Yesterday evening the Piano Break series presented by the Ross McKee Foundation streamed a solo recital by Zak Mustille. Born in 2003, he is currently a scholarship student in the Pre-College Division at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) and last year was the winner of the 2020 Ross McKee Young Artist Competition. The video was not “live,” with the second half recorded at the SFCM Recital Hall. The first half may well have been recorded at Mustille’s home. The entire video is now available for viewing on YouTube.
The program Mustille prepared was a seriously challenging one, taking on grand designs from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The twentieth-century selection was the second movement of Charles Ives’ first piano sonata. This is an ambitious undertaking for even the most accomplished pianists. The sonata is in five movements, but both the second and fourth of those movements are divided into “A” and “B” sections.
When I was living in Santa Barbara, I had a piano teacher that was determined to have me work through the “A” section of the fourth movement, which amounts to a little more than three pages. On the first two pages I marked out “1 & 2 &” for every measure, not that it helped very much when I had the negotiate the seven-against-ten in one of those measures! This is the shortest section of the entire sonata, and to this day I cannot recall how I managed to negotiate it all.
Nevertheless, those few pages of the fourth movement are a walk in the park compared with the second movement that Mustille performed. The second (“Concord”) sonata gets far more attention than the first; and I have been fortunate enough to listen to several recital performances of it. On the other hand, prior to yesterday evening, I knew the first sonata only through a few recordings. From a thematic point of view, there are several tropes that will be recognized by those familiar with the general Ives canon. Never the less, this is one of those pieces for which attentive listening can be as challenging as the act of performing.
The advantage of having this performance on video is that one can revisit individual selections. Last night’s “first encounter” tended to dwell on Mustille’s intense focus during his performance. I suspect that focus was abetted by his decision to play the movement from memory. That may have been a challenging goal to meet, but it gets beyond the hazard that all those notes on the printed pages can distract as easily as they can inform. Since it has been some time since the last time I even listened to a recording of this sonata, I have no baseline against which I can assess Mustille’s interpretative skills; but giving a clear account of all the marks on paper is well over 90% of getting the job done. However, on the basis of how he has handled this one movement, Mustille has left me curious about what he can do with the other four.
The ambitious selection from the nineteenth century was the second movement of Charles-Valentin Alkan’s Opus 33 sonata, given the title “Grande sonate: Les quatre âges” (grand sonata: the four ages). The four movements portray a man at the ages of twenty, thirty, forty, and fifty. As a result, the tempo markings tend to get slower as the sonata progresses, a significant departure from what one tends to expect of sonata architecture. Mustille played the second movement (the age of thirty), which is given the subtitle “Quasi-Faust.” Raymond Lewenthal described this movement as “actually a tone poem within a tone poem ... it forms the apex of the sonata and it is the longest and most difficult movement. It stands very well by itself and no one performing it without the other movements need fear being criticised for serving up a bleeding chunk.”
Mustille rose to Alkan’s challenges as impressively has he had to those of Ives. Once again, his focus was facilitated by having memorized the score. I must confess that few thoughts of Faust came to me while listening to this selection. On the other hand I was quickly hooked by the fugal episode in the movement, which I later learned involved eight independent voices.
I was also impressed that Mustille chose to follow this Alkan movement with a bagatelle by Nicholas Pavkovic. It would not surprise me if he played this selection as part of his Competition performances, since Pavkovic is Executive Director of the Ross McKee Foundation. Indeed, I was first aware of Pavkovic as a composer when one of his compositions was performed at the very first Hot Air Festival presented by SFCM students.
In many respective Pavkovic’s technical challenges were right up there with both Alkan and Ives. There may also have been a bit of playfulness in the way he labeled his composition. The bagatelles of Ludwig van Beethoven were some of the shortest pieces he ever wrote. Pavkovic’s bagatelle, on the other hand, ventures into a relatively broad space of technical challenges in rhythmic contexts that sometimes reflect on the wild imaginations of Ives. Thus, in some respects, the overall Piano Break recital emerged as a “trinity” of ambitious undertakings by Alkan, Pavkovic, and Ives.
The program opened on much more familiar turf, the BWV 868 prelude-fugue coupling in B major, taken from the first book of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. This was an excellent selection to prepare the attentive listener for Mustille’s clarity of “diction,” particularly in his accounting for the independent fugal lines. In addition, the Pavkovic and Ives selections were separated by Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 52 ballade in F minor, the last of the four ballades that he composed. This performance was recorded at SFCM, and it was hard to avoid the feeling that Mustille was playing it because someone told him he had to do so! While the execution was technically capable, he never seemed to tap into the undercurrents of spirit, which had made his approaches to Alkan, Pavkovic, and Ives so compelling.
