Samantha Cho at Old First Concerts

Pianist Samantha Cho (from the Old First Concerts event page for her recital, which includes a hyperlink to the YouTube video of that recital)

Last night Old First Concerts presented the first recital of the new year, a solo performance by pianist Samantha Cho. Cho prepared an impressive repertoire, playing all six of the compositions in the two books that Claude Debussy entitled Images, followed by Edvard Grieg’s Opus 7 piano sonata in E minor. By way of a “warm-up,” Cho began her program with four short compositions by Germaine Tailleferre, “Pastorale,” “Rêverie,” “Hommage à Debussy,” and “Romance.”

It is unclear whether Debussy intended his six Images compositions to be performed beginning-to-end. Each of the pieces is of moderate duration, combining rhetorical depth with prodigiously demanding keyboard technique. Cho’s undertaking would be a major physical strain for any pianist, while the sophistication of the pieces themselves is equally demanding on the listener. Nevertheless, Cho’s graceful technique always seemed to highlight the imagery that Debussy suggests in the titles of these six pieces. So, while the overall journey was no “walk in the park,” Cho knew how to guide the attentive listener through the many intricate details of Debussy’s technique, bringing to mind the advice from the I Ching that “perseverance furthers.”

Grieg’s sonata is one of his earliest compositions. Indeed, it is probably the earliest piece he wrote that is part of standard piano repertoire. One gets the impression that he is making an obligatory nod to traditional practices that predate his sonata by at least half a century. (The sonata was first written in 1865 when Grieg was 22 years old and was subsequently revised by a more mature Grieg in 1887.) Cho brought a clarity to her interpretation through which the attentive listener could appreciate how the composer was responding to traditional influences. She found just the right rhetorical stance to bring to each of the sonatas four movements, finding more personality in that rhetoric than other pianists have cultivated in undertaking this sonata.

Given that Tailleferre is known for little more than being the one female composer in Les Six, her music would have benefitted from even a modest introduction. The paragraph in the program book had little to say about the selections that Cho played, and Cho devoted her own attention only to the music. The best one can say is that Cho played the music with an affable rhetoric, leaving at least this listener desirous of greater familiarity with the Tailleferre catalog.