In contrast to the ZOFO recital given at the end of last month,
the four-hand piano recital given by Patricia and Vera Purcell as a
Memorial Concert for their mother, Olga Purcell, in today's Noontime Concerts™
offering, was more suited to the salon than the concert hall. This
made the setting of Old St. Mary's Cathedral a bit out of place, but the
Purcell sisters had no trouble establishing and maintaining the salon
spirit. That spirit was firmly declared by the decision to open the
recital with the overture to Gioachino Rossini's La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie).
Rossini was very much in his element in the salon; and the Purcell
sisters performed a four-hand transcription by Richard Kleinmichel, who
was contemporary with Rossini and probably prepared that transcription
for just such a setting. The tremolo imitations of the drum rolls may
have sounded a bit contrived, but all of the melodic and harmonic voices
had been assigned their proper place by Kleinmichel. Most importantly,
however, the Purcell sisters perfectly captured the rhetorical element
so important to this overture, as it is to so many of Rossini's
composition, the crescendo sustained over an extended duration. Since
this is an overture with a rather simple recapitulation structure, that
crescendo has to be executed twice, preferably with a greater sense of
climax the second time. Achieving this effect with only twenty fingers
on one keyboard is no mean feat, but the Purcell sisters pulled it off
as a natural component element of their technical skills.
Rossini was followed by two movements from Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite
as edited by Constantin Sternberg and arranged for four-hand piano by
E. Langer, presumably when it was published by Schirmer in 1918. This
may thus reflect material more suitable for an American living room in
the early twentieth century, rather than a nineteenth-century European
salon; but it almost certainly comes from a time when Americans would
get their music from a piano, rather than any device for playing
recorded music. From what I could gather from the Schirmer catalog,
this was an arrangement for "advanced" performers; and one quickly sees
why. Tchaikovsky conceived the overture as a very intimate
composition, confined for the most part to a highly limited pitch
range. Consequently, all four hands must be playing very close together
most of the time, which can pose major coordination challenges. On the
other hand the "Waltz of the Flowers" involves an orchestral setting
that is both rich and broad; so in this case coordination is a matter
of fitting all the notes into the twenty fingers. Again, the Purcell
sisters met these challenges with no evident difficulty.
All this,
however, was simply to warm up for their showpiece, which was their own
transcription of Tchaikovsky's Opus 49, his 1812 overture. This may
not have been quite as daunting a challenge as Igor Stravinsky's four-hand version of The Rite of Spring,
but it certainly came close. Most important was the way in which the
Purcell sisters communicated the diversity of orchestral textures that
Tchaikovsky had engaged while limited to their own resources. This, of
course, excluded those sound effects that have become a tradition at
Fourth of July concerts; and I have to confess that I was waiting for
one of them to pull a pop-gun out for the grand finale! Fortunately,
they stayed focused on their keyboard, which certainly gave them more
than enough to do to arrive at an effective execution.
Ironically,
the only music originally written for four-hand piano was saved for the
encore, the first of Johannes Brahms' settings of Hungarian dances.
Thus, the theme of the concert had more to do with different approaches
to transcription. However, as pianists such as Mack McCray
have demonstrated, this is certainly a worthy theme; and the Purcell
sisters gave it all of the respectful treatment it deserved.
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