June 16, 2009: A stimulating piano recital

Had I been granted the luxury of selecting a program to celebrate the completion of my radiation therapy, I could not have made a better choice than Carlos Avila did for his piano recital today for the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral.  He covered three centuries in three compositions, beginning with two sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti from the eighteenth century, continuing into the nineteenth century with Robert Schumann's Opus 12 Fantasiestücke, and concluding with what could well be judged a masterpiece of twentieth-century piano music by Frederick Rzewski, "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues."  In deference to my hyperbolic use of language, I shall examine these works in reverse order.

There is no questioning Rzewski's virtuosity as both a composer and a pianist.  His set of 36 variations on the political anthem "El Pueblo Unido Jamàs Serà Vencido!" has been compared (with good reason) to the 33 variations that Ludwig van Beethoven composed on a waltz (as simple as the anthem) given to him by Anton Diabelli or the two sets of variations (making for a total of 24) that Johannes Brahms composed on the (slightly more elaborate) final caprice of Niccolò Paganini's 24 Caprices.  Rzewski composed his set of variations in 1975;  and between 1978 and 1979 his shifted his attention from agitprop-political to folk-political, setting four North American ballads for solo piano.  "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues" is the fourth of those ballads;  and there is still a distinct political flavor, since the ballad is about the North Carolina textile mills of the 1930s.

If the "agitprop Rzewski" evokes the ghosts of both Beethoven and Brahms, the "folk Rzewski" honors a different set of progenitors.  As the title implies, this is a composition that follows both Sergei Prokofiev's machine-age ambition to compose a symphony "of iron and steel" (which would eventually become his second symphony) and his preparatory work for that project through his Opus 11 piano toccata.  However, this is also a work on the virtuosic scale of Franz Liszt's 1851 "Transcendental" etudes, but with its sights directed at solidly twentieth-century imagery, as Liszt's etudes had been inspired by themes of nineteenth-century romanticism.  Perhaps one way to describe Rzewski's music is that, if Liszt had lived long enough to have heard Jerry Lee Lewis, his approach to a "transcendental etude" may have changed and come out sounding like "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues."

Like many of Rzewski's compositions, this work requires a highly physical approach to performance.  Thus, when I say that Avila threw himself into his performance, I am not being entirely metaphorical.  This work is nothing less than an eruption of pianistic activity;  and, if the pianist does not erupt along with the music, the results comes out as little more than a jumble of notes.  Avila, on the other hand, got right into the working of the cotton mill, allowing the folk song to emerge, first in the form of a chorale prelude and subsequently as the dominant theme.  He deserves full praise for being ambitious enough to take on this amazing piece of work and skilled enough to rise to the level of his ambitions.

Schumann's Opus 12 was published a year after his 1836 C major fantasia (Opus 17), which was dedicated to Liszt.  However, it is unlikely that there was much influence in either direction beyond that shared interest in composing around the imagery of the romantic movement.  Schumann was more interested in rendering that imagery through relatively formal structures, usually following the ternary model that had served his predecessor, Franz Schubert, so well in his shorter piano compositions.  On the other hand one might say that Avila's approach to performing Schumann was decided Lisztisch (bearing in mind that musicians like Brahms only used that adjective with the most pejorative connotations), dwelling more on "transcendent moments," rather than the overall structure.  If nothing else, such an approach tends to shine a light on Schumann's fragile mental condition, even if it would be twenty years before that condition began to get the better of him.

Avila's approach to the two Scarlatti sonatas (Kirkpatrick numbers 135 and 380) was similarly Lisztisch, endowing them with layers of emotional expression that had probably never occurred to Scarlatti.  This very nineteenth-century approach tends to send Baroque purists up the wall;  but there was a time (before Ralph Kirkpatrick's cataloging efforts) when this was a perfectly respectable way to play these sonatas.  As Jimmy McNulty kept saying on The Wire (and I recently said about Tosca on my blog), "It is what it is."  By taking this nineteenth-century stance, Avila certainly set the tone for the rest of the recital;  and one cannot fault him for taking a consistent contextual approach to his entire performance.