Solomon Ge’s Disappointing Debut at O1C

Pianist Solomon Ge (from his O1C event page)

Last night at Old First Presbyterian Church, the first program of the new year to be presented by Old First Concerts was co-presented with the Ross McKee Foundation. Pianist and Bay Area native Solomon Ge was the 2019 Ross McKee Young Artist winner in the Ross McKee Competition, and this past March the Ross McKee Foundation YouTube channel presented a live-stream of a video of Ge’s performances at that Competition. Last night he made his San Francisco recital debut, and the program was also live-streamed through YouTube. The video has now been archived for subsequent viewing.

As was the case on the Ross McKee video, Ge’s performance was an uneven one. The high point of that earlier video was actually recorded at a more recent competition, the 2020 Hilton Head International Piano Competition. The selection was Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XVI/46 sonata in A-flat major, and Ge’s interpretation soared through Haydn’s many technical challenges while also doing justice to the abundance of wit in the score. Last night that spirit of interpretation was most evident in Ge’s account of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 90 sonata in E minor.

In the overall context of the entire recital, however, this turned out to be a flash in the pan. The opening selection, Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 808 third “English” suite in G minor, never got beyond making sure that all the notes were in the right place. All of Bach’s suite movements are based on dances, and there is every reason to believe that Bach appreciated the distinctive spirit of each of those dance forms. Sadly, no signs of those spirits emerged from Ge’s account, resulting in a rather tedious listening experience. The same could be said of his interpretation of Maurice Ravel’s sonatina, whose middle movement reflects back on those minuets that had inspired so many Bach compositions.

The final selection was the one piece that was also on the Ross McKee video, Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 83 (seventh) sonata in B-flat major. On that video, Ge’s baby grand was not up to handling the extremes of the sonata’s dynamic range. Those extremes were much more evident coming from the O1C piano, but Ge’s account focused more on meeting all the technical challenges without giving much attention to the harrowing rhetoric of this particular “war” sonata.

Far more intense was Ge’s account of his own “Threnody.” This involved an uncompromising delivery of brutal dissonances, which could almost be taken as a music approach to the primal screams of Arthur Janov’s therapy for neurosis. From a composition point of view, it seemed as if Ge was interested in developing a rhetoric around the “primal” sonorities of the piano itself, resulting in qualities in the audio spectrum that could almost have been taken as the result of electronic synthesis. Ge’s only shortcoming was that he never really developed a “journey” through the duration of the composition, meaning that, somewhere around the halfway mark, one would have been justified in asking if the score had anything else to say.