San Francisco Classical Voice

Gringolts did it, of course, with a degree of confidence and risk that was impressive. The music worked as it very rarely does; the repetitions didn't seem repetitious, and the clichés didn't seem cliched. And that is what makes great playing; because if you bring it off in just the right way, that piece hasn't got any repetitions or clichés, not so's you'd notice. Only finding just the right way happens to be unbelievably difficult. Gringolts managed it, making lumpy outer movements sing, putting enough zest into a particularly repetitious scherzo that you positively wanted the body of the movement to come back, investing the slow movement with such poetry — tinged, as it always is, with frailty — that hearing him come back to life, as it were, in the next movement was something of a shock.

The Gringolts sound in the Schumann was much of a piece with his sound all through the afternoon. It's not particularly big or juicy, but there's a fine legato, and power when he wants it, and bite when he doesn't especially want power. Gringolts loves the possibilities of articulation. That made the Bartók a natural for him, of course. His opening movement sounded even more like Bach than usual, and he managed to make the succeeding "Fuga" sound frenetic while at the same time deftly differentiating the voices. In the "Melodia" third movement, the slender sound was an asset, letting him move sinuously around the piece without anything sticking out; and the Presto finale was just brilliant.

Webern's Op. 7 Four Pieces preceded the Schumann. They are, as is usual with Webern, incredibly brief, but concentrated; and Gringolts and his pianist, Christopher Guzman, made the most of their tiny melodramas, especially that of the second piece (the longest of the four by far, and the most turbulent). Guzman made a better impression here than he did in the Schumann that followed. The Webern was alert and turned on a dime. The Schumann was also meticulously coordinated with Gringolts, but Guzman's range of tone colors in the minute gestures of the Webern didn't reappear there; there was a uniformity and clunkiness that didn't match what was going on in the other half of the duo. It was puzzling.

Still more so was the choice of the first work on the program: Mozart's Variations on "Le Bergère Célimène," K. 359. It's constantly pointed out that Mozart's violin sonatas are "for piano with violin accompaniment." So they are; but the accompaniment isn't anywhere near as accompanimental as it is here, where the violin provides at most a rudimentary counter-melody or a bit of deft embroidery atop what is basically a set of solo-piano variations. They are very pleasant variations, if not terribly consequential; so I wished I had liked Guzman's Mozart playing better than I did. Granted that once we were out of the theme and into the variations proper, the playing got markedly more nimble and nuanced; still, it was hard not to wish that Mozart had given Gringolts (who was a model Mozartean, which is to say both elegant and alert) a little more to do in this work, and Guzman just a little less.

The encore was of a piece with the program — which is to say, generally unfamiliar and unexpected: it was the last of Schumann's three Oboe Romances, Op. 94, a changeable and inconclusive piece that would seem the very last thing you'd want to play as an encore, except that Gringolts played it with at least as much care and thought as he'd given to the program proper. An equivocal sendoff — but that, perhaps, was the point.