June 17, 2009: A virtual Carnegie Hall recital

Notwithstanding the fact that the entire multimedia extravaganza of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall can be experienced virtually through YouTube itself, the greatest joys of Carnegie Hall tend to come from its more "bread-and-butter" offerings.  When I lived in Stamford, Connecticut (a short and easy train ride into Manhattan), the Carnegie Hall programs I most enjoyed were the piano recitals.  Now that I am in San Francisco, I find myself eager to experience those recitals virtually whenever possible, even when the virtual world can only support an audio track.

Virgin Classics has provided such an experience with their two-CD release of the recital given by Piotr Anderszewski at Carnegie on December 3, 2008.  I was particularly curious about this recital, since I had been rather disappointed with Anderszewski's performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 491 C minor piano concerto when he visited the San Francisco Symphony this past April.  My curiosity was then enhanced by Richard Fairman's Financial Times review of Anderszewski's Festival Hall recital in London this past Tuesday.  For one thing there were some important overlaps between London and New York;  but I was also struck by Fairman describing Anderszewski as "a philosopher pianist who seeks out music by sinking a line deep into a pool of artistic consciousness."  Given my own preoccupations with both philosophy and the more general study of consciousness, I found myself compelled to find out whether the New York/London Anderszewski was significantly different from the "San Francisco version."

Well, as the French seem to delight in saying, "Vive la différence!"  To be fair, Anderszewski selected a much broader variety of composers for his Carnegie Recital:  Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert Schumann, Leoš Janácek, and Ludwig van Beethoven (in that order).  Unfortunately, his decision to perform the Adagio movement from the C minor piano sonata by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (K. 457) was excluded from the Virgin Classics recording (as was another encore of more Bach).  This was personally frustrating, since his approach to K. 457 might have offered at least a few clues about any thoughts he had about K. 491 independent of those he arrived it through working with conductor Stéphane Denève in San Francisco.  However, I was content that the encore he took of Béla Bartók's Three Folk Songs From the Csík District (Sz. 35a) was included.

Whether or not I would endorse Fairman's hyperbolic intellectualizations, this recording leaves no doubt that Anderszewski is a highly acute listener, regardless of the genre of music to which he is listening;  and, as a performer, he makes it his goal to share that acuity with his audience.  Thus, his approach to Bach is one that addresses the question of just how we are to listen to an intricate fabric of contrapuntal lines.  This is the same approach that Frank French took in his performance of the 48 preludes and fugues in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier;  and Anderszewski's interpretation of the BWV 826 C minor partita was nothing short of electrifying in the insights it offered.  His Schumann ("Faschingsschwank aus Wien"), on the other hand, was rich in both counterpoint and harmony;  but for Anderszewski the key to listening was to be found in the diversity of dynamics and tempi, both of which were subject to abrupt variation demanding intense technical skill.  For Janácek Anderszewski took yet another strategy, approaching him as a composer primarily of sonorities, demonstrating that "V Mlách" ("In the Mists"), Janácek's last piano composition, had as much richness of sound as his orchestral works.  Finally, his selection of Beethoven's Opus 110 A-flat major sonata allowed him to bring together all of these different component elements in a single composition.  The result was a recital given by a serious listener encouraging his audience to join him in his serious listening experiences.  We should thank Virgin Classics for production qualities that enabled Anderszewski's ambitions to proceed beyond the walls of Carnegie Hall into the virtual world.