Last night cellist Jay Campbell returned to Herbst Theatre for the second program in the San Francisco Performances Great Artists and Ensembles series. This served as a follow-up to the first program in the series, featuring violinist Miranda Cuckson, which took place exactly one week ago. Campbell was joined by pianist Conor Hanick, who devoted half of the program to solo compositions by Franz Schubert and György Ligeti. These were framed by the duo performances, the first being “gretchen am spinnrade” by Eric Wubbels and the final offering being Francis Poulenc’s sonata for cello and piano. Taken as a whole, the program served up a prodigious variety of emotional dispositions.
The duo decidedly hit the ground running with “gretchen am spinnrade.” It did not take long for even a casual listener to recognize that this music had nothing to do with either Schubert or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The composer himself provided his own description of the music, distilled down to a single sentence: “A manic, hounded piece, alternating relentless motoric circuits with plateaus of regular, ‘idling’ motion.” One could almost associate the music with the dysfunctional world of RoboCop, where the motto is “I’d buy that for a dollar!”
Dysfunctional or not, “gretchen am spinnrade” was definitely music that forced the listener to sit up and take notice. Both Campbell and Hanick seemed to be expending all of their energy for the entire evening on this one dynamo of a composition. At the very least, one would say that this was music that could not possibly be ignored. Personally, I had no trouble being drawn into its dispositional mix of the dynamic and the diabolic, suggesting that, in Goethe’s world, this music had far more to do with Mephistopheles than with Gretchen. For that matter, I would be only too happy for an opportunity to listen to it a second time.
The second half of the program consisted entirely of the Poulenc sonata. The composer began work on this sonata in 1940 but was interrupted by the German occupation. It was completed in 1948; but a corrected edition was published in 1953 (presumably with the composer’s approval). This is very much music for high spirits, meaning that it could not have been a better complement to the program’s opening selection. Back in the early Sixties, Poulenc was recognized as a major composer; but that reputation receded very quickly not long after his death in 1963. The good news is that both Campbell and Hanick knew how to tap into that spirited rhetoric. The sonata may not be “back in vogue;” but, given my own background, I found it more than a little comforting to listen to this music some 60 years after the composer’s death.
Connor Hanick (photography by Laura Desberg, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)
If the duo performances proceeded from present to past, Hanick’s solo offerings took the opposite direction. He began with the last of the four impromptus in both of the Schubert collections. D. 899 and D. 935. Both were high-paced compositions, providing the pianist with the best possible opportunity to display dexterity.
He then shifted over to the recent past with three of György Ligeti’s études, two from his first book (“Fanfares” and “Arc-en-ciel”) and one from the second (“L'escalier du diable”). (The English translations for the second and third études are “rainbow” and “the Devil’s staircase.”) To some extent one may say that all of Ligeti’s études have a diabolical streak, and Hanick’s interpretations tended to reflect that position. Personally, I was a bit saddened to realize how long it had been since I had heard any of Ligeti’s études either in recital or on recording. As a result. I was more than a little elated by Hanick’s juxtaposition of Ligeti with Schubert.
Now I find myself curious as to how Hanick would plan a full-evening recital!
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