of the eclipsing notoriety of Glenn Gould, which threatened to usurp her unregistered patent on articulation and eccentricity.

With the younger generation (as well as the afterlife) in mind, Tureck laid the groundwork for an international Bach competition which has succeeded in gathering an ardent following of the highest caliber. The Grand Prize Winner of the 2010 session (the competition’s second cycle) is Hilda Huang, now 15, who gave an all-Bach recital at the Faust Harrison Piano Salon on Saturday evening. Performing to a filled room on a pair of beautifully restored pianos at close range, Huang sailed with supreme comfort and assurance through some of the most intricate and eclectic of Bach’s keyboard works, building to a consummate rendition of the Sixth English Suite, BWV 811. (The latter was a last-minute substitution for the originally programmed No. 5, on the advice of her San Francisco mentor, John McCarthy.) Huang already holds title to a Bach prize from Wurzburg, Germany, and would be any jury’s first choice; her flair for counterpoint and understanding of harmony are displayed with ebullience and such crisply designed fingerwork that, for stretches of the concert, I thought I was hearing Her in reincarnation.

There are subtle differences, of course. Unincorporated into Huang’s style are the pointed agogic accents that Tureck used so frequently to dramatize facets of the score; absent are the elegantly meditative lilts of allemande and courante, the poignant whispers of the sarabande, the quarter-pedals with sliding fingers. Rolled chords anticipate their beats neatly, rather than announcing the thumb in a sardonic moment of Tureckian glee. Huang is so upbeat and refreshing—lest one forget her age—that we strain to hear bittersweetness in passages of free rhythm or chromaticism. A fugue subject is a fugue subject—albeit one with a descending tenor foreshadowing the inexorable—but that will certainly come later, perhaps when Huang is sixteen. Her extroversion is alluring for its boldness of sonority and arching crescendi, which Tureck shunned, but which create such a satisfying concept of formal structure in Huang’s playing. This young artist will be thrilling to watch as her perfection extends to embrace the audience, as she experiments with triumphant endings and risky sound effects. For now, she is a phenomenon.

The Bach scene has undergone revisions since Tureck broke new ground. The path is familiar, and modern Bach players may virtually dial-an-approach according to their respective tastes. Indeed, the irregularity of the Baroque “oddly shaped pearl” is out of place in a competition setting and difficult to reconcile with our need for quantifiable elements in a society obsessed with order. But Rosalyn cautioned against too much order: too much perfection is Bach’s hereafter—Mozart.