Roles Played by Pianist Adam Tendler

Adam Tendler “unpreparing” his piano while discussing the music of John Cage at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles in 2018 (from Adam Tendler’s Web site)

Last night in the Sol Joseph Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), the Ross McKee Foundation presented the latest installment in its Piano Talks series. The speaker/pianist for the occasion was Adam Tendler, visiting from New York. The title of the program was Role Playing; and the talking amounted to a “confession” in the sense of Augustine of Hippo or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, using autobiography to frame thoughts about the development of a belief system. In Tendler’s case, those beliefs involved his approach to the contemporary piano repertoire.

Tendler began by citing the first pianist he encountered that interested him, William Kapell. Kapell was probably the first American to establish himself as a leading pianist. However, he died tragically at the age of 31 on October 29, 1953, when the flight he took to return from a tour of Australia crashed while on approach to San Francisco International Airport.

It was through a Kapell recording of “Toccata Ostinato” that Tendler first learned of the composer Robert Moffat Palmer, whose music currently receives almost no attention. Tendler tried to remedy this situation by beginning his program with a performance of Palmer’s second piano sonata, composed in 1942 and revised in 1948, available only as a photocopy of the manuscript. Like the toccata, the music has this odd quality of sounding both fresh and dated at the same time; but the selection served well as an overture to Tendler’s reflections of the different roles he has played over the course of his life.

Each of those roles provided the framework for a different approach to repertoire. Thus, the “Youth Roles” were represented by two short selections by Béla Bartók, reinforced by Tendler’s reflection on a desire to perform all six volumes (constituting 153 short pieces) of that composer’s pedagogical Mikrokosmos collection. Palmer and Bartók were two of the three composers represented by two selections. The third was John Cage, first with a prepared piano composition, “The Unavailable Memory of,” in the “Fledgling Roles” section and then with a performance of 4’33” associated with the time Tendler spent living in Texas. As an interlocutor, Tendler was impressive in his ability to discuss Cage while setting up the preparations of his piano at the same time.

I was pleased to see that the Cage selections were complemented by the music of his youngest New York School colleague, Christian Wolff. Wolff also composed for prepared piano, but Tendler represented him with a performance of the first of two pieces called simply “For Piano.” The relationships between sound and silence in this piece, composed in 1952, provided just the right context for 4’33”, composed in the same year. Tendler could not resist citing James Pritchett’s impressively scholarly The Music of John Cage; but I still think the best way to get at this still-startling “study of silence” can be found in I-VI, the book of Cage’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University, which also includes transcriptions of the Q&A sessions he held with Harvard students following each of the lectures.

On the whole Tendler’s musical selections were consistently engaging, with just the right amount of diversity to sustain a full-evening recital. His spoken delivery, on the other hand, tended to ramble more than it should have done. I got the impression that Tendler was speaking spontaneously when, given the wide scope of his reflections, he could have been better rehearsed. I would also take the SFCM staff to task for dimming the lights so low as to make it difficult to read the program sheet, particularly when Tendler ventured into less familiar composers and their works. Nevertheless, there was so much to engage the attentive listener in this program that I would have no trouble experiencing its entirety a second time.