It appears that both my fellow SF Classical Music Examiner, Elizabeth
Morgan, and I were equally impressed with the way in which Angela
Hewitt conceived the program for her recital last night at Herbst
Theatre. Morgan
was particularly attracted by the connection between the dance pieces
that constituted most of the movements of the two partitas by Johann
Sebastian Bach (BWV 825 and 826) and the "Tänze" part of the title of Robert Schumann's Opus 6, Davidsbündlertänze. I, on the other hand, saw this program as an opportunity to explore a more general picture of the influence of Bach on Schumann,
focusing more on both what John Daverio and Eric Sams, in the Grove
Music Online article about Schumann, called "the genre of the keyboard
miniature" and the impact of Bach's contrapuntal "grammar." Alas, what
looked good on paper never really emerged in Hewitt's performances,
making last night's event a somewhat perplexing experience for the
serious listener.
Beginning with the most successful part of
the evening, the Schumann Opus 22 piano sonata in G minor is a monster
of challenges to the performer. It begins with the tempo marking "So
rasch wie möglich" (as fast as possible) and provides few opportunities
to catch one's breath, whether one is the performer or the listener. In
the midst of that same flood of restless energy that pervades the much
more mature Opus 63 D minor trio (performed so excellently yesterday by
the Tilden Trio),
Hewitt took a secure and confident approach, basically letting the
tumult speak for itself but never giving in to it. All that was missing
was a sense of that cadenza (marked as such in the score) in the final
movement, which provided as much of a link to Bach (through, for
example, the fifth Brandenburg concerto) as did Schumann's contrapuntal
dexterity. However, given the pace at which Schumann required the
pianist to hurtle through that final movement, it is easy for that sense
of cadenza to get lost amidst all those demands for faster tempo.
Similarly, at those speeds, counterpoint, no matter how elaborately
structured it may have been, reduces to texture, rather than any sort of
"conversational interplay" among the voices. This idea of counterpoint as texture
was actually very popular throughout much of the twentieth century,
having been promoted early in the century by Donald Francis Tovey; but
more recently pianists have begun to apply the conversation metaphor to
excellent effect. In Frank French we in San Francisco have one of the better examples of a pianist who makes the most of this metaphor.
This
brings us to Hewitt's approach to Bach. She is definitely in the more
recent camp; and, in the two partitas she performed, her keyboard
technique was excellent for providing the listener with a clear sense of
both how many voices were in play and how those voices "conversed."
The problem had less to do with technique and more to do with what was
being conversed, as it were. Hewitt had a tendency to milk every note
in ways that conveyed a sense of affectation rather than significance.
This is a practice that flourished in the nineteenth century and would
certainly be consistent with the spirit of Franz Liszt. Thus, had she
decided to perform some of Liszt's transcriptions of Bach organ music,
her approach might have rung true to the source text; but, if one is
committed to working with any of the editions of the partitas accepted
as authoritative, that kind of affectation distorts the underlying
syntax, rather than clarifying it for the listener. Whether or not one
accepts Morgan's claim about the dance-like nature of the movements
(which I personally do not), that "genre of the keyboard miniature"
depends heavily on such clear syntax, meaning that that partitas that
began and concluded Hewitt's recital were ultimately disappointing.
The same can be said for the eighteen miniatures of the Davidsbündlertänze. One would think that Schumann's apparent affinity for the Sturm und Drang movement
would have found compatibility in the affectations that Hewitt brought
to her performance. However, just as those affectations ultimately
distorted any sense of Bach's syntax, they also undermined any sense of
the miniature in each of those eighteen movements. Thus, what could
have been a highly dramatic narrative unfolding from the coded presences
of Clara Wieck and Schumann's two fictional personalities, Florestan
and Eusebius, quickly devolved into Winston Churchill's famous
characterization of history without narrative, "one damned thing
after another." To be fair to Hewitt, she is far from the only pianist
to have foundered on these extended multi-movement compositions,
particularly from Schumann's early period, that offer few, if any, clues
to the nature of the journey from beginning to middle to end; but, to
be fair to those of us on the listening side of the hall, there are any
number of sources she could have consulted to address the problem,
possibly even including the narrative of the choreography conceived by George Balanchine for this music.
Where
the spirit of affectation paid off was in the one encore that Hewitt
took, Mary Howe's transcription of the "Sheep may safely graze" aria
from Bach's BWV 208, the secular cantata Was mir behagt, is nur die muntre Jagd! While active in the first half of the twentieth century, Howe's approach to composition is described in her Wikipedia entry
as neo-romantic, which is consistent with both her affiliation with
Leopold Stokowski and her approach to this particular transcription.
The Ebook30.com page
that summarizes Hewitt's CD of Bach arrangements (illustrated above)
describes this particular selection as her favorite encore; and she
certainly performed it that way. Nevertheless, did we have to wait the
entire evening before the spirit of Hewitt's approach to performance was
revealed in a positive light?
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