AnnaLotte Smith at Old First Concerts

The holiday weekend did not turn out to be a good one for the Old First Concerts series at Old First Presbyterian Church. Those that read my account of the vocal recital by Jill Morgan Brenner on Friday evening know that it left much to be desired. Sadly, things did not fare much better yesterday afternoon.

AnnaLotte Smith at the piano keyboard in Old First Presbyterian Church (screen shot from the YouTube video of yesterday’s performance)

The program was a solo recital by pianist AnnaLotte Smith entitled Songs My Mother Taught Me. The justification for that title in the program book could not have been more muddled; and, if Smith could not express herself clearly and concisely through text, then her approach to keyboard performance did not fare much better. Indeed, she decided to make a replacement for the first work on her program; and her microphone skills were so inept that, after having replayed the video several times, I still have not the foggiest idea of what that first selection was (or even who composed it).

Fortunately, the afternoon had a high point. This was “Reflets dans l’eau,” the first of the three compositions in the first of the two “books” in Claude Debussy’s Images collection of six solo piano pieces. Smith was at her best in making sure that all of the notes were in the right place, resulting in a convincing sense of flow from one phrase to the next. Debussy’s solo compositions are rarely short of challenging, and Smith definitely knew how to rise to the challenge.

Sadly, this was the only prince in a swamp full of frogs. The earliest work on the program was the collection of three intermezzo compositions in Johannes Brahms’ Opus 117. Each of these is a polished gem of structure and expressiveness, but all of that polish was obscured by uneven dynamics and muddled phrasing. The same could be said of her approach to the final work on the program, the fourth piece in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 16 collection, Moments musicaux. On the contemporary side, her approach to Reena Esmail’s “Rang De Basant” fell far short on Nicholas Phillips account at last year’s San Francisco International Piano Festival.

The other recent composition was Monica Chew’s “Ice Calf.” This is one of those “environmentally sensitive” works, whose “message” could probably have been communicated better through electronic mail. The “calf” came across more like a bucking bronco. Unfortunately, I had missed the opportunity to listen to Chew play this piece when she contributed to a Centuries of Sound program at The Century Club of California in September of 2022. So I cannot account for how much my impressions were due to the music and how much were due to the performance.

On the other hand, I can say, with certainty, that Smith’s journey through “centuries of music” left much to be desired. That included her attempt at levity in her encore. This was a four-hand (the other two hands never identified) take on the second in Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies collection. This was clearly intended as comedy, but Spike Jones was much better at that sort of thing.