Last night's recital in the Faculty Artist Series at the San
Francisco Conservatory of Music featured a performance by Mack McCray,
Chairman of the Piano Department; and, like his Piano Month recital in
the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral this past August,
it reflected the breadth of his appreciation of the piano repertoire,
not only in the program he prepared but also in the encores he
selected. The way in which McCray arranges his programs seems to hint
that he takes as much pleasure in teaching his audience about the
delights of diversity in that repertoire as he does in providing his
students with an education in the necessities of technique and
interpretation. For those of us who had been at Old St. Mary's, last
night began with a "return visit" to Joseph Haydn's G major sonata,
Hoboken XVI/6, a very early (probably pre-Eszterháza) work. Not enough
attention is paid to early Haydn, even in this bicentennial year,
perhaps under the assumption that there is so much more "meat" in his
later periods; but McCray made it clear that Haydn was already flexing
all of his creative muscles in this sonata, whether in harmonic
invention, overall structure, or a rich repertoire of embellishments,
which probably reflected his eager study of the Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.
To
provide us with an alternative perspective on inventiveness, McCray
then swung us from the mid-eighteenth century of Haydn to the early
twentieth century of Claude Debussy, performing the three movements of
his Estampes. I had the good fortune to observe McCray working
with one of his students on this music during an Open Classroom Day at
the Conservatory; and the "Pagodes" movement was prepared by another
Conservatory student for a Master Class given by Paul Roberts this past February.
Before McCray began his class, I was able to chat with him a bit about
the confusion between the Chinese connotations of the title and the
clearly Indonesian tone of the music. McCray's performance last night,
however, reminded me that, whatever the cultural influences may have
been, they were being thoroughly reworked by Debussy's own imagination.
Thus, while the Indonesian sounds that inspired Debussy depend heavily
on a steady pulse that changes very infrequently (if at all), McCray
brought out so much diversity in tempo that I had to go back to my score
to confirm that he was following Debussy's instructions to the letter!
McCray
also has a great interest in paraphrases, which received a fair amount
of attention in his August recital. One of his August selections,
Alexander Siloti's treatment of the E minor prelude from the first
volume of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, was
taken as an encore last night; but two other instances appeared on the
main program. The intermission was preceded by the "Concert Arabesques
on Motifs by Johann Strauss' 'By the Beautiful Blue Danube'" by Andrey Schulz-Evler,
which was very popular in virtuoso piano recitals in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Josef Lhevinne gave a
performance for "capture" on a Welte-Mignon Piano Roll on October 6,
1906.) However, Igor Stravinsky applied a strong shot of steroids to
the very nature of virtuosity with his 1921 transcription of three
movements from his 1911 ballet Petrushka. If Stravinsky used his four-hand version of The Rite of Spring (recently performed by ZOFO)
to work out (perhaps for himself as well as his listeners) distinctions
between foreground and background in the orchestral complexity of that
ballet, the Petrushka transcription is an almost defiant effort
to cram as much as possible from the orchestral score into the ten
fingers (and two pedal-pushing feet) of a single pianist. McCray's
command of Schulz-Evler's "old school" virtuosity was impressive; but
his approach to Stravinsky was as awesome as (I suspect) Stravinsky had
wanted it to be.
These two feats of transcription were separated
by two short selections by Frédéric Chopin, both completed in 1846, the
first of the Opus 62 nocturnes in B major and the Opus 60 barcarolle in
F-sharp major. While the latter is relatively familiar to those who
follow Chopin recital selections, the two Opus 62 nocturnes receive
comparatively less attention, except among pianists deciding to traverse
the complete canon of nocturnes. The B major nocturne goes beyond the
usual rhetoric of virtuosity with some intriguing inventiveness in both
melodic and harmonic ambiguity. One might go so far as to call it one
of Chopin's "experimental" pieces, particularly since we do not
associate him with such experimentation. If McCray wanted to bring our
attention to unjustly neglected repertoire, he certainly succeeded with
this selection.
McCray's Siloti encore was preceded by the only
piano composition that Johannes Brahms called a "romance," the fifth (in
F major) of his Opus 118 pieces. Brahms used the term frequently in
his vocal music; but the Opus 118 romance is definitely pianistic
writing, following the ternary form of most of his short piano works.
Written late in his life, this, along with the other Opus 118 pieces, is
sensitive and reflective, almost as if McCray wanted to remind us that
encores deserve the same serious listening as the rest of the program.
Taken as a whole, then, the entire evening was very much a "grand tour"
of repertoire, that may well have been as exhausting as it was
stimulating.
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