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RECITAL REVIEW
February 9, 2003
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By Mack McCray
To be in Davies Hall Sunday night at the Symphony's Great Performers Series was to taste a bit of what it must have been like to be at a piano recital seventy, eighty years, even a hundred or more years ago. And not just any piano recital, mind you: we would be savoring the thrilling advance notices, the breathless descriptions of friends lucky enough to have already heard the artist, and we would be looking forward to an evening of delightful miniatures, awe-inspiring physical feats, heaven-storming gestures and shattering, heart-breaking emotional power. On Sunday night at Arcadi Volodos' piano recital we got enough of those expectations fulfilled to come away very satisfied. If the sum of the evening's parts did not quite add up to a compelling emotional and artistic experience, it was still an extraordinary evening.
Volodos is by any measure as fearsomely equipped a pianist as there is on the stage today and is a poetic, intelligent and tasteful musician besides. He has the grace occasionally to chip a note and that makes his athletic achievements all the more hair-raising. His courage in programming lesser-known works is to be applauded, and the idea of a program of miniatures (eschewing the Serious Large Sonata where the roast beef normally would be on the menu) is most intriguing. Unfortunately, the idea didn't fully succeed for several reasons.
A famous European pianist has said that "Volodos is one of the greatest pianists in the world... for thirty minutes." While this is perhaps too harsh a judgment, I believe there is a grain of truth behind it. What he seems to mean is that for all the stunning pianism a certain sameness creeps into Volodos' performances, and after a while we notice the same reverent pianissimos, the same thundering octaves, and the fact that we frequently are not being moved by a genuine emotional connection. In fairness, it must be noted that the pianist was somewhat trapped by his program, unable to subordinate or sacrifice his virtuoso glamor for great, arching lines or large architectural visions because they are very few or non-existen.
For this listener Volodos definitely began the recital as "one of the greatest pianists," with ravishing and intelligent Scriabin, layer upon layer of sensuous sound in the tiny Enigme, Opus 52 No. 2, Guirlandes, Opus 73 No. 2, and the great Sonata No. 7, Opus 64, the "White Mass." The problem with the following Rachmaninoff group was partly pianistic, partly the uneven choice of material. I was reminded of a recent performance of Porgy and Bess in which every song had been treated as a showstopper, the cast belting the final lines of each with arms widespread. After a while the grandstanding began to pall, as did the pianist's turbulent climaxes in piece after piece. There was an attempt to structure the group into three movements, moving first through stronger pieces in sharp keys (the Melodie in E Major, Opus 3 No. 3, and two Preludes from Opus 32 in E major and B Minor) to a somewhat slower, softer group in flat keys (two Preludes, G major from Opus 32 and G-flat Major from Opus 23, the Allegretto in E-flat Minor from Moments Musicaux, Opus 76 No. 2 and Margaritka (Daisies), Opus 38 No. 3). The pianist then ratcheted up for the climax, a dazzling if somewhat punishing grouping of Oriental Sketch, Humoresque and Volodos' own fierce arrangement of Polka italienne. Unfortunately the early Rachmaninoff works have a limited emotional and musical reach, and it was unfair to both composer and audience to program such a long chain of highly perishable daisies together. The Preludes fared somewhat better, particularly the gorgeous No. 21 in B Minor, Opus 32 No. 10, which more and more seems to be a remarkable study for the slow movement of the Sonata in B-flat Minor, Opus 36, written three years later. However, the little G Major (Opus 32 No. 5) got tugged around in an unexpected and not altogether successful agitato. In spite of these flaws, it must be reiterated that staggering piano playing was the order of the day, even when it did not need to make an appearance. After intermission the small, early Schubert Sonata in A-flat Major, D. 557, probably unfinished, did not seem particularly charming or lovely. The large-scale pianism which had been lavished on Rachmaninoff seemed to overwhelm the little movements.
Three Liszt works (Sonnet No 123 of Petrarch, Consolation No. 6 in E Major, and Il penseroso) were beautiful, and along with the Scriabin group, enjoyed the best playing of the evening, thoughtful and poetic. Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre, transcribed by Liszt but heavily doctored by other hands (Volodos?) completed the program with breath-taking fireworks that ignited the large and enthusiastic audience. This outpouring of approval and energy cheered this listener, because from the amount of coughing that occurred all through the evening I had feared that there would be several corpses to be carried from Davies Hall at the end of the recital. It also prompted many curtain calls and four encores, a Feuille d'Album and Mazurka by Scriabin, a dazzling version of Moszkowski's Étincelles doctored up by Volodos, and what I am told is only the fourth performance of a new arrangement by the pianist of material from Bizet's Carmen, a blustering, prancing and sparkling explosion of pianism that generated many smiling faces at concert's end.
(Mack McCray is a concert pianist and a
member of the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.)
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Arcadi Volodos