Pianist Rachel Breen (from her Old First Concerts event page)
Yesterday afternoon in the Old First Presbyterian Church, the 2022 San Francisco International Piano Festival presented the first of the three Old First Concerts recitals to be performed at that venue. The recitalist was Rachel Breen, making her Festival debut. Breen prefaced both halves of her program with well-informed verbal introductions, making the case for a well-considered plan behind the overall performance.
The conclusion of that path was Ludwig van Beethoven’s final piano sonata, Opus 111 in C minor. Beethoven departed from structural conventions of the past in many of his late compositions. By the time he completed Opus 111, he had distilled structure down to only two movements. This consisted of a hyper-charged sonata form with a Maestoso introduction followed by an extended set of variations on an Arietta theme. Both of these movements lead the attentive listener down a series of highly convoluted paths involving elaborate embellishments of thematic elements based on almost naive simplicity. Breen clearly appreciated the full scope of those embellishments and knew how to communicate them to the attentive listener, providing a clear account of music that many members of the audience have probably encountered any number of times in the past.
Breen also decided that the second half of her program needed an introduction to this massive icon in the Beethoven catalog. Since the two movements are in C minor and C major, respectively, she chose to introduce the sonata with Robert Schumann’s Opus 18 “Arabeske,” which he composed in the key of C major. As the title suggests, this is also highly-embellished music. While the music itself post-dates Beethoven, that attention to embellishment served to prepare the audience for the extreme thematic elaborations that would be encountered in the Beethoven sonata.
The first half of the program concluded with music that had also been selected to prepare the listener for Beethoven. Breen’s selection was Nikolai Medtner’s Opus 22 sonata in G minor. She explained that this sonata reflected the same prioritization of counterpoint over harmony that one encounters in Opus 111, particularly where the second-movement variations are concerned. She also suggested that Medtner’s attention to rhetoric would guide the attentive listener to recognizing rhetorical devices in Opus 111, this time in both of the sonata’s movements.
At the same time, the Medtner sonata reflected the approaches to composition that preceded it in Breen’s program. It would be fair to say that the first half of the program involved the exploration of multiple tonalities and the processes of modulation that connect them. Conventional modulation generally involves shifts in tonality across the interval of a perfect fifth. Medtner’s sonata, on the other hand, deploys modulations across the interval of a third (major or minor). Furthermore, the opening selection, a fantasia by John Bull, amounts to an exercise in stepwise modulation. He made this clear to performers and listeners by giving this composition the title “Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La.” Breen used dynamics to clarify how Bull deployed his modulations, a clarification that would probably have been more difficult to perceive when his music was performed on keyboard instruments of his own time, such as the virginal.
The “bridge” between Bull and Medtner was Alexander Scriabin. Breen selected seven of the preludes from his Opus 11. This is the set of 24 preludes that account for all of the major and minor keys. The last of Breen’s selections was the prelude in E-flat minor, and she preceded it by another Scriabin prelude in the same key, the fourth of his five Opus 16 preludes. Breen clearly had her own strategies for guiding the listener through Scriabin’s preludes. Her techniques left me hoping that, at some time in the future, she would return to Old First to present an all-Scriabin program.
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