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RECITAL REVIEW
May 30, 2004
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By Jerry Kuderna
Garrick Ohlsson's recital of music by Carl Maria von Weber and L. van Beethoven, part of the SF Symphony's “Beethoven's Vienna” series, gave us an opportunity to journey back to 1816 — to the birth of the romantic period, of the modern concert grand piano and, with that, of the grand and rewarding literature composed for it. Modern pianists have mostly disregarded the handful of sonatas by Weber, so overshadowed by the 32 by Beethoven (once called “the New Testament of the piano”). Even Schubert's sonatas languished for nearly a century before Artur Schnabel began introducing them to concert audiences.
Ohlsson began with the well-known “Invitation to the Dance,” an early precursor of “program music” for which the composer supplied a synopsis of the action. We didn't need the title; the playing told the story. Then came Weber's Second Sonata in A-flat, which might as well have been titled “And the Dance Continues.” In this respect it looks forward to the works of Chopin and Schumann, so many of which are based on dances. The scherzo movement, a manic and capricious minuet, must have been one of the pieces the young Robert Schumann studied. It found an echo in his “Carnaval” a decade later.
The freedom of modulation is even more striking, especially in the development of the first movement and the gravity of the second, which seemed almost to forecast the Mahler Second Symphony. The last movement looked back to Beethoven, particularly the grazioso finales of some of his early sonatas. This one had a naïve descending chromatic scale as its moniker, and Ohlsson played it innocently, as if to say, “see how easy it is to make music with just these twelve little notes.” Garrick Ohlsson clearly delights, even revels, in pianistic textures for their own sweet sake, and he has as wide a range of sonority as any pianist today. The fluency and ease of his performance made it sound as if he had been playing the Weber Sonata all his life. Given the enormous scope of his repertoire, he may well have.
Beethoven's Sonata Op. 101 begins harmlessly, as if nothing “bad” could ever happen. But, this being Beethoven, there is always at least one level below the surface, and in this case many more. The legend is that Beethoven improvised for Dorothea Ertmann when she lost her child (this sonata was dedicated to her). She claimed that the sonata saved her reason. The combination of deep seriousness and compassion with wit and humor in this work makes us believe that Beethoven's music could do this. “Who could describe this music?,” she said. “We seemed to hear choruses of angels greeting the entrance of my poor child into the realms of light.” This sounds like a description of the slow movement (really an introduction to the finale, moving from darkness into light), the closest I came to feeling the deep longing which lies at the heart of the work, to find such joyous release in the finale. This transition was achieved masterfully. As for the finale itself, it was most genial, but I wanted to feel more of the disturbing musical events which distinguish Beethoven from Weber or Hummel. The monumental “Eroica” Variations concluded the program. I've never heard an opening E flat chord command silence like Ohlsson's did, and the audience did not dare to cough for its duration which seemed at least a minute long. This was amazing enough, but when they still were not coughing during the slow variation before the fugue, I thought of sending for a doctor. But I was too dumbstruck by Ohlsson's awesome technical command to do this, or even figure out what the music might have been about. I may have quibbled about some of his tempi, but Ohlsson clearly had the whole of Davies Hall in his hands. After the Beethoven ended on such a triumphal note I probably got the shock I was looking for in two dark pieces not from Vienna, both in c-sharp minor, by Scriabin and Rachmaninoff.
(Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who teaches at Diablo Valley College.)
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Garrick Ohlsson