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RECITAL REVIEW March 25, 2006
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Pianistic Fast Food By Scott MacClelland
What stood out in Olga Kern's solo recital Saturday at Carmel's Sunset Theater was her complete technical command of the Yamaha piano (she is a Yamaha artist) and an equally penetrating grasp of the music she chose. In the latter, the glamorous 2001 Van Cliburn competition gold medallist — there was a not-as-glamorous co-first-prize winner — displayed a strong sense of the overall picture, where other accomplished pianists often leave instead a trail of cameos and miniatures. This was true even in the facile and superficial inclusions in her program, of which one could complain there were too many.
The deepest work paraded in this bright but dry concert hall was Chopin's Sonata in B-flat minor, with its famously cliched funeral march. Otherwise she played Mendelssohn's Serious Variations, Op. 54, plus a lot of froth, leaving the audience dazzled by her technique but with little idea of her artistic depth. Curiously, she stayed heavy on the sustaining pedal in the Chopin, blurring instead of articulating its fine passagework. (Her pedaling lay similarly on Rachmaninoff's transcription of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream scherzo, but otherwise was held in good balance.)
The Mendelssohn variations made an excellent impression, vividly varied one from the next, articulated with crystal clarity, and spirited. The Chopin was gutsy in the first movement, while the terse finale swirled in murky fog.
The short second half consisted of the savory Morceaux de fantaisie, Op. 3, by the 19-year-old Rachmaninoff, as well as Liszt's conflated Réminiscences de Don Juan. From the Rachmaninoff, the opening "Élégie" in E-flat minor and the extremely overexposed Prelude in C-sharp minor — both played with generously elastic expression — show the composer's distinctive style already remarkably well seasoned but strongly influenced by the likes of Chopin, Liszt, and Tchaikovsky. The most sophisticated of the set is the Serenade in B-flat minor, whose Spanishness may owe something to Rimsky-Korsakov. The Liszt is one of that composer's most gaseous “reminiscences,” a shameless display at the expense of "Là ci darem la mano" and "Fin ch'han dal vino" from Mozart's Don Giovanni. It features numerous opportunities to “quit already,” but ignores them all, making its 16 minutes seem much longer. It takes chutzpah to play in public, and Kern managed to do it with some measure of dignity simply by going for the gusto and making no apology. As such, she brought the audience to its feet. The entire second half, including the encores — Hopak, Liebestod, Spinning Wheel, and Flight of the Bumblebee — was like Chinese food. Ten minutes later we were hungry again.
(Scott MacClelland, since 1978, has written music criticism and journalism for all the major newspapers on the Monterey Peninsula, and for the Metro papers in Santa Cruz and San Jose. During the same period, he has taught music history for Monterey Peninsula College.)
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Olga Kern
