Benjamin Grosvenor’s 20th Century Tops his 19th

British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor made his San Francisco Performances (SFP) debut in April of 2013, serving as recitalist for the annual gift concert. Last night he returned to give his first “ticketed” recital in Herbst Theatre as part of this season’s SFP Piano Series. In the interim, in September of 2014, he made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony performing Maurice Ravel’s piano concerto “in G,” one of the selections on his first concerto album released by Decca.

At the core of last night’s program, Grosvenor presented two “gems” from the early twentieth century, both distinguished for the amount of expression they could pack into relatively brief periods of time. The first of these was the piano sonata that Leoš Janáček entitled “1.X.1905;” and the second was Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 22, a collection of twenty miniatures entitled “Visions fugitives.” These short pieces were framed by more “monumental” selections from the nineteenth century. The first half of the program was devoted entirely to Robert Schumann, coupling his Opus 19 “Blumenstück” (flower piece) to his Opus 16 cycle Kreisleriana. “Visions fugitives,” was, in turn, followed by Franz Liszt’s “Réminiscences de Norma.”

The title of Janáček’s sonata is the date of a Czech workers’ demonstration at which one of the demonstrators was bayoneted. It consists of two relatively short movements that provide a before-and-after account of the episode. The first is entitled “Foreboding” and advances through a circulation of intense motivic fragments at a Con moto tempo. This is followed by an Adagio movement entitled simply “Death.” This movement is also structured around motifs; but the motifs are slightly longer in duration and the overall rhetoric is less fragmented. Grosvenor seemed aware of how the intensity of this composition derived from the turbulent flow of Janáček’s thematic materials; and, even in the absence of the full narrative behind the sonata’s title, the attentive listener could easily respond to the urgency of the composer’s rhetoric.

Prokofiev composed his Opus 22 between 1915 and 1917, giving the piece its premiere performance on April 15, 1918 in Petrograd (the name the Soviet Union initially gave to Saint Petersburg—it would later be called Leningrad). The following month he would leave for the United States and completed immigration processing on August 11, 1918. Through his connection with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Prokofiev was well aware of what Igor Stravinsky had been doing with dissonance; and, in many respects, one might (in the spirit of Hokusai) call Opus 22 “twenty ways of listening to dissonance.” Grosvenor definitely knew how to endow each of these short pieces with its own individual identity, but the sense of that identity would probably have been better grasped had the program book allocated enough space to list the tempo markings of the individual movements.

These crystalline examples of modernism provided by both composers seemed to be Grosvenor’s sweet spot for the evening. His approach to Schumann tended to be on the erratic side. This certainly was consistent with how the author E. T. A. Hoffmann had developed the character of the musician Johannes Kreisler, for whom Opus 16 was named. However, Grosvenor’s execution tended to exaggerate the mood swings in both directions, often obscuring Schumann’s underlying logic, which is just as relevant as his rhetoric. Furthermore, that somewhat warped mentality also tended to pervade the Opus 19, where there was less logic to support it. Here, again, the program book put the serious listener at a disadvantage, identifying each movement only by its initial tempo, rather than the richer internal structures denoted by tempo changes.

One of the final holograph pages of Liszt’s “Réminiscences de Norma” (from IMSLP, public domain)

At the other end of the evening, the program concluded with the Liszt selection, an arrangement of themes from Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Norma. This is a prime example of Liszt’s flamboyant display of technical virtuosity at its most excessive. Nevertheless, Grosvenor rose admirably to the many challenges posed by this composition, leaping all of the hurdles with astonishing facility. However, even the most capable execution, coupled with a sincere attempt to honor Liszt’s rhetoric, cannot save this piece from sounding like an archaeological discovery from the nineteenth century that should have been left buried.

Grosvenor took two encores, announcing neither of them. The first was probably one of the more technically flamboyant compositions by Moritz Moszkowski [added 3/16, 4:05 p.m.: the eleventh étude (in A-flat major) from his Opus 72 collection], and the execution was certainly delightful. This was followed by a more subdued selection by Edvard Grieg, most likely one of the the 66 short works he called Lyric Pieces, published over a series of ten volumes [added 3/16, 4:05 p.m.: “Erotikk” (erotikon) from the Opus 43 (third) volume]. Having not internalized the entire collection, I was not able to identify the specific composition [added 3/16, 4:10 p.m.: until I found it on the SFP event page for the recital]!