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RECITAL REVIEW
A Recital With a Broken Wing April 7, 2002
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By Jerry Kuderna
Murray Perahia's concert at Zellerbach on Sunday was a perplexing mix of fine, often beautiful, piano playing, unbalanced programming, and a surprising disregard for musical structure.
Perahia placed two major works on the first half. They were the Beethoven 32 Variations in C minor and the big Schubert Sonata in A major D. 959. In order to squeeze these substantial pieces in before intermission, he had to play the variations at an allegro instead of the marked allegretto. The result was pretty dreadful. Everything was run together and you heard lots of fast runs in the right hand and not much else. The piece might have been modeled on the Bach Chaconne and needs the same expansive treatment and flexibility of tempo to be effective. A quick opener it is not. Perahia raced through as if impatient to get to the main work on his program.
Even less responsive to a streamlining approach is the Schubert A-major Sonata. The opening chords were struck massively and the contrasting second theme sang with winsome loveliness. The exposition was very promising, and I suppose Perahia felt ready to move on, skipping the repeat. He assumed that the audience knew the piece as well as he does and did not need to hear that music again. Alas, it also means cutting four bars which are crucial not just to the first movement but to the whole piece. It is a simple upward sequence of four half notes, but it turns out to be the crucial inner voice of the chordal beginning, a fact that you are not likely to notice on first hearing. The exact same notes resurface as the forlorn solo, punctuated by fortissimo chords, right after the stormy outburst in the slow movement, showing in the clearest possible way its significance to Schubert. The entire slow movement was beautifully played
and obviously deeply felt.
The scherzo and last movements were played so well that I almost forgot my disappointment with the first movement. But the length of the finale only really makes sense in relation to the big first movement. Much that was good about Perahia's performance would have been more meaningful had he really embraced Schubert's "heavenly length". By "abridging" Schubert's music, it does not make it seem less long, but the opposite. I heard it played earlier in the week with repeat and the proportions were exactly right. The second half of the recital was devoted to Chopin. The 2nd and 3rd ballades enclosed shorter works, the Mazurka in B-flat minor, three etudes from Op. 25 and the B-major nocturne Op. 62. The ballades had the requisite fire but I was dismayed by the pianist's tendency to double octaves in the bass or play them an octave lower than written. Though he did this presumably to offset the rather dismal acoustics in Zellerbach, the effect was exaggerated. The etudes were lovely, though I did not understand why he needed to punch out the melody in the "Aeolian Harp" etude. In the nocturne he seemed to become lost in the music, a little too lost, but recovered to do his best playing in the A-flat Ballade and the three encores by Chopin which followed. (Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who teaches in Berkeley and at Diablo Valley College.) ©2002 Jerry Kuderna, all rights reserved |
