June 24, Williams Recital Hall. Charles Ives: First Sonata for Piano; Leo Ornstein: Sonata for Two Pianos. Stephen Drury, Jeanne Golan, Christopher Oldfather, piano.
June 25, Williams Recital Hall. Karen Tanaka: Crystalline; Franco Donatoni: Rima; George Crumb: Eleven Echoes of Autumn; Joseph Cancellaro: Sleet; Morton Feldman: Palais de Mari; Robert Helps: Shall We Dance. John Mark Harris, Yukiko Takagi, Shannon Wettstein, piano. Callithumpian Consort.
June 26, Williams Recital Hall. Linda Dusman: Suite Sweet Errata; Pierre Boulez: Incises; Elliott Carter: Night Fantasies; Karlheinz Stockhausen: “Unlimited” from Aus den Sieben Tagen. Winston Choi, Shannon Wettstein, piano. The BSC.
June 27, Williams Recital Hall. Lei Liang: Some Empty Thoughts of a Person from Edo; Toshi Hosokawa: Vertical Time Study; Iannis Xenakis: Mists, Evryali, Anton Webern: Variations for Piano, Op.27. Takae Ohnishi, harpsichord. Marc Ponthus, piano. Callithumpian Consort.
June 28, Brown Hall. Andrew May: Shimmer, for Piano and Tape; Karlheinz Stockhausen: Klavierstuecke XIII and XVI; John Luther Adams: Red Arc/Blue Veil; Moiya Callahan: Magnify. Nino Jvania, Shannon Wettstein, piano. Ensemble Sirius.
June 29 concert not reviewed.
Stephen Drury, director of the New England Conservatory based Summer Institute for Piano Performance, takes impish glee in stating that this festival’s acronym (SICPP) is pronounced “sick puppy.” After hearing the parade of remarkable pianists presented this week, your reviewer was left thinking not of trembling Chihuahuas or anemic Yorkshire Terriers, but of strapping Saint Bernards and rangy Great Danes. These keyboard virtuosi were hale and accomplished, able to play the toughest music of the last hundred years of so with aplomb.
The opening concert was devoted to two huge works that date from the beginning of the 20th century. The First Sonata for piano by Charles Ives is a mould-shattering masterpiece, if a cantankerous and challenging one, that needs some tender loving care in presentation to avoid appearing disjointed or sprawling. A run-of-the-mill pianist can all too easily neglect such necessities as melodic shaping and balance/differentiation of sections. It is hard to imagine this sonata receiving a better performance than the one Drury gave it this evening. His presentation (from memory) sported a stunning range of dynamics and touch, remarkable sensitivity to line and voicing, scintillating technique, and careful delineation of structure. The other piece, Leo Ornstein’s Sonata for Two Pianos (an adaptation by the composer of his Piano Concerto) is a rarely heard entry that merits a listen. Distilled within its confines are heard echoes of many composers of the time and slightly before: Bartok, Debussy, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and most especially Scriabin. Yet Ornstein is able to impart sufficient personality of his own to the music; the harmonic language, tonal yet not functional in nature with notable octatonic and whole tone elements, sounds quite fresh. One wonders what the piano and orchestra version sounds like. Jeanne Golan and Christopher Oldfather played it with eager passion and professional precision.
Tuesday’s evening of music showed three long-time stalwarts of the festival playing against type. Shannon Wettstein gave a strong accounting of Franco Donatoni’s Rima, a strangely obsessive two-movement piece that strongly delineates sections by the type of figuration contained therein. It’s not the most successful entity for a couple of reasons: the sections (all toccata like to varying degrees) consistently lurch from one to the next without real transitions or a compelling reason to go there, and the piano writing sounds both leaden and ungrateful. Wettstein, who with her smooth technique and warm tone excels in felicitous sounding fare, performed it with an appealing feistiness and laser focus. John Mark Harris’s three program items were low key and subtle, demanding great control and concentration—and Harris, a pianist who can do power-packed music with the best, came through splendidly. Sleet by Joseph Cancellaro takes its cue strongly from Morton Feldman’s oeuvre; quiet in dynamics and leisurely in unfolding, it could be a style study except for a tendency to progress a bit more quickly than much of this seminal minimalist’s output. For all that, it’s an effective listen. Feldman’s Palais de Mari is of course the real deal, exhibiting a unique formal sense in the bargain. Here, a ritornello gesture appears at the outset and between sizable passages that focus on varied frozen figurations; not until the last major section does the piece finally gets around to developing the ritornello idea. It’s a work plenty long in duration that remains fascinating nonetheless. The answer to the question posed by the Robert Helps piece Shall We Dance is, “well, sort of.” The music here is in triple meter, consistently hinting at terpsichorean origins without obviously indulging in them. It also contains a good bit of Chopin-inspired fioratura, further making the point that, like the great Polish composer sometimes did, one can write music inspired by dance idioms without being overt about it. While showier than the Cancellaro and Feldman (how could it have been less so?), it’s still a selection long on subtlety. A steely, lively tone quality and showy technique are hallmarks of Yukiko Takagi’s playing style. The two selections she participated in, Karen Tanaka’s Crystalline (a solo piece) and George Crumb’s Eleven Echoes of Autumn (for mixed quartet) demand a different approach. The former’s sonic universe is East Coast jagged, though mostly requiring evocative high register splashiness (only the third of the four sections here allows the pianist to play loud, explosive material). It’s a good composition to hear. Crumb’s entry contains fragile figures loaded with special effects that demand exquisite refinement of tone and care in execution. Takagi performed both successfully, imparting all the sensitivity and clarity a listener could want. Violinist David Fulmer, clarinetist Michael Norsworthy, and alto flautist Linda Bento-Rei (as part of Drury’s wide ranging ensemble entry, the Callithumpian Consort) assisted wonderfully well in the Crumb.
Wettstein returned on the June 26th concert to perform Suite Sweet Errata by this year’s composer in residence, Linda Dusman. This five movement set of substantial, yet humorous character pieces is cast in a harmonic language that finds an effectual midpoint between East Coast grit and tonal focus, able to incorporate patterned material without at all suggesting process stylings. Structurally, the music is idiosyncratic, yet satisfying, and the piano writing is idiomatic without being especially flashy. Wettstein’s presentation imparted warmth and understanding to Dusman’s quirky musical speech without sacrificing anything technically. Winston Choi next took stage to present two late 20th century piano masterworks, Night Fantasies by Elliott Carter and Incises (2001 revision) by Pierre Boulez. Both are showy yet durable entries demanding the utmost virtuosity in terms of technique and musicality—and Choi was more than up to the challenge. His playing was simply stunning: brawny, virile, and exciting, featuring razor sharp finger work and careful attention to overall pacing. In short, he’s a major young talent with star potential. The evening drew to a close with an extemporized realization of “Unlimited” from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s conceptual Aus den Sieben Tagen. As these things go, it was very enjoyable, definitely not a goofy scrape-fest among friends best kept to the privacy of one’s living room. Members of The BSC (a group of eight playing everything from theremin to contrabass) mainly kept things on the quiet, thin textured, extended techniques, and electronic end of things.
The first half of Thursday’s concert concerned itself with two works by Japanese composers. The appearance of harpsichordist Takae Ohnishi proved that this festival happily accommodates keyboard players other than pianists. Her presentation of Lei Liang’s Some Empty Thoughts of a Person from Edo was a strong one, exhibiting mastery of many techniques and moods, the latter ranging from delicate Oriental gestures (nicely suggested via lute stop) to outsized cluster work. Which was precisely the difficulty with Liang’s piece—it tried to synthesize a broad range of approaches without making all these extremes appear to be a part of the same entity. And sadly, no sense of structural shape was apparent here. Drury’s Callithumpians reconvened as a trio (Drury, Norsworthy, and cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer) to present a dynamic performance of the intriguing Vertical Time Study by Toshi Hosokawa. The work, somehow sounding dissonant in a European instead of American fashion, erected a cogent entry from punctuation figures interspersed with long held material; the former expanded out later to small fragments, then to choppy flourishes in a fairly systematic way. Following intermission was one of the most unusual solo piano experiences your reviewer has ever encountered: Marc Ponthus gave three pieces (Anton Webern’s Variations for Piano, Op. 27 sandwiched between Mists and Evryali by Iannis Xenakis) in a manner that mixed elements of the visionary and eccentric. The triumvirate was played with only brief pauses in between (no formal acknowledgement that a piece had ended occurred). By doing so, Ponthus correctly pointed out the main similarity between them: all are concerned with controlled fragmentation, building cogent edifices from what might seem to be unpromising bits and pieces. His playing, featuring a heavy, commanding tone quality and spot on control of fingers and figures, served the Xenakis entries well. And Webern’s work was shown to have a perceivable level of drama and guts that some performances wrongly suppress. But this approach had its drawbacks, too—Ponthus unfortunately overdid the energy level in the Variations, making them restlessly feverish and squelching the wise warmth also to be found there (in particular turning the fizzy second movement into a raging, overdriven monster). His outsized sound sometimes crossed the threshold into banging. And his stage deportment reached Glenn Gould levels of idiosyncrasy, full of humming, grimaces, and foot kicks, and featuring spots where he dropped his coat on the floor and stood up while playing. Unique it certainly was, and thought provoking.
June 28th’s presentation saw the busy Ms. Wettstein take the stage yet again. Three on a match may be unlucky, but three on a festival was great news in this case. The piece she gave was a good one; Shimmer, for Piano and Tape by Andrew May goes out of its way to make its prerecorded material sound piano-like, nicely melding the two so that they sound like a strange super-piano from a parallel universe—familiar, yet really not. Its structure is clearly and interestingly delineated, consisting of two large contrasting sections (the former busy in texture and dissonant, the latter more sparse and tonal sounding), which then recapitulate in truncated versions, resulting in an A-B-a-b construct. Wettstein wisely recognized that this piece, despite being filled with notes, was at heart a relaxed, friendly affair; she harnessed her formidable finger technique to successfully complement a sound quality that was warm, almost buttery at times. Stockhausen’s music was encountered again this week in the form of two late Klavierstuecke. Number 13 in the series, subtitled “Lucifer’s Dream,” is a lengthy, bizarre selection that demands a virtuoso pianist. The performer is expected to not only play the keyboard in standard fashion, but also master myriad extended techniques (including one your reviewer had not seen before, playing large clusters and glissandos with one’s derriere), make a host of vocal sounds, jingle some bells, and put forth a stage persona beyond the standard pianist-sitting-at-the-keys.
The piece itself is intriguing in its way, if long and a bit shapeless; it also does as great a job of integrating standard and experimental modes of playing—a notoriously hard thing to do. Nino Jvania’s presentation (from memory) was terrific, theatrically putting forth the notion of the pianist as devilish, demented vamp in addition to displaying a big tone quality, first rate digital dexterity, and marvelously controlled execution of special effects. The German master’s Klavierstuecke XVI shows just how far along his notion of “piano piece” has gone since the 1950’s. Here, one finds the bulk of the sound being produced by samples controlled by an electric keyboard, enhanced by piano playing that almost exclusively consists of extended techniques. The number of notes played conventionally on the keys could be counted on the fingers of two hands. Intriguing in sound, the piece is further enhanced by a good sense of duration, being significantly shorter than the preceding Klavierstuecke XIII. Red Arc/Blue Veil, composed by John Luther Adams and scored for piano, percussion (crotales and vibraphone), and tape, is a good example of West Coast ambient music—and by “good,” this critic also means a value judgement. The work, more or less pentatonic in sound, traces a clearly defined sense of shape (gradually up-the-hill to down-the-hill in instrumental register and dynamics, with prerecorded sounds periodically washing over the proceedings like incoming waves) and is only long enough to make its point clearly—not a jot more. It’s a fine listen. Would that Moiya Callahan’s Magnify had exercised as judicious a use of blue pencil. This piano and percussion duo certainly has the right idea, built as it is from sections consisting of bubbly, energetic, usually pointillist staccato material tossed back and forth between the two players, culminating in a laid-back coda where the piano finally hits and holds the chords. But sorry to say, it’s too repetitive and lengthy to sustain interest. These last three selections were wonderfully well given by Ensemble Sirius (Michael Fowler, keyboards and Stuart Gerber, percussion). Both performers demonstrated a fine sense of ensemble balance, spot-on control, fully capable technique, and crisp rhythmic delineation in passages that called for it.
Saturday’s concert, featuring student performer enrolled in the institute, was not reviewed.
A most enthusiastic “hats off” goes out to Drury and his dog pound of talented pooches, a far from mangy bunch that would make any new music listener howl with delight.
--David Cleary