Liszt Not at Top of Game in Pascucci’s Debut

Pianist Alvise Pascucci (from the Noontime Concerts event page for his solo piano recital)

Every now and then one encounters a recital (usually solo), which does not redeem itself until the encore selection. Sadly, this was the case at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral this afternoon, when Italian pianist Alvise Pascucci made his San Francisco debut in the third Solo Recital Series performance in this year’s San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF). The encore was “Au lac de Wallenstadt” (at Lake Wallenstadt), the first of nine pieces in the “Swiss Year” of Franz Liszt’s set of three suites collected under the title Années de pèlerinage (years of pilgrimage). Over the course of those suites, there is no end of Lisztian bombast, which makes his moments of quietude stand out just for being there. In that context “Au lac de Wallenstadt” is decidedly exceptional, and this afternoon Pascucci knew exactly how to present those exceptional qualities.

Unfortunately, to get to those qualities, one first had to contend with a program devoted entirely to Liszt’s arrangements for solo piano of the fourteen songs in one of Franz Schubert’s final compositions, his D. 957 Schwanengesang song cycle. The first thing one observes when one examines the Liszt publication is that the order of these songs has been altered from the way in which they were ordered for the song cycle. To be fair, the notes provided by Otto Erich Deutsch for this entry in his catalog suggest that Schubert, himself, never decided how to order these songs. Nevertheless, both vocalists and their listeners have come to accept an overall logic based on a structure of two “books” containing six and eight of the songs, respectively.

It should be no surprise that those who embrace that logic (present company included) are likely to react to Liszt’s ordering with more than a bit of a jolt. Most frustrating is that the cycle no longer concludes with the wistfulness of a carrier pigeon whose name is “Longing.” That is now the penultimate song, and the pigeon meets a dark fate at the hands of the warrior in the “Kriegers Ahnung” (warrior’s foreboding) song, which now concludes the cycle. (To be fair, the Schubert publication orders the songs according to the poets providing the texts: seven settings of Ludwig Rellstab, six by Heinrich Heine, and the last by Johann Gabriel Seidl. If there is any awkwardness, it involved the fact that the last of those Rellstab poems marks the beginning of the second “book” of the overall cycle.)

If the ordering of these songs was my only annoyance, I could probably live with it. However, almost all of these songs are subjected an abundance of violent over-the-top embellishments introduced by Liszt. This is Liszt at his most Lisztian; and even those that enjoy many (most?) of his flamboyant moments will probably acknowledge that, after a certain amount of exposure to that flamboyance, an absence of Liszt makes the heart grow fonder. Pascucci would to better to contemplate on the old adage that “enough is enough.” His undertaking of all fourteen Schwanengesang settings suggests a reluctance to show some awareness of when even the most attentive listener has had enough.