Pianist Drew Petersen (courtesy of SFS)
Last year’s announcement of the 2021–22 season of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) included a new addition to the programming. Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen added a new Spotlight Series, which would consist entirely of debut performances in Davies Symphony Hall. That Series was launched last night with the first of four recitals. The recitalist was pianist Drew Petersen, and things could not have gotten off to a better start.
His program could have been entitled Three Ways of Looking at Virtuosity. Each of the three composers on that program demanded a high level of virtuosic skill, but each composer has established his own unique skill set as foundation. The composers were Frédéric Chopin, Maurice Ravel, and Sergei Rachmaninoff, each known for his keyboard technique as well as his inventiveness.
Chopin was represented by four of his études, the first three from his Opus 25 collection, followed by the eighth in the Opus 10 collection. The Ravel offering was the three-movement suite Gaspard de la nuit, probably the most finger-busting of his solo piano compositions. The program then concluded with the revised version of Rachmaninoff’s Opus 36 (second) piano sonata in B-flat minor.
The Ravel offering was the most interesting, not only for its technical demands but also for the grotesque narratives behind each of the three movements. Each of those movements is based on a poem by Aloysius Bertrand from his collection Gaspard de la Nuit – Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot. The first poem, “Ondine,” depicts a water nymph that lures sailors to visit her at the bottom of a lake (where, of course, they die of drowning). This is followed by “Le Gibet,” named for a scaffold bearing the corpse of a hanged man accompanied by the sound of a single tolling bell (the ostinato of a B-flat octave). The final movement is named for the vicious goblin Scarbo, the king of all nightmares.
Each of the movements is technically demanding unto an extreme. As a result, there are too many performances that focus on little more than getting the notes right (no mean feat), leaving little room for the expressive dispositions behind each of Bertrand’s poems. Petersen’s command of technical details could not have been more comprehensive. In addition, however, through his performance he could establish his own “images” for each of the poems, giving narrative as much attention as the marks on paper. From a personal point of view, I have to say that too many of the recital performances I have encountered of Gaspard de la nuit have reduced Ravel’s music to tedious technical exercises. Petersen knew how to find the sweet spot in which both technique and expressiveness rule.
The Rachmaninoff sonata was originally composed in 1913, a few years after his 1909 Opus 30 (third) piano concerto in D minor. It was subsequently revised in 1931, and that was the version that Petersen played. The score is as thick with virtuosic demands as is Ravel’s suite. However, there is a sense that Rachmaninoff was focused much more intently on raw discipline, rather than establishing any narrative qualities. Thus, while one can be guided through Ravel’s suite by a narrative thread, Rachmaninoff’s sonata comes across as a series of unrelenting technical demands that leave little room for expressive interpretation.
That said, Petersen did his best to interpret those demands with some sense of an adventurous (rather than arduous) journey. This was my first encounter with this sonata in performance, rather than on recording. I left with an appreciation for why the music seldom shows up on recital programs and admiration of the degree of sense-making that Petersen brought to his interpretation.
On the other hand, the Chopin études can be admired simply for the specific technical demands posed by each individual composition. Nevertheless, here, too, Petersen did not overlook the need to seek out an expressive interpretation. As a result, each étude had its own engaging qualities, as did the one from Opus 10 that he saved for an encore, sadly, without mentioning its key. This was coupled with the G major prelude, the third in Chopin’s Opus 28 collection. Those Chopin encores were preceded by a more satisfying Ravel encore: the second (minuet) movement from his three-movement sonatina. Petersen’s interpretation served as a sun rising to dispel all the nightmares of Gaspard de la nuit.
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