Nicholas Phillips Launches 2021 SFIPF

Pianist Nicholas Phillips (from the Ross McKee Foundation event page for the concert being discussed)

The fifth annual season of the San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF) got under way yesterday evening with a streamed solo recital by Nicholas Phillips. The performance was the first of two concerts to be presented as part of the Piano Break series under the auspices of the Ross McKee Foundation. The program consisted of three works by Charles Tomlinson Griffes, all composed during the second decade of the twentieth century. (Griffes would die at the end of that decade, in 1920, at the age of 35, a victim of the Spanish Flu pandemic.)

The program was framed by two suites. It began with the four movements of the Opus 7 Roman Sketches and concluded with the three pieces in the Opus 6, collected under the title Fantasy Pieces. Between these was the more extended tone poem “The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan,” composed in 1912, revised in 1915, and orchestrated in 1917, that last version published as Griffes’ Opus 8. It was first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Monteux on November 28, 1919.

In a brief introduction Phillips remarked that Griffes was sometimes referred to as “the American Debussy.” This might be taken as either laudatory or critical. In the latter case anyone familiar with many of the works of Claude Debussy would probably be struck by the resurfacing of several themes and motifs. It is hard to believe that these incidents were coincidental, since Griffes was well aware of much of that music during his visit to Europe.

Nevertheless, it would be fair to say that Debussy had a firmer command of the architecture of duration than Griffes ever did. The American could spin out masses of technically challenging passages (all of which were skillfully dispatched by Phillips); but he never quite caught on to the subtle relationship between duration and attention span, which Debussy had mastered far more skillfully. Thus, while Phillips’ recital lasted only an hour, by the time half of that hour had elapsed, even the most sympathetically attentive listener had likely succumbed to an emerging sense of tedium. For better or worse, any one of Phillips’ three selections was already straining the capacity for attention in its own right. Presenting three such pieces consecutively was clearly asking too much.