I last heard Tessa Seymour, now fifteen years old, a little less than
two years ago when she played the cello solo in a San Francisco
Symphony Youth Orchestra performance of Ernest Bloch's "Schelomo."
This had been my second exposure to her playing, the first having been
at a chamber music recital of the Preparatory Division of the San
Francisco Conservatory of Music (where she still studies) the previous
May. That first exposure was, to pardon the expression, a real
whopper. Her Luna Trio performed only excerpts from Dmitri
Shostakovich's second piano trio in E minor (Opus 67); but they
included the darkest moods of the composition's final movement
in one of the most bone-chilling interpretations I have heard. I have
to confess that I was both dumbfounded and concerned that kids so young
could be taking on such raw emotional content; but that same lightning
struck again as I listened to Seymour's performance of "Schelomo."
Nevertheless, with all due respect to both Bloch and Shostakovich, these were both works of heart-on-sleeve emotionalism,
however well crafted that emotionalism may have been. Indeed, as I
have previously observed, "Schelomo" was composed at a time "when the cerebral nature of serial music was all the rage;"
and, while we can now appreciate Bloch for sticking to his personal
aesthetic guns, the question remains of how Seymour would manage with
some of that more "cerebral" material. Well, I have yet to hear her
take on anything from the serial repertoire; but today, in her Noontime Concerts™
recital at Old St. Mary's Cathedral, Seymour turned to Claude Debussy's
1915 sonata and Johannes Brahms' first sonata in E minor (Opus 38),
both personal favorites of mine about which I have written frequently.
While both of these sonatas have highly dramatic elements, they are also
very much compositions for those "little grey cells" of what I like to call "the ear-mind coupling;" and I am happy to report that Seymour's little grey cells were definitely up to the demands that these compositions impose.
It
may be that the reason she can deal with the cerebral as well as the
emotional is that she plays with a concentration so intense that her
body rarely reflects the nature of what she is playing. However, just
when you think that she has locked herself into some sort of programmed
behavior, she lets loose with a spontaneous physical gesture, such as
the foot-stamp that added an accentual kick to the final climax of the
Debussy sonata. Similarly, while her body may have been the still
center of the universe, it was clear that she was intensely wrapped up
within the interplay of voices in the fugue of the final movement of the
Brahms sonata. In writing about Steven Isserlis' cello master class
last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I referred to "his voracious love of repertoire."
Seymour is still building up her command of the repertoire, but I doubt
that it will be long before she is challenging Isserlis over breadth of
scope.
Then there was her encore, the fiendishly difficult "Dance
of the Elves" by David Popper (his Opus 39). She played it almost as
if it was her idea of fun, leading me to wonder whether the intensity of
her concentration comes naturally in some way that I had not previously
imagined. (I was reminded of Peter Shaffer having Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart declare in his Amadeus script that he found setting up a
complex billiards shot more engaging than counterpoint.) Popper's burst
of virtuosity used to be one of Mstislav Rostropovich's encore pieces;
but, while Gregor Piatigorsky used to harangue his students at the
University of Southern California for sounding too much like
Rostropovich recordings, no one can direct such an accusation at
Seymour. Her sound may reflect the influence of her teachers, but it is
becoming her own and seems to be reflecting her personal growth
progress.
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