Pianist Hélène Grimaud (from the event page for last night’s recital)
Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony presented the second program in its Great Performers Series, which features (usually) one-night-only concerts by recitalists and ensembles. For this particular offering the program was a solo piano recital by Hélène Grimaud. The first half of that program consisted of interleaving relatively short compositions by (in order of appearance) Valentin Silvestrov, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and Frédéric Chopin, separated by short pauses without giving the audience a chance to applaud. The second half was then devoted entirely to Robert Schumann’s Opus 16 Kreisleriana.
This was not the first time that Davies hosted a program in which an “extended composition” was “synthesized” by stringing together music originally intended to be performed in isolation. Unless I am mistaken, my first encounter with this technique also took place during a Great Performers Series piano recital, the one presented at the end of October of 2017 by Daniil Trifonov. Grimaud’s “synthesis” was far more ambitious, weaving a much more elaborate fabric from a provocative diversity of threads.
Most provocative was her decision to begin with the first of the thirteen bagatelles for solo piano that Valentin Silvestrov composed in 2005. Half of Grimaud’s latest Deutsche Grammophon album was devoted to Silvestrov’s music, but only one of the tracks was a solo performance. The bagatelles, on the other hand, are exercise in extreme miniaturist style, reflecting what the composer calls “naïve music.” The stillness of the first of those bagatelles seized audience attention through an intimacy established through simplicity and brevity.
Sadly, the almost mystical stillness of that bagatelle was quickly shattered by what can only be described as a brutalist approach to Debussy, Satie, and Chopin. One can probably make a case that this approach was scrupulously calculated, since each of the composers seemed to have been given his own controversial interpretation. In many respects the Satie performances were the most ironic, since Satie’s scores frequently involve text remarks to the performer that tend of be provocative but both amusing and disturbing at the same time. However, Grimaud made it clear that she had her own way of doing things, hammering out every note on the score page that suggested that every instant of the performance was isolated from every other. If she had opted to go for disturbing, rather than amusing, then the extent of her success was almost frightening.
If her intent was to disturb throughout the first half of her program, then she succeeded just as effectively with the Debussy and Chopin selections. These two composers embody radically different approaches to the keyboard repertoire. However, Grimaud reduced both of them to that same “hammered out” approach, situating Debussy and Chopin on the same “playing field” as Satie. It was as if her intention was to dispense with the radical differences among all three composers by undermining the very foundations of expressive interpretation. If Silvestrov’s aesthetic was based on a stillness that is incompatible with expressiveness, then Grimaud responded to his music by reducing the expressiveness of Debussy, Satie, and Chopin to absurdity, a technique that might have amused Satie but does no favors to either Debussy or Chopin.
The dispassionate nature of that technique returned after the intermission with her approach to Schumann. The title of the Opus 16 cycle was inspired by the writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann about a fictitious conductor named Johannes Kreisler. The earliest of the novels also bore the title Kreisleriana. Here, again, there was a sense that Grimaud was hammering out the notes as if each one needed to be distinctly separated from the others. This may well have been an evocation of the provocative traits of Kreisler’s character, using Schumann’s music as a magnifying glass held up to those traits. The result was a radical thinking about how to approach Schumann’s approaches to “narrative” foundations; and Grimaud may have left her audience seriously reconsidering their thoughts about listening to the “tone poem” qualities of several of Schumann’s extended piano compositions.
Grimaud took three encores, playing each without introducing it to the audience. I could not easily identify any of them. My current “working hypothesis” is that they were all drawn from the rather generous supply of solo piano preludes composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff. [added 1/30, 6:15 a.m.: My hypothesis was almost correct. All three encores were composed by Rachmaninoff. However, they were not preludes but three of the movements from the Opus 33 Études-Tableaux collection: the second in C major, the third in C minor, and the last in C-sharp minor.]
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