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TRIBUTE
Hearing Robert Helps' Great Heart
May 26, 2002
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By Jerry Kuderna
For those who were lucky to have known Robert Helps, it is comforting to know that we still have his music, even though he, the wondrously witty one, the beneficent Babe of Brooklyn Heights, is gone. One of the outstanding pianists of his generation, he was tireless in playing difficult new works which were written with him in mind. How many pieces were inspired by his transcendent technique and sure understanding? Anyone who knew Bob as a pianist knew that his performance would be authoritative. Never mind that someone else's name was at the top of the score. He was the pianist of their dreams, and a special light emanated from the eyes of composers who had heard their music played by him.
But it is as a composer that he would wish most to be remembered, and as his prowess as a pianist fades into legend, his music will become much better known than it now is. Although Helps composed a number of chamber works (usually with piano), two piano concerti, some songs, and two symphonies, his music for solo piano makes up the bulk of his catalog. While he would surely have raised an eyebrow at any attempt to assess his work as a whole, after Sunday's memorial concert at the San Francisco Conservatory devoted mostly to his piano music, a preliminary sort of retrospective view seems appropriate.
The concert spanned virtually his entire career as a composer. "In Retrospect" (1977), five pieces for piano, dates from the middle of Helps' output. Here, the masterly control of counterpoint in the "Prelude and Pastorale," the exquisite poise in the forlane rhythm of "Dance," and the gorgeous melody in the central piece, "Song," made it the ideal opening work for the program. The final "Toccata" is a compositional tour de force combining the melodies of the previous four. The set received a sensitive and loving performance from one of Helps' longtime friends and students, Jim Carmichael.
While rarely overtly showy, Helps' pieces are quite difficult to play, and as the composer himself liked to say, can be difficult to hear. Like the works of Fauré and Sessions, two apparent opposites, they reveal their beauties gradually. When they are done well, they are very appealing indeed. As with all great music, the real difficulty lies beneath the surface. Attempts to "wow" the audience with them are bound to be futile. Of course, there are exceptions. Helps composed two sets of three etudes, both of which are, as he said, "criminally difficult." The later set (for the left hand alone) are typical of the composer's modesty: they do not wear their difficulties on their sleeves. The earlier set does, and should bear the warning: "Do not try this at home." As in Chopin's or Bartók's studies, Helps' Three Etudes (1956) push pianists to the limit of strength and agility, and perhaps to worse things than that. But there is a lot of music to be found beyond the quantities of notes and the sheer craftsmanship. Lee Nolan, another Helps pupil extraordinaire, gave a dazzling account of them. The first is a juggernaut of parallel fourths that scream and spin furiously up and down the keyboard until collapsing inward on themselves. The second ("cocktail music for geniuses," as it has been called) finds a kind of oblivion in hyper-sensuality and harmonic opulence. The final study is a demonic thing, like Ravel's Scarbo gone madder still. You wondered that the piano was still standing. As a change of pace and to remind us of Helps' long association with singers, especially the unforgettable Bethany Beardslee, Wendy Hillhouse and Steven Bailey performed two songs by Elinor Armer and Duparc. Both were among Helps' favorites. Armer's "Poplar at Dawn," from her cycle Season of Grief, was appropriate for obvious reasons, and it received a convincing reading, even in this excerpted placement. The lines from the wonderful "La Vie Anterieure" by Duparc seemed to encapsulate the elegiac tone of the concert and one which surely resonated with the "French" side of Helps' sensibility: . . . "le secret douloureux qui me faisait languir."
Helps' association with the San Francisco Conservatory and with pianists Peggy and Milton Salkind goes back more than three decades. Saccade, for piano four hands, was dedicated to the Salkinds in the late sixties, when Helps was briefly on the Conservatory faculty. It is a disturbing parody of the genteel art of the piano duet, beginning with its deliberately out-of-synch chords, to the crossing over into the primo part's territory, marked "furtively," leading up to the final confrontation and dissolution. Thomas Turinia joined Peggy Salkind in a performance which revealed much of the beauty of the piece, if not completely embracing its chaos and violence. The (almost) final works on the program by Helps' were likely his last. They are the Postcards(2000), portraits of two of the cities he loved most, and where he was, perhaps, most loved. The first is of San Francisco, a latter-day "Broulliards" with its complex harmonies like banks of fog that rolled and drifted in waves beneath Mack McCray's supple hands. The second was a vigorous and jazzy rag from Greenwich Village. McCray's playing was a gas, and Bob's unforgettable sense of humor came through. Elinor Armer made a lovely cameo appearance as pianist in William Bolcom's "Graceful Ghost Rag," partly to oblige the F major triad at the end of the last Postcard, but mainly to channel Mr. Helps back to us for an encore, which he graciously provided, electronically. It turned out to be his Hommage a Fauré, naturally. In the silence following this piece, those lovely harmonies continued to smile at us. We felt the mystery of this immaterial medium called music and felt your great heart. (Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who teaches at Diablo Valley College and is a host of the Berkeley TV program, Stop, Look, and Listen. ) ©2002 Jerry Kuderna, all rights reserved |