Yesterday afternoon in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music hosted the Fifth Anniversary Season Finale of the San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF). The title of the program was A Well-Tempered Legacy. This amounted to a series of reflections on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach without any of that composer’s works included on the program until the final selection. Another possible title might have been Bach Reflected and Refracted, with fugues providing the basis for both reflection and refraction.
The first composer on the program was Dmitri Shostakovich, whose catalog includes a generous number of preludes and fugues. Indeed, that coupling accounts for the first two movements of his Opus 57 piano quintet in G minor. SFIPF Artistic Director Jeffrey LaDeur took the piano part, joined by the members of the Telegraph Quartet: violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw.
While there are no further reflections on Bach in the remaining three movements, the entire quintet presents Shostakovich’s rhetoric at its most intense. The score was completed in September on 1940, and there is a certain irony to the foreboding darkness of that rhetoric: Less than a year later, in June of 1941, Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union. Even without that historical context, yesterday’s performance provided a thoroughly engaging account of the diversity of dark shadows that Shostakovich summoned in composing this quintet.
Indeed, the impact of this quintet is so strong that it is usually programmed as a final selection. Performing it at the beginning of a program is likely to leave the attentive listener wondering what could possibly follow it. LaDeur seems to have based his plan on the principle that one good fugue deserves another. As a result, the program concluded with Parker Van Ostrand, currently an SFCM student, playing the final movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 106 (“Hammerklavier”) piano sonata in B-flat major. That movement couples an extended introduction (prelude) with a ferociously aggressive fugue which is about as remote from any fugue Bach composed than one could hope to get. Yesterday’s performance did not overlook a single trick as Beethoven turned the fugue theme into those pieces of colored glass that you see reflected in a kaleidoscope. That coupling of Shostakovich and Beethoven probably left the audience thankful for then being allowed an intermission.
Fortunately, the remainder of the program was less intense. LaDeur returned to play four fugues based on Beatles tunes that had been composed by Tom Sivak. The movements he selected were “All My Lovin’,” “Penny Lane,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Hey Jude,” all of which were being given West Coast premiere performances. After the intensity of the first half of the program these offerings came across a bit like parlor tricks, but they were more than moderately engaging.
The remainder of the program was taken by Tammy Lynn Hall, preceded by a film of Nina Simone. The film was made at the 1987 Montreux Jazz Festival; and Simone was playing one of her favorite tunes, Walter Donaldson’s “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” However, this particular account was clearly introduced in the context of the gigue that was one of Bach’s favorite musical dance forms. Hall then took the keyboard to explore similar approaches to four familiar tunes, all of which had been in Simone’s “book,” “Little Girl Blue,” “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” “Good Bait,” and “Love Me or Leave Me.” She then closed out her set (and the entire program) with the C major prelude (BWV 846) that begins Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.
This made for a rather casual wrapping-up of this summer’s SFIPF; but, given the intensity of the first half of the program, that calmer disposition was decidedly welcome.
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