Yesterday afternoon Old First Presbyterian Church hosted the final program in this year’s the seventh annual San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF). Artistic Director Jeffrey LaDeur performed in all of the selections on the program, which included accompanying mezzo Kindra Scharich in Gabriel Fauré’s song cycle La bonne chanson, two duo performances with pianist Gwendolyn Mok (one for four hands on one keyboard and the other for two pianos), and two solos at the beginning of the program. The offering was presented in collaboration with LIEDER ALIVE!, whose Liederabend Series has provided a generous platform for both Scharich and LaDeur.
Their SFIPF offering was a cycle of nine poems by Paul Verlaine. (I must confess that I seem to have lost track of two of them during the performance.) What is particularly impressive about the source of these poems is a rich diversity of imagery, and Scharich’s delivery seemed to reflect the significance of the images being evoked. These are texts in which evocation takes precedence over signification, and Fauré had a knack for “evocative rhetoric” in many of his compositions. This was the central selection on the program, and it was very much a “keystone” for the “arch” of the overall program.
Jeffrey LaDeur playing Fauré at yesterday’s final SFIPF recital (screen shot from the YouTube video of this performance)
Appropriately enough, the vocal work was preceded by a solo Fauré piano selection, his Opus 63 (sixth) nocturne in D-flat major. LaDeur delivered a solid command of the interleaving polyphonic lines. One could call the piece a “fabric of connotations,” which prepared the listener for the semantic subtleties that would unfold over the course of La bonne chanson.
Fauré was preceded by Jean-Philippe Rameau with a solo piano arrangement (presumably by LaDeur himself) of an aria from the opera Castor et Pollux. The aria was “Tristes apprêts” (mournful solemnities). The Wikipedia page for this opera describes it as “one of Rameau’s most famous arias;” but I am not sure how many Rameau arias are familiar to how many listeners! My own acquaintance with Rameau operas dates back to my Examiner.com days, and I have had almost no contact with that repertoire in recent years. However, to the extent that I recall the past, I would say that, for better or worse, LaDeur’s approach to the arrangement he performed was not particularly true to the original source.
The first of LaDeur’s performances with Mok was the most familiar to me. This was Claude Debussy’s collection of six short pieces described as “épigraphes antiques.” These were composed as musical accompaniment for recitations of erotic poems by Pierre Louÿs from his collection Les Chansons de Bilitis. (I used to have a vinyl recording in which those recitations were included in the performance.) The setting was for four hands on a single keyboard, and I was fortunate enough to play this music with a neighbor. As a result, I appreciated (and enjoyed) the opportunity to listen to a more “professional” performance of the music.
Mok and LaDeur then took to individual pianos for the final selection, Florent Schmitt’s Opus 53. These were three pieces he described as “rhapsodies,” each with its own “nationality:” French, Polish, Viennese. I have to confess that this music had little impact on me, due, in some part, to my inability to discern “differences in character” across the three movements. To be fair, however, my encounters with Schmitt’s music have been few and far between. However, there may be reasons for this that Mok and LaDeur were not able to overcome!
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