Garrick Ohlsson and Kirill Gerstein at SFCM

As was announced this past Friday, this afternoon the Baltimore-based Shriver Hall Concert Series (SHCS) streamed a video of a two-piano recital given by Garrick Ohlsson and Kirill Gerstein. The performance took place in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Ohlsson lives in San Francisco, and Gerstein traveled from Berlin to share the stage with him. The video will be available for subsequent viewing until 8:59 p.m. on Wednesday, November 11, accessible through an SHCS Web page.

All three of the compositions on the program were two-piano arrangements of music previously composed for other resources. The least familiar of these was also the major offering. Ferruccio Busoni originally composed his “Fantasia contrappuntistica” for solo piano; and its “definitive edition” was first published in 1910. He prepared his own two-piano version, which was published in 1922. Rather than composing an expanded transcription, he reworked many of the passages, meaning that the latter version had a structure and rhetorical strategy of its own.

This afternoon was the closest I have ever been to anything other than a compact disc recording of either the solo piano or two-piano version of this music. As in some of his earlier compositions, Busoni used Johann Sebastian Bach as a point of departure. His primary source was the “Contrapunctus XIV,” the final (and unfinished) fugue from BWV 1080, The Art of Fugue. This was to be a three-subject fugue, whose third subject was based on Bach’s initials: B (German notation for B-flat), A, C, H (German notation of B natural). Beginning with a relatively faithful account of what Bach had written, Busoni developed his own extravagant fugue weaving the B-A-C-H subject in with the two that Bach had already composed and then expanded the scope by adding a fourth subject!

The other source was the Lutheran hymn “Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr” (alone to God in the highest be glory), for which Bach composed six chorale preludes, BWV 662–664 and BWV 675–677). The “Fantasia contrappuntistica” also includes three variations on the fugue subjects, preceded by an intermezzo and followed by a flamboyant cadenza. The Lutheran chorale is then revisited prior to a Stretta movement that piles up all the preceding thematic material. In lesser hands this could have well resulted in a train wreck. Instead, the final section affirms just how skilled Busoni could be in managing complex polyphony.

Fortunately, the video of this afternoon’s performance provided subtitles to guide the attentive listener through the unfolding of this monumental undertaking. Furthermore, the camera work, for the most part, assisted the listener in keeping track of who was responsible for managing which of the themes and polyphony as the performance proceeded. Thus, while the half-hour duration of the composition makes for an intense listening experience, the chemistry between the two pianists brought as much clarity as could be realistically expected to both the thematic material and the composer’s full arsenal of techniques for developing that material.

The remainder of the program was devoted to two-piano arrangements of works originally composed for full (and rather large) orchestral resources. The first of these was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 45 “Symphonic Dances.” Rachmaninoff himself prepared the two-piano version. The good news was that he successfully provided a clear account of all of the thematic material and most of his techniques in developing that material.

Nevertheless, there were at least a few moments in which the instrumental rhetoric had more to offer than the arrangement. For one thing, in the original version the piano was just one of the instruments of the full orchestra; and, in that context, its sonorities have their own unique contributions to the overall texture. Then there is one particularly poignant theme that Rachmaninoff scored for saxophone, which is reduced to “just another tune” in the two-piano version. Nevertheless, that latter arrangement provided opportunities for keyboard virtuosity that made for an almost perfect follow-up to Busoni’s approach to two-piano writing.

Kirill Gerstein and Garrick Ohlsson building to the final climax of “La valse” (screen shot from the video being discussed)

The program then concluded with Maurice Ravel’s two-piano version of “La valse.” Ravel himself gave the first performance of this arrangement joined by pianist Alfred Casella. Recently, however, it has been easier to encounter performances of the solo piano version that Ravel also prepared. It goes without saying that no number of pianos can provide the breadth of sonorities found in the original orchestral version of “La valse.” On the other hand, to the extent that the music itself can be taken as a shell-shocked reflection on the aftermath of World War I, both Ohlsson and Gerstein provided a compelling interpretation of what amounts to an uncompromising account of deranged nostalgia. Ravel’s approach to instrumentation might have been more nightmarish, but Ohlsson and Gerstein still managed to capture much of the score’s shock value.