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RECITAL REVIEW
Powerful and Perceptive April 16, 2002
|  By Thomas Schultz
Two years ago I heard Peter Serkin begin a recital with Mozart's B-minor Adagio. To me, it seemed a courageous thing to do and I was filled with admiration when he played the piece so well that the audience remained in motionless silence from beginning to end. On Tuesday evening at Herbst Theater, Serkin again chose an uncompromising beginning for his recital, this time Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11 and again, the audience's
attention remained riveted to the music. Serkin's concert, as a whole, was an example of the sort of stimulating programming that pianists and other recitalists might emulate. Not only was a good half of the concert devoted to substantial 20th-century music, but every work played was a challenge to the listener.
The presence on the program of both Op. 11 and the Op. 25 Suite of Schoenberg afforded an opportunity to trace changes and stabilities in this composer's music over the span of years from 1909 to 1923. In these two works, as in all of Schoenberg's music, melody is central. Serkin's playing of melodic lines took the form of an intense cantabile, subtle and various in its inflection — particularly in the Minuet of Op. 25 — and of a finely-controlled, richly-detailed polyphony. He brought out many details in Op. 11 with great clarity, and obscured others with a wash of sound, making evident the work's closeness to the music of both Brahms and Debussy. Conversely, the gracefulness, edge, and humor of Serkin's playing of Op. 25 connected its dance rhythms and dissonances to Webern and Stravinsky.
I was frequently surprised by Serkin's idiosyncratic approach to certain passages. He sounded unlike any other pianist in these places, and unlike anything I had imagined possible. Where most pianists play the third piece of Op. 11 in a tumultuous frenzy, Serkin played with great intensity, wildness, and extremes of dynamics but, at the same time, at what seemed like an unhurried pace. Here was the reality of "make haste slowly." In Op. 25, after a graceful, melodious minuet, he gave us a formal, starchy trio, illuminating the sudden canonic writing. It was also surprising to hear the similarity of the second of the Op. 11 pieces to the Intermezzo of Op. 25. A quiet rhythmic ostinato is woven through both pieces, taking the form of a slow, gloomy alternation of two bass notes in Op. 11 and a quicker, lighter, almost wistful two-note pattern undergoing subtle shifts in interval and speed in Op. 25.
Considering the audience's appreciation and Serkin's masterly playing of these two works, it seems apparent that Schoenberg can no longer be considered a "difficult" composer. His music is no tougher for the listener than Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata or "Grosse Fuge," no more dense than some of the fugues of Bach or symphonies of Brahms, and certainly no more abstract than the late works of Fauré and Debussy. And it's a rare living composer whose music is as colorful and thoroughly inventive as Schoenberg's. Serkin has long played an active role in the commissioning of new works and is justly renowned for his performances of recently written music. I remember hearing him in the late 1960s in a program that began with Mozart, Webern and Schoenberg, and ended with 40 minutes of Messiaen, played in near-darkness to the accompaniment of a psychedelic light show. Although there was a time when, as a member of the chamber group Tashi, he was involved in commissioning provocative and radical works like Yuji Takahashi's For You I Sing This Song, his tastes have since become decidedly more conservative. Alexander Goehr, Peter Lieberson, Toru Takemitsu and Luciano Berio have all written music for him. The work on this program by Oliver Knussen, his Variations, Op. 24 from 1989, is of this lineage. Knussen's piece is brilliantly "pianistic" and frequently utilizes the ever-effective technique of presenting melodies in octaves. I found it difficult, though, to follow the progress and delineation of the variations and felt the piece was sabotaged by the unrelentingly rhetorical nature of the music and by its almost constant use of the entire range of the keyboard. (Although full of virtuosity, color and expressivity, Schoenberg's Op. 11 and Op. 25 had nothing rhetorical about them.) Serkin concluded each half of his recital with late Beethoven. He played the often obsessively repetitive and fragmentary 6 Bagatelles, Op. 126, with great beauty and in an intensely personal manner. The music was a constant duet between left and right hands and when he chose to make the lower parts more prominent, it was as if he were simply realizing Beethoven's own markings. At the start of the second bagatelle, Serkin used longer-than-usual pedals to create a halo of resonance. He played the fifth Bagatelle with a nearly rubato-less simplicity; the fourth was unexpectedly quick and frighteningly intense. In his playing of these pieces, there was none of the humor or playfulness that we've come to expect in Beethoven.
I've heard many fine interpretations of Beethoven's Sonata, Op. 109 by well-known pianists and students alike, but Serkin's playing of this work was revelatory. The moments in the first movement when the music returns to the opening allegro from the recitative should be entirely predictable for me by now. In Serkin's playing, they were unexpected and as if newly created. The second-movement prestissimo began with a violent explosion and continued with jarring shifts of tempo and character. His slow tempo for the andante theme of the third movement verged on adagio and became even slower in the first variation. Throughout the evening, Serkin's playing was intimate, intense, and unhurried. Certainly a large part of what distinguishes his music-making from the fluid and accomplished, but ultimately unsatisfying, playing of many other pianists is his constant intense focus on the moment-to-moment connection between the notes. I'm reminded of Yuji Takahashi's remark: "Each performance is a questioning." (Thomas Schultz is a pianist and a member of the faculty at Stanford University.) ©2002 Thomas Schultz, all rights reserved |
