Solomon Ge at last year’s Hilton Head International Piano Competition (screen shot from the video being discussed)
Yesterday evening’s live-stream of the latest addition to the Ross McKee Foundation YouTube channel was the second to feature solo performances by a winner of the Ross McKee Competition. Solomon Ge was the 2019 Ross McKee Young Artist; and last night’s video included performances from that Competition, which took place in the Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Those performances featured familiar selections of music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, and Frédéric Chopin. This was the second Piano Launch recital of the Foundation’s Spring Season programming, a subcategory of the Piano Break concert series devoted to McKee Competition winners.
However, the most memorable selection on the program was not taken from the McKee Competition but from a more recent competition. The video began with a performance of Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XVI/46 sonata in A-flat major, which Ge performed for last year’s Hilton Head International Piano Competition. While the McKee Competition performances amounted to a consistency of technically dutiful accounts, Ge’s Haydn offering revealed a more personal presentation of expressiveness, perhaps suggesting what an additional year of experience can bring.
Mind you, the technical skills that Ge brought to his interpretation of Haydn were anything but compromised. His dexterous command of Haydn’s rapid-fire passages were nothing short of jaw-dropping. However, in this more recent recording Ge added a sense of personality to the mix. Most likely this was motivated by the abundance of wit in this particular sonata. Ge knew how to elicit a chuckle from the attentive listener through this treatment of the thematic material, but he never overplayed the “cards dealt to him” by Haydn’s score. The result was a personable approach to performance that was never quite as evident in the Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin selections.
The final selection seems to have been recorded at Ge’s home, possibly under current lockdown conditions. The program concluded with Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 83 (seventh) sonata in B-flat major. This is the second of the three “war” sonatas, composed during World War II between 1940 and 1944; and they serve up some of the composer’s most dissonant approaches to solo piano music. Sadly, the piano available to Ge for this recording was a baby grand, not quite the sort of instrument to do justice to the extremes of the composer’s dynamic range. Nevertheless, Ge’s technical account of the score was as jaw-dropping as his rise to Haydn’s technical challenges; and that was sufficient to allow Prokofiev’s harrowing rhetoric to register with the attentive listener.
Finally, I wish to offer a technical afterthought. I assume that I am not the only one to have discovered that the xfinity YouTube app provides a way to watch YouTube content on a screen more satisfying than most computer monitors. Every now and then, however, there tend to be hiccups in the xfinity connection to YouTube. Yesterday there was such a hiccup at the beginning of Ge’s program: One could see that the images of Ge’s fingerwork did not correlate with the audio. (A previous hiccup provided all of the audio without any video.)
Fortunately, these problems can usually be easily solved. All that is necessary is a “reboot.” Exit from the app, and restart it. (The user interface usually makes it easy to return to the content previously seen.) Since the feed is live-streamed, this means losing a minute or two of performance. However, once the problem is resolved, viewing is much more informative!
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