Pianist Anyssa Neumann (from her Old First Concerts event page)
Last night in the Old First Presbyterian Church, Anyssa Neumann brought impressive diversity to her Old First Concerts solo piano recital. The historical scope ranged from the pedagogical “little” preludes of Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 933–938) up to 2010, the date of Christopher Cerrone’s “Hoyt-Schermerhorn,” scored for piano with live electronics. Between these extremes, there were transcriptions by Franz Liszt (of Richard Wagner) and Ferruccio Busoni (of Bach) and original compositions by Frédéric Chopin, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Arvo Pärt. All selections were given informative introductions, delivered clearly by Neumann, who never resorted to using a microphone.
Neumann consistently knew how to apply her technique in service of the expressiveness of each of her selections. One could appreciate the technical challenges of the Bach preludes while enjoying Neumann’s interpretations that endowed each prelude with its own rhetorical qualities. The Busoni transcriptions were of chorale preludes in which the chorale theme charted a clear path through the polyphonic textures that elaborated that theme. Chopin was Chopin, endowed with a bit more attention from Neumann calling out the bizarre sonorities of the A minor prelude from the Opus 28 collection without deep-ending on the music’s obsession with the tritone.
However, the composer that benefitted the most from Neumann’s presentation was Dallapiccola. Quaderno musicale di Annalibera is a collection of eleven twelve-tone compositions that the composer dedicated to his daughter (named in the title). Neumann’s introduction did not go into the nuts and bolts of the techniques that Arnold Schoenberg originated, nor did she discuss Dallapiccola’s approach to those techniques. She simply noted that all twelve chromatic pitches had equal priority, resulting in the absence of any focus on one pitch as a tonal center. Instead, she discussed the titles of the individual pieces and how the music related to those titles. Those summaries allowed the attentive listener to dwell more on the spirit of the music than on the flesh of the technical constraints imposed for the sake of atonality.
Her introduction to “Hoyt-Schermerhorn” was more poetic. The composer was evoking the loneliness of a New York subway station late at night, a time when just about every sound has its own characteristic echo. Those echo effects were realized by the electronic enhancements applied to Neumann’s keyboard work, and the results were compelling enough to deserve future listening opportunities.
The Pärt selection, “Trivium,” was composed in 1976 for organ. This was early in Pärt’s move to minimalism and the tintinnabuli technique that emerged from that move. The organ pedals were used to sustain tones above which polyphonic passages would unfold. Neumann raised the damper pedal to hold the pedal tones, allowing the upper voices to reverberate with their own echo effects. Thus, while Busoni cultivated elaborate polyphonic techniques for his piano transcriptions of Bach’s organ music, Neumann allowed the reverberating qualities of her piano to throw a new light on Pärt’s approach to the organ.
The most elaborate approach to transcription, however, was the concluding Liszt selection. This was his piano realization of the “Liebestod” that Isolde sings at the end of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Anyone who has experienced a compelling performance of this aria will appreciate that Liszt had set himself a virtually impossible challenge. Neumann did her best to honor Liszt’s effort, which meant that one could readily follow the overall architecture of the aria, even if a solo piano could do little to capture the emotional intensity behind Wagner’s score.
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