Sonatas and Swing

Joel Fan is a young pianist who has been quickly making a name for himself in the past few years, most visibly as a member of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. His work as a solo performer has much of that group's spirit of exploration and its canny sense of connection between the standard repertory and more far-flung musical adventures. Appearing in an unusual and memorable San Francisco recital debut on Friday at Old First Church, he unveiled a well-developed musical personality, one built around intelligent eclecticism, a strong and versatile interpretive sense, and commanding technique that serves the music and avoids self-importance. His program was a beautifully designed traversal of weighty works and shorter, though still substantial, pieces. Building the program, in part, around an international range of composers, Fan kicked things off with Cristal, by the contemporary Brazilian jazz pianist and composer César Camargo Mariano. This was a quick demonstration of Fan's ability to approach a wide range of repertoire with idiomatic feeling, as his playing exuded a sense of joy in the music's harmonic richness and rapid shifts of mood, and moved along with a real sense of swing. The pianist paired this work with Heitor Villa-Lobos' Choro No. 5, Alma Brasileira, and again Fan's playing had a rightness about it, with a solid feel for the composer's mix of lyricism and rhythmic drive. The harmonies in this music are gorgeous, and the piece offered a showcase for Fan's beautifully balanced chords and feeling for harmonic tension and release. The second organizing principle of Fan's program was sonatas, and his first exploration of the form, Alberto Ginastera's Sonata No. 1, revealed an affinity both for extremes of expression and for understanding a wide range of musical structures, in a performance that put this piece across as a major 20th-century work. Fan pounced on the opening Allegro marcato movement with tremendous intensity, with thick chords leaping across the piano's range and brief, quickly evolving ostinatos holding the movement together. Fan brought continued rhythmic force but still evoked a searching feeling in the following Presto misterioso. Stepping away from the rhythmic fireworks, the third movement, marked Adagio molto appassionato, highlighted the pianist's sense of musical line, as he built a clear but complex structure out of the movement's swirl of long, overlapping phrases, complex harmonies, and equally compelling moments of stillness. The sonata ends by returning to the relentless feel with which it began, and Fan devoured the toccata-like fourth movement, Ruvido ed ostinato, with ferocious energy and momentum.

Serene Repose

In a welcome bit of variation from the fire of the Ginastera work, the program turned to another short work, Syrian composer Dia Succari's La Nuit du destin, from 1978. This work explores a range of mostly meditative moods, and Fan filled the music with an elegant sense of serenity and repose. The sonata thread next led to Beethoven's Sonata No. 31, in A-flat, Op. 110. What stood out here was a sense, from the very beginning of the piece, of a journey being undertaken. The Adagio movement was especially lovely, with Fan's full, wonderfully consistent tone and his ability to make a line sing out over its accompaniment being among the highlights. The only real quibble I have about Fan's playing would be a slight tendency to overpedal, which blurred the clarity of the fugue in the final movement. Fan opened the program's second half with Margaret Bonds' Troubled Waters, a 1967 set of variations on the gospel song Wade in the Water. This is a substantial work that displays a great deal of compositional expertise in its deployment of a range of virtuoso variation techniques. At the same time, it's far from a showpiece, and Fan invested this shorter work with real depth, drawing on the power of the tune that is the basis of the piece. Fan finished the program's trio of sonatas with a tremendous performance of Samuel Barber's 1949 Sonata, Op. 26. The composer was surely at the height of his powers in this work, which Fan delivered as a shot of bracing, jagged modernism. The tone throughout was one of piercing restlessness, whether in the fierce opening Allegro energico or the dirge-like third movement, finding resolution only in the concluding fugue. Again, as in the Ginestera, Fan's performance was so committed that it made a convincing case for this work's deserving a place in the standard repertory. Wrapping up the evening with Liszt's concert Paraphrase of Verdi's "Rigoletto," Fan dashed it off with just the right mix of frothiness and casual pyrotechnics. He encored with a return to South American composers, with a soulful take on Ástor Piazzolla's Milonga Prelude.