The live stream of the final program in the fourth annual season of the San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF) consisted of three previously recorded events. The result was a celebration of the diversity of the keyboard repertoire with an emphasis on high spirits. The program lasted a little less than 75 minutes, and the video is now available for viewing on YouTube.
What was perhaps the most interesting was that the second of the three sections of the program was devoted to the “coming generation” of concert pianists. It presented a piano duo performance by Karina Tseng and Kevin Yang, both alumni of Young Chamber Musicians, playing the final (“Tarantelle”) movement from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 17 (second) suite for two pianos. The video account was rather unique, showing the opening phrase being performed at the Crowden School in Berkeley, after which the remainder of the movement was given a socially distanced performance in cyberspace.
The video image was divided in half with one frame for each of the two pianists. These were demanding circumstances for the intricately thick textures of Rachmaninoff’s score. However, it was clear that Tseng and Yang were keenly aware of each other; and the presentation was particularly effective in informing the video of who was playing what as the movement unfolded.
The opening section was taken by Artistic Director Jeffrey LaDeur and featured the third piano sonata of George Walker, described on the YouTube Web page as “one of the foremost black composers of the 20th century.” LaDeur thus provided the perfect complement to Nicholas Phillips’ Saturday evening performance of the piano music of Florence Price, which gave particular attention to her only piano sonata. Indeed, the two composers could not have been more different in their approach to creating a sonata.
Where Price drew upon and then elaborated traditionally tonal thematic material, Walker’s three-part sonata was a study in different approaches to atonality. The opening section, “Fantoms,” explored bell-like sonorities, followed by a “Choral” section that involved repeating the same chord with dynamic control of the individual fingers that allowed each instance to display its own unique sonorities. The sonata then concluded with a cryptic Fughetta in which one could barely discern the subject through the thick textures in which it was embedded.
Walker’s sonata was flanked by more amenable nineteenth-century selections. LaDeur began with the first of Franz Schubert’s D. 935 impromptus in the key of F minor. He then concluded his set with the last of Frédéric Chopin’s four scherzos, Opus 54 in E major. These certainly made for sharp contrasts against Walker’s sonata, and LaDeur was a bit weak in his structural and rhetorical account of the Chopin selection. The Schubert performance was far more effective and served as a useful introduction to Walker’s thick textures.
The final selection was a video recording made in a church in what appears to have been the Occitan region of southern France. Bobby Mitchell performed a suite entitled Songs from Childhood, which may well have been a prankish nod to Robert Schumann’s Opus 15 Kinderszenen (scenes from childhood) collection. However, while Schumann’s themes were original, Mitchell transmogrified eight familiar tunes such as “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”
Readers may recall that SFIPF had already presented a video of Mitchell playing “Songs of Insurrection” by Frederic Rzewski. Rzewski has a strong political streak and has a gift for weaving thickly-textured elaborations around songs of “social significance.” Mitchell’s suite swings the pendulum to a more innocuous side, but his richly ornate accounts of tunes more suited to the nursery are as impressive as those cultivated by Rzewski. Most distinctive was probably Mitchell’s take on “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which begins as a fughetta and then prances off to a gigue. The French text for “Frère Jacques” on the other hand seems to have inspired Mitchell to evoke Claude Debussy with sonorities deftly appropriated from the “La cathédrale engloutie” (the submerged cathedral) piano prelude.
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