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RECITAL REVIEW
November 21, 2006
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Perverse Virtuosity By Heuwell Tircuit
Last Tuesday in Old St. Mary's Cathedral, pianist Carlos Avila played a Noontime Concert that was like a look over the shoulder at the early 20th century. His program consisted mainly of showstoppers of the virtuoso frills variety, together with two exceptions: transcriptions that occasionally went well over the top. Schubert dominated the program, in forms both real and unreal, and there was one perfectly outlandish camp number at Saint-Saëns’ expense.
Avila opened with Schubert's Impromptu in A-flat Major, Op. 90, No. 4, followed by three transcriptions of Schubert's music, and finally the Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat Major, Op. 90. Those gilded lilies included Liszt's version of the famous Ave Maria, Rachmaninoff's rendition of Wohin (Where) from the lieder cycle Die Schöne Müllerin, D.795 (The fair miller girl), and the deliciously ridiculous Leopold Godowsky transcription of Morgengruss (Morning greeting) from the same D.795 cycle.
To round things off, Avila's topper was a sort-of-Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre. What we thought we were hearing as that composer's orchestral tone poem turned out to be Liszt's liberal transcription of Danse Macabre, as further gussied up by Vladimir Horowitz.
Readers of Classical Voice may remember the rave review that Avila drew when he took on the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 1 with the California Symphony on one day’s notice in 2001. He's well trained locally, as well as at Yale, and currently studies at New York's Juilliard School of Music. He has won a fistful of competitions and has appeared around the world, from Japan to Italy. So it was to be taken for granted that he can play the instrument — and that he did for this technically demanding series. Of the two authentic Schubert works, the Impromptu No. 3 was a beautifully controlled, dulcet flow of notes. Avila's grasp of the melodic basics proved to be moving. But his opening Fourth Impromptu turned out to be more controversial. There he laid on emotive rubato with a trowel, stretching the line out of shape and greatly extending the normal duration of the score. He did not so much play the piece as convert it into a swooning exercise. It marked the first time I've experienced a sense of tedium during that impromptu. Liszt's arrangement of the Ave Maria was reasonably respectful of the original, if one could overlook the almost Wagnerian climax, played as if it were being sung by Isolde. But with the two lieder from Die Schöne Müllerin, we got into the world of no-holds-barred virtuoso irrelevance. Those songs were submerged into scales, arpeggios, and all manner of harmonic changes. By contrast, Avila played the Rachmaninoff as a straightforward virtuoso showpiece, which at least held true to Schubert's beautiful melodic creation. And although brilliantly played, Godowsky's transcription goes over the line of basic good taste. While Avila's ease in playing bravura was astounding, even that could not disguise what is in essence a creation in seriously bad taste. It was like cutting into a cake and finding that it's all butter cream and no cake. This is not to imply that I did not enjoy these pieces' sheer perversity, especially the extremes of Godowsky and the Saint-Saëns cum Horowitz, after Liszt's grand touch-up. I've not heard that sort of music in performance since my student days back in the 1950s, and have heard it only rarely on disc.
Danse Macabre was born in 1873 as a sarcastic two-minute song. The singer even makes paradisaic, bone-rattling noises amid the Henri Cazalis text: "... zig et zig et zig, la mort en cadence" (The dead in rhythm). A year later, Saint-Saëns greatly expanded on the tune to create his famous tone poem of the same name, his Op. 40. And, of course, he quoted snippets of the tune again in Carnival of the Animals. But neither the song nor Carnival was given the honor of an opus number. Both were intended merely to as private jokes to amuse friends at parties. The orchestral tone poem, on the other hand, was a serious effort. Liszt picked up on it, expanded it, and added all sorts of harmonic and key changes, all the while embedding it in pianistic gewgaw. The fingers fly all over the keyboard at dizzying rates, and again the climaxes get enormously inflated. If you know Liszt's Don Juan Fantasy, which was drawn from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, you get the idea. Never having heard the Liszt original, I can’t say just what Horowitz did in his arrangement. But for comparison, you've likely heard Horowitz's Carmen Variations. This was something along those lines, only more extreme. I daresay that’s why I'd never heard the original Liszt — it likely frightens off pianists. Yet it didn’t spook Carlos Avila, who ripped through the piece, showering sparks all over the cathedral walls. In several ways, this was his finest performance of the entire recital — that, and Schubert's G-flat Major Impromptu. Simply as a display of dexterity, both were outstanding, and even made the Saint-Saëns/Liszt/Horowitz folderol thrilling. Despite insistent audience demand, Avila played no encore. Considering what he'd just been though, that was understandable.
(Heuwell Tircuit is a composer, performer, and writer who was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years a music reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He wrote previously for Chicago's American and the Asahi Evening News.)
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Carlos Avila
