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RECITAL REVIEW
March 28, 2004
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By Jerry Kuderna
In a century of tumultuous change there has been much tragedy, but with that a deeper sense of the possible in music. David Holzman's recital at Old First Church on Sunday focused on works for piano born out of war and dislocation beginning with the years prior to WWI. By limiting the program to six Jewish composers, both those who lived through critical events of the last century and younger composers for whom their predecessors' work is of vital importance, he underscored the common artistic and human concerns of us all.
Ernst Bloch's Visions and Prophecies (1956) began the program. Originally for orchestra, its mystical and visionary passages alternating with vehement and bellicose ones, did not seem quite comfortable in its piano incarnation. Perhaps to compensate, Holzman literally threw himself at the keyboard producing sounds which can be electrifying and slightly unnerving. There is something of the old time revivalist in his approach. When his sermon became a little too bombastic, he would calmly and soothingly assume a quiet reverence only to shatter it with yet more passionate exhortation.
Daniel David Feinsmith's Leviathan for solo piano, op. 27 (2002) is based on Psalm 104, and it is whale of a piece, gigantic in scale but clearly comfortable in the hands of Holzman. Feinsmith writes idiomatically for the piano if somewhat repetitiously. I couldn't tell whether this was a problem with the piece or in the way it was presented. Again, I found Holzman's approach to the quieter passages to be more convincing than the grander ones where the sound tended to become strident.
Again, there was plenty of turmoil in Erich Itor Kahn's Chaconne in the Time of War (1943) written after his emigration from Germany to America. I was grateful to hear this rarely played work. There are harrowing events being recounted, but there is lyricism too. At the conclusion, the note C, distributed over the registers of the keyboard, while clearly not peace, was something that pointed to victory or to a sense of unity which could only be arrived by undergoing hardship and struggle. Arnold Schoenberg is, of course, the figure who epitomized hardship and the struggle to continue the tradition of German music while he himself seemed to be its prime destroyer. His Three Piano Pieces Op. 11 (1909) were among the first of his attempts to write music without a firm tonal center. To our ears Schoenberg's music can have a truly prophetic inevitability. It is strange how the opening bars of this music can both evoke nostalgia and, in the words of Stefan Georg, “breathe the air of other planets.” As if to emphasize the angst of the music, Holzman exaggerated its expressionistic content, but also blurred the harmonic and motivic details that insure proper perception of its continuity. In his evocative and sometimes programmatic Uprising, William Sussman bears witness to events he did not experience. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is portrayed in a series of ascending octaves which seemed desperate and futile attempts to escape the confines of a the limited piano keyboard. Once again Holzman proved a passionate advocate, although I was begin to tire of the “…and I say unto you…” rhetoric and craved a bit of understatement. Surprisingly, I could relax during some of the quiet minimalist passages in Susmann's work when “uprising” was expressed in static three-note arpeggios in both hands. By concluding with pieces by Stefan Wolpe, Holzman showed why he has achieved his legendary status as “a Horowitz of modern music.” Wolpe's music ranges from tonal pieces reflecting his Jewish roots to the most radical of 12-tone experiments. One of these, tucked into a group of relatively slight pieces, was Waltz for Merle (1952), a piece which could hardly be recognized as a waltz but which, in Holzman's performance, danced off the page with a mastery and electrifying spirit. We will await his return to give us performances of such standards (for him) as Wolpe's Battle Piece and, dare we hope, Donald Martino's Pianissimo.
(Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who teaches at Diablo Valley College.)
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