Pianist Samantha Cho (from the Old First Concerts event page for her recital)
This past January pianist Samantha Cho had the honor of presenting the first Old First Concerts (O1C) recital of the new year. As was the case at that time, the performance was live-streamed through YouTube and then saved as a YouTube video for subsequent viewing. What struck me most about her technique was her capacity for capturing the rhetorical stances of composers as diverse as Claude Debussy and Edvard Grieg.
Yesterday afternoon Cho returned to Old First Presbyterian Church. Once again her performance was live-streamed, but this time she also played to a limited audience. Also there was again considerable diversity in her selections with a program that involved the music of Domenico Scarlatti, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johannes Brahms, and Sofia Gubaidulina played in chronological order. This time, however, she seemed to exercise less command over her sense of rhetoric; and, at the syntactic level, her ability to “parse” the polyphonic intricacies of these four composers was not as secure as her interpretations of Debussy and Grieg.
Her rhetorical stance seemed most secure in her approach to Mozart’s K. 570 sonata in B-flat major. While this is a decidedly mature composition, K. 570 reminds the listener that Mozart never let go of his capacity for playfulness. Cho seemed sensitive to that playful side of how he invented his themes and then twirled them around a diversity of embellishing techniques. There was also a delightful sense of “repetition with a twist” in his approach to the rondo form of the concluding movement. Cho gave this a particularly engaging account in contrast to the more stilted account of the sonata’s predecessor on the program, the K. 511 rondo in A minor.
Indeed, when it came to rhetorical devices, “stilted” seemed to be the predominant attribute across the rest of Cho’s program. Much of the problem seemed to involve the diversity of polyphonic techniques that cut across the repertoire of the first three composers on the program. The difficulties were most evident in the three intermezzos that Brahms collected as his Opus 117. Each of these short compositions has been realized through a richly-textured fabric; but the challenge in performing these pieces is to allow the user to perceive not only the fabric but also the interwoven threads. Sadly, it seemed as if Cho was still getting her fingers accustomed to the marks on paper, rather than providing an account of the broader perspective.
Similarly, polyphony established the core of the two Scarlatti sonatas that began the program, K. 132 in C major and K. 1 in D minor. It is important to remember that K. 1 was originally published as a set of 30 sonatas collected under the title Essercizi per gravicembalo (keyboard exercises). Presumably, these exercises had as much to do with expressive interpretation as with keyboard dexterity; and, more often than not, expression arose from the interplay of the individual voices in a polyphonic fabric. That approach to performance was not evident in Cho’s accounts of Scarlatti’s music.
The program concluded with two short pieces by Sofia Gubaidulina, “Toccata-Troncata” and “Invention.” Both of these seem to have been conceived a playful jabs at traditions that began to go out of fashion during the eighteenth century. The “nuts and bolts,” on the other hand, could not be more contemporary; and Gubaidulina’s approaches to dissonance are so compelling that the listening experience is practically joyful. Cho seemed both to apprehend and to communicate Gubaidulina’s prankish rhetoric, making for a more than satisfying conclusion to an overall program that was weak on too many fronts.
No comments:
Post a Comment