Graham Lynch’s Serious Playfulness

Paul Sanchez playing Graham Lynch’s “Absolute Seriousness” (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Last night’s installment in the fifth annual season of the San Francisco International Piano Festival was a solo recital by Paul Sánchez consisting entirely of premiere performances of works by Graham Lynch. The program was framed by two world premieres, “Absolute Inwardness” and “White Book 3.” Between them Sánchez played the United States premiere of “The Couperin Sketchbooks.”

Sánchez also gave his program a title: Seria Ludo: New Piano Music by Graham Lynch. “Seria” is Latin for “serious,” while “ludo” provides the Latin root on the adjective “ludicrous.” The juxtaposition appears in a sentence by Horace that involves putting jokes aside in favor of more serious matters. In that context I have to confess that, at least in Sánchez’ account, there was an intensity of seriousness that dominated any attempt at a sense of humor. After all, the very title of the first composition was drawn from the writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, hardly known for any turns of wit in his writing.

To be fair, however, all three of Lynch’s scores were technically demanding unto an extreme. At the very least Sánchez deserves not just credit but accolades for the confident interpretation he brought to each of these pieces, However, in spite of the pianist’s prodigious technical capacities, it was difficult for any “first-contact” listener to establish orientation in the midst of an onslaught of dense textures overwhelming any sense of either thematic material or the development of that material.

Mind you, a century ago even the most liberal of serious listeners would have been voicing the same difficulty when encountering the music of Charles Ives. Nevertheless, those who bothered to read the notes that Lynch prepared for the YouTube Web page of Sánchez’ performance probably came away thinking that Lynch’s capacity for describing his own music was as opaque as the music itself. If there was anything ludic in his compositions, one could barely grasp it within the onslaught of the serious.