A Disappointing O1C Piano Recital

Yesterday afternoon Old First Concerts (O1C) live-streamed a solo recital by Berkeley-based pianist Jason Chiu. This seems to have been a self-recorded video, created with a single camera at Chiu’s home. The camera angle provided a good view of the entire keyboard, allowing the attentive viewer to appreciate the technical demands behind the selections he performed, familiar compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel, as well as a short selection by Charles Tomlinson Griffes.

Sadly, much of this offering was disappointing, possibly because making the video was as much on Chiu’s mind as was performing the pieces he had selected. The one consistently satisfying account came from his performance of Beethoven’s Opus 53 (“Waldstein”) sonata in C major. The camera angle disclosed a complexity in the score that can only be appreciated in a recital setting by those with just the right view of the stage.

However, this was the one offering in which a convincing account of expressiveness registered as distinctively as that detailed perception of execution technique. If Chiu took a more serious approach to what may have been some of the more prankish gestures on Beethoven’s part, he brought an acute sense of phrasing that guided the attentive listener through the many intricate details that the composer wove into his overall texture. This was an account of Beethoven that did not overplay any of those “scowling Beethoven” clichés but, instead, subtly allowed the listener to appreciate just the right balance of technique and expressiveness.

Unfortunately, that balance was lacking through most of the remainder of the program. Chiu preceded his Beethoven with all four of Chopin’s Ballade compositions. None of these registered any convincing sense of expressiveness and many of the technical nuts and bolts never seemed to be firmly secured. The same could be said when he took on the abundantly rich intensity of both Debussy’s “L’isle joyeuse” and Ravel, the solo piano version of “La valse.” Both of these pieces overflow with emotional dispositions, yet Chiu never succeeded in tapping into any of them. The Griffes selection was the “Notturno” that is the second of the three Opus 6 Fantasy Pieces; and, since this music is performed so seldom, it was difficult to establish whether Chiu’s approach to expressiveness was any more convincing than it was for Debussy or Ravel.