|
RECITAL REVIEW
Thomas Adès
December 9, 2006
|
A Composer Takes to the Keyboard By Jerry Kuderna
One of the perks of being a composer as well as a pianist is that you get to play music that slips under the radar of most virtuosi who have their hands full of Chopin and Liszt. Thomas Adès' program of rarely heard and unheard-of music, which he performed at Herbst Theatre on Saturday, traced a trajectory from the personal and essential to the literal and merely diverting. In the process, he revealed what he wants to hear as a composer as much as what he likes to play with his fingers.
The recital began with a large chunk of music by Leos Janácek. It isn't difficult to find a connection between the Czech and the Brit, since both are best known as composers of opera. Janácek’s piano music contains an inner drama, as well as a power and meaning that lies between the lines (or between the notes, as the case may be). Adès chose to perform his last major work, In the Mist (1912), prefacing it with five relatively unknown pieces that ranged from a youthful work to unpublished marginalia written on the composer’s will and cryptically titled I Am Waiting for You.
In it Janácek seems to be sending a final “intimate letter” to someone, perhaps Kamila Stösslová, the spiritual dedicatee of many of his works.
In the Mist tells us more obliquely, but even more powerfully, about the sense of dislocation and loss the composer felt after the early death of his young daughter 10 years earlier. It is like the ghost of his former self, the one who gave his compositions titles such as Come With Us and So Unbearably Anxious (in the Overgrown Path). Now the titleless pieces are even more powerfully concentrated, though uttering the sob that lies just beneath the surface. Adès gave In the Mist a thoughtful and deeply felt performance in which the silences were as important as the sounds themselves. You felt a large intelligence supporting the playing, capable of revealing the music from the inside.
The controlled pathos of the Janácek led well into the two pieces of Adès' own that followed. Darknesse Visible is a free paraphrase of a lute song by John Dowland. It imitates that instrument's touch with some ingenious repeated notes that ranged far beyond the compass of any instrument except the modern piano. While I found the work to be captivating, I would never have known it was a literal transcription, in the basic harmonic sense of a work from the early 17th century, even with the final phrase that occurs in the original register.
The second piece, Traced Overhead (1996), was a tour de force that displayed the full range of Adès' mastery of the instrument. It went on a bit too long for the harmonic materials it displayed. The composer relies heavily on juxtapositions of major and minor triads cavorting in tandem along the length of the keyboard. Somehow the piece still retained flavors of the Elizabethan about it, hints of things wild and outrageous.
The next stop on this musical tour was the Italian Alps. How I Spent the Summer (1983) is a set of 10 mostly out-of-doors pieces by Niccoló Castiglioni. What a surprise it was to hear music so full of whimsy and poetry, particularly music created by a former habitué of Darmstadt — that center of all that was avant-garde back in the 1960s. I particularly liked the description of the composer’s pianist friend sleeping in a police station (did they consume too many parallel fifths?) and the piece about a ghost, which called for Adès to cross the stage and play on a muted, upright piano. Next were two pieces by Stravinsky that showed again that composer’s effort to create pieces that don't much sound like him. The Souvenir d’une march boche may have been a bitter takeoff on the Germans, who were referred to contemptuously as “Jerries.” Perhaps it was written for basic training — in military marching — for it received a good keyboard thumping by Adès. It was followed by a children’s waltz that could have been penned by Satie or any of Les Six, with rhythmic displacements that only an exceptional child would appreciate. Finally came Piano Rag Music (1919), which could only have been written by Stravinsky. Its dedicatee, Artur Rubinstein, never got around to learning it, as he was afraid of the piece’s leanings toward jazz, so he stuck with Three Movements From Petrushka. Adès wrung any trace of dance rhythm from the rag, giving it a machinelike delivery. He hardly paused for breath until the oddly inconclusive cadence, which somehow proved more satisfying than any performance I’ve ever heard of it. He was just getting warmed up for his concluding set, the Three Canons for Ursula by Conlon Nancarrow. Adès wears his admiration for this master of the player piano on his sleeve, calling him, I think, America’s greatest composer. His playing almost made you believe it. Adès rendered the work with perfection, giving a convincing imitation of a Disklavier. It was diabolically remote and engaging at the same time. I don’t know the pieces well enough to say how closely Adès followed the complex rhythms in the score. But I do know that the two hands, each with a mind of its own, seemed to cheerfully go their own way — like their owner.
(Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who teaches at Diablo Valley College.)
|
Thomas Adès
