Last week I wrote about the Piano Break recital presented by the Ross McKee Foundation for Zak Mustille, the winner of the 2020 Ross McKee Young Artist Competition. Last night’s recitalist, Ken Iisaka, is a three-time finalist in the Van Cliburn Amateur Piano Competition, dividing his time between music and artificial intelligence. He presented a program entitled In F-sharp Major: Etherealism and Exoticism in One Key. The composers he selected for this performance were, in order of appearance, Frédéric Chopin, Nikolai Medtner, and Alexander Scriabin.
The Scriabin selection was particularly interesting. The Opus 30 (fourth) sonata in F-sharp major was the last of the ten sonatas to be assigned a key. Scriabin was determined to get away from conventional harmonic progressions; but, as Donald Francis Tovey put it in his “Harmony” entry for the Encyclopædia Britannica, the composer “complained shortly before his untimely death [in 1915] that he had, after all, not succeeded in getting away from a sophisticated dominant seventh.”
Even with its key assignment, Opus 30 shows early signs of Scriabin’s quest. Last night’s video provided many convenient overhead shots of Iisaka’s playing, suggesting that he wanted his listeners to “see the action” involving the black keys. Where Scriabin is concerned, one of my conjectures that, in choosing the key of F-sharp major, the composer had sought to attempt to reverse the roles of black keys and white keys, making the white keys the “chromatic auxiliaries” to the black ones.
This would require that new approach to harmonic progressions. The black keys allow for only two triads, F-sharp major and D-sharp minor. White keys are necessary for the dominant triad of either of these keys, C-sharp major and A-sharp minor, respectively, suggesting that progressions that avoid the white keys are likely to be unsatisfying, at best. In the opening Andante movement of Opus 30, it almost seems as if Scriabin was trying to get beyond harmony as the basis for progression, turning to rhythm instead. Such a premise would suggest that the black keys and the white ones have become “equal partners,” a premise that Arnold Schoenberg was just beginning to address when Scriabin’s Opus 30 was first published in 1904.
Opus 30 thus serves somewhat as a “landmark,” not only in Scriabin’s catalog but also in the history of music during the first half of the twentieth century. One could thus take considerable satisfaction in the video techniques that Iisaka planned to complement the listening experience of his account of this sonata. Regrettably, however, this was the most satisfying portion of his program.
The Medtner selection was his Opus 27 (eighth) piano sonata, which the composer called “Sonata-Ballade.” The composer structured the piece as a ballade, an introduction, and a finale. While the score is rich in thematic ideas, from a rhetorical point of view it never manages to get beyond rambling. Medtner seemed more interested in unfolding an assembly of engaging themes without endowing those themes with a framework through which the attentive listener can appreciate progressions from beginning to middle to end. As a result, when the composer tries (not particularly successfully) to launch into a fugal exposition, one begins to wonder whether this will be a “grand finale.” (It wasn’t.)
The author of Medtner’s Wikipedia page claims that there is a “passing reference to Chopin’s Barcarolle.” Given that Iisaka began his recital with that Chopin composition, I have to say that any “passing reference” went by too quickly to be recognized. One problem may have been that, while Iisaka tended to have a strong command of phrasing in managing Scriabin’s unconventional approaches to progressions, his accounts of both Chopin and Medtner tended to be flatter, with less sense of prioritizing the primary and the secondary. Given the duration of Medtner’s Opus 27, one needed considerable patience to hang in there until the Scriabin account got under way.
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