Last night the San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF) moved to Old First Presbyterian Church to present a program in the Old First Concerts (O1C) series. Due to cancellations, this was the first O1C concert to be presented in the BEET250VEN series celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven. The program consisted of three of that composer’s sonatas, only one of which was a piano solo. Last night’s live-stream through YouTube has now been captured, and a Web page has been created for subsequent viewing.
The second half of the program was devoted entirely to the Opus 109 sonata in E major, the first of the three final sonatas (the other two being Opus 110 in A-flat major and Opus 111 in C minor). The pianist was Allegra Chapman. The first half offered two different duo performances. The program began with cellist Stephen Harrison joining Gwendolyn Mok for the section of the Opus 5 cello sonatas in the key of G minor. This was followed by the third of the Opus 30 violin sonatas with Sarah Yuan at the piano and Eunseo Oh on violin.
Allegra Chapman playing Beethoven’s Opus 109 at Old First Presbyterian Church (screen shot from the video of the concert being discussed)
I have become so used to Chapman’s advocacy of music from different periods of the twentieth century that I was particularly curious about her approach to Beethoven. In his last three sonatas we encounter Beethoven going boldly into adventurous experimentation with a spirit that would then follow him into his final string quartets. The first movement of Opus 109 is almost an operatic recitative, following by a Prestissimo “aria” that is practically over just around the time you thought it had begun. These movements are followed by an extended set of variations on a theme that is little more than an extended chord progression.
From a technical point of view, Chapman was at the top of her game. She knew how to shape each phrase to reflect the broader grammatical structure, rather than simply letting the notes unfold into a prolonged improvisation. This is a composition that has been beaten to death by music theorists; and, given that this is an “anniversary year,” who knows how many more papers will be written trying to deconstruct and reconstruct the damned thing. Chapman, on the other hand, convinced the attentive listener that she had a firm understanding of the sonata in its entirety and could inform that listener of not only the pieces but also how they fit together to constitute the whole. Having listened to this sonata more times than I can enumerate, I took great pleasure in finding that Chapman had brought her own unique voice to its performance.
It is important to remember that the titles for the selections performed during the first half were “Sonata for Piano and Cello” and “Sonata for Piano and Violin.” Beethoven was not shy about declaring his priorities. That said, Mok and Harrison (to honor Beethoven’s ordering) were the more successful pair when it came to give-and-take between equals. The rhetoric of that give-and-take is consistently upbeat, reminding listeners that Beethoven had a lively sense of humor, regardless of how many portraits we have seen of “scowling Beethoven.”
The performance by Yuan and Oh, on the other hand, was not quite as expressive and certainly did not reveal any signs of the composer’s sense of humor. From a video point of view, the presentation suffered from a poorly-positioned static camera. The angle of view was such that one could barely see the pianist, and it was difficult to ascertain just how the two performers communicated with each other. The result was an interpretation that “played by the notes,” so to speak, with little awareness of any rhetorical expression.
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