SFP Launches Season with Two Sets of Solo Piano

Pianists Natasha Paremski and Alfredo Rodríguez (from the SF Performances Blog)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) launched its 40th anniversary season with the first concert in the 2019–2020 Shenson Piano Series. My guess is that this was the first time that the Series divided a program into two distinctive sets, each presenting a different approach to piano virtuosity. The first set was taken by Natasha Paremski, making her second SFP appearance. This could be called the “recital” set. The intermission was then followed by a set featuring jazz pianist Alfredo Rodríguez, currently SFP Jazz Artist-in-Residence. This was also Rodríguez’ second SFP appearance.

Paremski almost packed enough into the first half of the evening to account for an entire program. She gave a concentrated account of three of the most technically challenging compositions in the solo piano repertoire. The most familiar of these was Maurice Ravel’s three-movement suite Gaspard de la nuit, which took its title from a collection of prose-poems by Aloysius Bertrand. Ravel was preceded by Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 22, a collection of twenty brief pieces entitled Visions fugitives. This title was also based on literature, in this case a couplet from a poem by Konstantin Balmont:

In every fugitive vision I see worlds,
Full of the changing play of rainbow hues.

The program concluded with Mily Balakirev’s “Islamey,” which he called an “Oriental Fantasy.” Any one of these pieces would have demanded enough to exhaust a lesser pianist, but Paremski clearly had the chops to rise to the challenges of all of them.

She prevailed over those challenges impressively. I must confess to a certain lack of patience with the Ravel selection. Over the course of my listening experience, I feel that too many pianists have tried to master it; and most of them leave a bitter fools-rush-in taste in their wake. Thus, many dismiss the piece as being so difficult that only Ravel himself could master it, while those that manage to get all the notes in the right place at the right time do so by losing touch with the literary context.

The path from Bertrand to Ravel probably ran through Charles Baudelaire and his involvement with symbolism as a reaction against naturalism and realism. Thus “Ondine” reveals a menacing sprite in the highly agitated flow of river water, while “Le Gibet” (the gallows) equates the physical object with the sinister shadow of a personified death. “Scarbo” is an equally dark character, flitting about so rapidly that one is never quite sure where he is.

Each of these three pieces puts technical proficiency to the limits, and the late Charles Rosen declared “Scarbo” to be the most difficult piece in the standard repertoire. Nevertheless, Paremski rose to all of the technical challenges with bold confidence, confident enough that she could deliver not only on the marks on the score pages but also in depicting all the spooky characters that haunt the three movements. If one buys into the anti-realist motives behind symbolism, one could appreciate how Paremski’s account was just as powerful on narrative grounds as it was for her keyboard technique.

Her decision to follow Ravel with Balakirev was equally well-informed. Indeed, Ravel himself composed “Scarbo” with the deliberate intention of creating solo piano music even more challenging that “Islamey.” Thus, through her ordering of her program, Paremski presented “Islamey” almost as if it were a relief from the somewhat opaque symbolist account of narrative behind “Scarbo.” The themes are simple, and they recur frequently. However, the embellishments are so thick and so demanding that one had to admire Ravel rising to the challenge of trying to outdo Balakirev.

It was a bit of a pity that the house lights were turned down low during the opening Prokofiev performance. Each of the twenty Opus 22 pieces has a unique tempo marking, which often has more to do with emotional disposition than with pace. They are almost like the titles of miniature paintings. By the time one captures the mood of any individual piece, it has almost completed. There is no overall plan, and many were written in isolation for the composer’s specific friends.

Nevertheless, even without being able to follow the verbal descriptions, the attentive listener could readily capture the distinctive mood of each piece through Paremski’s attention to rhetoric, which was just as strong has her technical account of the marks on paper. There is also the possibility that, for Prokofiev, this was an opportunity to capture certain fleeting thoughts that could subsequently be developed at greater length. Thus, the author of the Wikipedia page for this composition caught a glimpse of the composer’s Opus 16 (second) piano concerto in G minor, while I could have sworn that I caught a “fugitive vision” of Romeo and Juliet over the course of Paremski’s interpretation.

Rodríguez’ set, on the other hand, was devoted primarily to improvisation. He began with some remarks reflecting on Keith Jarrett’s talent for unfolding solo piano improvisations of prodigious duration. Rodríguez’ efforts never came close to Jarrett’s scale, but he certainly knew how to mine original reflections out of popular songs or familiar tunes from his Cuban background. All of this contrasted sharply with Paremski’s set; but, even with the separation of an intermission, the attentive listener needed a break from the intensity of the first half. Rodríguez provided that break; but he did so while providing music worthy of attention, rather than just serving up a soothing background.