Yesterday evening pianist Jonathan Biss gave his own preview of the recital he will be playing this evening in Herbst Theatre. The event
(in the "Concert with Conversation" series organized by San Francisco
Performances) took place in the modest setting of the Community Music
Center at 544 Capp Street in the Mission District. The selections from
the recital that Biss performed here were Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K.
457 sonata in C minor, five pieces from György Kurtág's Játékok
(Hungarian for "games"), and the Opus 59 mazurkas of Frédéric Chopin,
followed by his Opus 27, Number 2 nocturne in D-flat major. The spirit
of the event was set by the humorously self-deprecating (because Biss
probably wrote it himself) "Meet the Artist" handout, which made for a
refreshing change from the usual list of impressive performances and awards.
(This statement joked about Biss first being influenced by music as a
fetus; one wonders if his parents had also been reading aloud from
Woody Allen's New Yorker essays at that time.)
Since I
shall be at Davies Symphony Hall this evening, I was very eager to
attend this event. For one thing I have been consistently impressed
with Biss, both when he performed the Mozart K. 482 E-flat major piano
concerto last year with Herbert Blomstedt conducting the San Francisco Symphony and in his San Francisco Performances solo recital the preceding season.
Equally important, however, is that I have been fascinated with Kurtág
ever since I was exposed to him when San Francisco Performances
presented Marino Formenti's "San Francisco Piano Trips"
recitals in April of 2007. Games seem to be a major preoccupation for
Kurtág, as in the ludic nature of the "12 Mikroludien Für
Streichquartett" that constitute his "Hommage À Mihàly András,"
performed this past fall
in the first of the Chamber Music Masters concerts at the San Francisco
Conservatory of Music. Another preoccupation, which was the focus of
the first of Formenti's "piano trips," is with the full scope of Western
music history. Yet, with such broad interests, Kurtág is a master of
what I recently called the "architecture of brevity." Thus, Biss compared the (currently) seven-volume collection of Játékok with the miniaturist Mikrokosmos
collection of Béla Bartók; and, as I previously observed, the very
word "Mikroludien" is most likely an invented word that provides a "mash
up" of Mikrokosmos, the plural of the German for "prelude" that we find in the scores of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the Latin ludus for "game."
Needless
to say, such music cannot be performed without a strong sense of wit.
Biss displayed that wit first in introducing the music to the audience
and then in performing it. For those of us who tend to overdose on
piano recitals, Kurtág's playfulness was most obvious in "The girl with
flaxen hair in a rage" (title translated from the Hungarian), which
might invoke a rather inadequate music student wanting to play Claude
Debussy in the worst way (as Abraham Lincoln put it in describing his
dancing with Mary Todd). Someone once said that comedy is about being
fearless enough to take a pie in the face, and Biss approached this
particular composition with that kind of fearlessness.
It was also
interesting to see him offer Kurtág immediately after the Mozart C
minor sonata. A week ago I was writing that every Mozart composition in
a minor key "is a gem in its own right,"
while grousing that last week's performance of the K. 491 C minor piano
concerto at the San Francisco Symphony never really got into the "minor
spirit" of the work. Biss had no trouble at all capturing that "minor
spirit." Introducing the work to the audience, he stressed that
"turbulence and tension" (my words, not his) that I found missing last
week as critical factors that would surface again in the piano sonatas
of Ludwig van Beethoven. He also pointed out one motivic fragment that
may well have served as a trigger for The second movement of
Beethoven's Opus 13 ("Pathétique") sonata (also in C minor).
Biss
is not afraid to experiment with new ways of listening. Thus, he chose
to play the three Chopin mazurkas almost as if they were a single
continuous composition, rather than just three works collected under a
single opus number. He observed that, because these works are
relatively late, he was drawn to their introspective nature. Thus, it
was as if he decided to treat the collection as a single meditation,
which, for this particular set, worked quite well (without detracting
from the power of the D-flat major nocturne to stand on its own).
The
"conversation" part of the evening was a brief question-and-answer
session following the music. Biss was as comfortable with this as he
had been with providing introductory remarks. Many people in the
audience were eager to question him on a variety of matters, and he was
always ready with a friendly and informative response. This was the
first "Concert with Conversation" event I have attended. If they all
come off as well as this one, then San Francisco Performances has come
up with a great way to combine education and community outreach; and I
shall make it a point to cover similar events next season.
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