A Lump of Coal from Old First Concerts

Pianist Sandra Wright Shen (courtesy of Old First Concerts)

Yesterday afternoon at Old First Presbyterian Church, Old First Concerts concluded its month of holiday offerings with a solo piano recital by Steinway Artist Sandra Wright Shen. The program was a disconcertingly uneven one, significantly marred by the ill-prepared and poorly delivered chatter that Wright injected between her performances. As to the programming itself, she was at her best when she departed from music that could be called Christmas-themed.

The high point of the program came just before the intermission with a performance of “Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este” (the fountains of the Villa d’Este) from the “third year” of Franz Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage (years of pilgrimage) collection. Wright performed with impressive dexterity and a sense of phrasing through which the music emerged as more than a jumble of notes. Those virtues were also evident at the conclusion of the program in her execution of Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 20 (first) scherzo in B minor, selected because the middle section was based on a Polish Christmas carol. Liszt also contributed to the holiday spirit with four of the ten pieces collected under the title Weinachtsbaum (Christmas tree), each of which was based on a Christmas carol. However, while these selections were based on familiar themes, Wright’s musicianship fell short of her account of the more demanding Liszt selection.

The remainder of the program was, for the most part, disconcerting, with two egregious disappointments rising above any of the “lesser peaks.” The Holiday Spirit was probably served most poorly by Wright’s decision to perform “Le baiser de l’Enfant-Jésus” (the kiss of the infant Jesus) from Olivier Messiaen’s monumental suite Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus (twenty contemplations on the infant Jesus). This is music for which even the most skilled dexterity is not enough. There is a semantic layer that is so rich with both denotation and connotation that Messiaen prepared roughly three pages of explanatory notes, which serve as a preface for the Durand publication of the score.

(That publication is in French. I have never seen a full English translation. My command of French is strong enough that I have never needed one.)

Between her rambling verbal comments and her execution, the evidence was pretty strong that Wright had not paid very much attention (if any) to Messiaen’s background material. From a strictly musical point of view, this was most evident in her failure to recognize the fundamental “thème de Dieu” (God theme), which is subjected to an impressive number of (transcendental?) transformations in the “Nativity Scene” of the movement she selected. Having had the opportunity to experience Messiaen’s music performed by several far more competent pianists (Yvonne Loriod, alas, was not one of them), the vacuity of Wright’s reading of the score struck me as particularly disconcerting.

Indeed, it was far more disconcerting than the other major disappointment, Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 829 partita in G major. Perhaps this is because I am cynical enough to begin with the hypothesis that only a handful of pianists are capable of playing Bach in a manner that is as expressively relevant as it is technically precise. For this selection Wright’s pre-performance babble dwelled on the dance forms and never seemed to rest on any solid foundation of dance history. It was therefore no surprise that there was hardly anything “dance-like” in her approach to the six movements given dance titles. The only good news from this performance was that she did not take any repeats, making the entire experience about half as long as it could have been.