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RECITAL REVIEW
January 31, 2004
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By Sarah Cahill
At the end of Arnaldo Cohen's recital at Herbst Theater on Saturday night, half of his listeners leapt to their feet with whoops and bravos, and half sat back scratching their heads in befuddlement at the other half's enthusiasm. I admit to being part of the second half. Cohen, the Brazilian pianist who won the Busoni competition in 1972, has an astonishing technique. He can taper the end of a phrase with the most exquisite pianissimo. His legato playing is enviable. And yet, all of his gifts seem parcelled out for intellectual interest rather than emotional satisfaction.
And emotional satisfaction seemed inevitable for Cohen's program choice: Schoenberg's Three Pieces op. 11, Schumann's C major Fantasy op. 17, and Chopin's 24 Preludes. Ideas of form emerged — the two sets of miniatures framing Schumann's expansive musings, the almost anti-sonata ternary structures of Schoenberg and Schumann.
In the first few notes of Schoenberg's opening (Mässig) movement, Cohen coaxed the tiniest whisper from the piano. He has phenomenal control over gradations of dynamics. He couched these little pieces in mystery, listening carefully to how each pitch moves to the next, shaping phrases, and focusing on silences between them which he weighted with equal substance. He was especially meticulous about Schoenberg's markings, investing the third (Bewegt) movement with extreme contrasts between pianissimo and fortissimo, ferocity and ghostliness, songfulness and angularity. Cohen immersed himself so deeply in Schoenberg's world that he hovered on the keyboard for a while after the music stopped, until applause broke the spell, and he finally rose from the bench slowly, like someone waking from hypnosis.
Cohen's concert was a lesson in how great attributes, when overrused, can become mannerisms. That astonishing pianissimo, the hesitation and focus on particular pitches that worked so beautifully in Schoenberg, deflated Schumann's Fantasy. Enough already with the lingering over a lovely phrase! As important as it is to stop and smell the flowers, we get impatient if we have to stop every three steps to smell every blessed flower. And without structural support, this Fantasy falls apart quickly. Cohen opened the Fantasy with a long luxurious melody, and throughout the piece his melodic lines were supple and lovely, but one started to long for a real singing tone. After all, this piece is bursting with Schumann's love for Clara, but Cohen's introspective performance seemed to reflect on love from a distance. This is not to say that it didn't have its dazzlements: at the end of the second movement, he actually sped up before the treacherous sequence of dotted leaps that have felled many giants of the piano, and he nailed every single leap. Still, one never got the feeling of risk-taking or excitement, but just a particularly impressive technique. In places, Cohen paid literal attention to the score: in the last movement, for instance, he chose to hold down right hand triads while playing fifths and arpeggios entirely with his left, while most pianists use the pedal to hold the triad and sneak arpeggios with the right hand. At other spots, however, he contradicted the score, mainly in ignoring marked fortes, most maddeningly in the last few measures of the piece, where he started the diminuendo at the height of the climax. Chopin's 24 Preludes revealed Cohen's talents, and his mannerisms, most acutely. The gorgeous shrouded tone he used for Prelude #2 in C minor, spinning out one continuous line from beginning to end, became monotonous when he adopted it for every single slowish Prelude — #4, #6, #7, etc. The faster Preludes were as nimble and as note-perfect as they've ever been played, but had been spayed and defanged in the process. The great savage Presto No. 16 in B minor breezed by effortlessly, and the last, No. 24 in D minor, was brilliant but not at all scary. As with Cohen's performance of the Schumann Fantasy, this was an intellectual observation of a major journey of the heart. In three encores, Cohen relaxed and had a good time. Two fluffy bonbons by Brazilian composers Francisco Braga and Carmago Guarnieri proved perfect showpieces for Cohen's terrific facility: his fingers were a blur of dizzying passagework. His inner Horowitz also emerged in a study by Moszkowski, after which he smiled for the first time. If only the smile had come at the beginning, rather than at the end.
(Sarah Cahill is a pianist and critic. Her website is www.sarahcahill.com.)
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Arnaldo Cohen