Piano Break: Alison Lee

Yesterday evening’s performance in the weekly Piano Break series, presented under the auspices of the Ross McKee Foundation, was a solo recital by Alison Lee. According to my records, I first encountered Lee at a Sunset Music and Arts recital at the end of June in 2019, when she provided piano for the newly-formed Ensemble 1828 piano trio, whose other members were violinist Nicole Oswald and cellist Isaac Pastor-Chermak. This group performed the music of Franz Schubert in a variety of different combinations; and Lee’s solo contribution was a performance of the last two impromptus (in G-flat major and A-flat major, respectively) from the D. 898 collection of four.

Last night’s program was far more diverse. Lee framed the program with two American “entertainments.” She began with Scott Joplin’s 1909 “Solace,” which he called a “Mexican Serenade,” and concluded with the “Quarantine polka,” composed by William F. Strong in 1885 in the midst of a smallpox epidemic in Iowa. Between these two light offerings, Lee provided three perspectives on virtuosity. She began with Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 19 (second) piano sonata in G-sharp minor, a two-movement composition that he called “Sonata-Fantasie,” completed in 1897. She then dropped back a century for the last of the three sonatas, in the key of D major, that Ludwig van Beethoven published as his Opus 10.

Overhead shot of Alison Lee negotiating Nikolai Kapustin’s Opus 41 (screen shot from the YouTube video of the recital being discussed)

Lee’s final virtuoso venture was the most recent work on the program, Nikolai Kapustin’s Opus 41 set of variations. I first became aware of Kapustin through recitals given by Yuja Wang, who seemed to appreciate both his sense of humor and his preference for jazzy rhetorics. Both of those features are evident in Opus 41. The variations are on the opening measures of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” (where the bassoon sounds like a horn in its upper register); but the theme is deftly concealed in “all that jazz.” Those familiar with the history of piano jazz should be able to detect references to both Count Basie and Erroll Garner, but those cues pass almost as soon as they are noticed. Much more significant is the composer’s capacity for finger-busting virtuosity delivered with the sort of unabashed vigor that one tends to associate with Cecil Taylor. Lee managed all of those aspects of Kapustin’s score without ever breaking a sweat.

The result was an imaginatively-conceived program that was thoroughly engaging from beginning to end. Mind you, the deliberate frivolity of Strong’s polka was a bit disquieting under current pandemic conditions. On the other hand it also provided a pointed reminder of other situations in which the general public tended to respond to medical emergency with frivolity. Piano Break could not have picked a better time to present this selection than during Thanksgiving Weekend. The video recording of the entire recital has been uploaded to YouTube, where it is now available for viewing.