Christopher Basso’s Ross McKee Video

Yesterday evening the latest installment in the live-streamed Piano Break series presented by the Ross McKee Foundation was a recital by Christopher Basso. That video, about half an hour in duration, has now been uploaded to the Foundation’s YouTube channel. Basso prepared a diverse program of composers whose chronological order was Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Claude Debussy, and Paul Juon. The “core” of the program was the performance of the first movement of Schubert’s D. 958 sonata in C minor.

D. 958 is the first of the “big three” sonatas that Schubert composed in September 1828 only a few months before his death on November 19. Each of the sonatas is monumental in scale, each with its own bold rhetoric than is frequently bone-chilling. It is easy to imagine that Schubert worked frantically at these sonatas knowing that he would not be alive much longer, and there have been suggestions that he worked on all three sonatas concurrently. The first movement of D. 958 is practically a composition unto itself, and Basso certainly delivered a compelling account to justify that premise.

The Schubert offering was balanced by shorter works, which were lighter in both duration and rhetoric. Basso even added a bit of wit to his Debussy selection, “Des pas sur la neige” (footprints in the snow), from the first book of solo piano preludes. He chose to bundle himself with a jacket and cap, and the video itself was given a sepia filter:

While one could not see any snow through the window, the image still reminded locals of how cold summer tends to be in the city of San Francisco.

That capacity for wit could also be found in the Juon selection, a movement from his Opus 38 Den Kindern zum Lauschen (the children that listen). The English subtitle of this collection is “sundry pieces for children to play;” and there is a playful rhetoric behind each of the pieces, often reflected in the choice of title. Basso’s selection was the fourth piece in the set, “Das Heimchen” (the cricket); and it is distinguished by a slightly melancholy disposition for a playful little tune. The entire program was neatly framed with Robert Schumann’s Opus 18 “Arabesque” at the beginning and the first (in the key of G major) of Beethoven’s Opus 126 set of bagatelles.

While the entire offering was relatively brief, Basso’s selections and his interpretative approaches could not have been more absorbing.