Pianist Danny Driver’s Impressive Debut

Pianist Danny Driver (photograph by Kaupo Kikkas, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances presented the first of the four debut recitals it scheduled for the last two months of this year. The recitalist was British pianist Danny Driver, who is no stranger to North America but was probably making his West Coast debut. His program offered an engaging intertwining of relationships, culminating in a performance of Robert Schumann’s Opus 13 set of variations, given the title (as translated into English) “Symphonic Studies.”

The program began with four compositions by Gabriel Fauré, one of which was his own Opus 73 set of variations, which explicitly cites Schumann’s Opus 13. The last of the Fauré selections was his Opus 66 barcarolle in F-sharp minor. This could be taken as a “forward pass” to  Maurice Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l’océan,” the third of five solo piano compositions collected under the title Miroirs, which was preceded by two short compositions by Lili Boulanger. Finally, the broad scope of the Schumann composition was complemented at the end of the first half of the program by César Franck’s “Prélude, Choral et Fugue.”

In each half of the program, Driver provided only modest pauses between his selections, deliberately leaving no time for audience applause. He clearly wished to convey the impression that each half of the program had its own unified design. Following the intermission, he offered a few brief remarks about such unification, as well as the “thematic link” between Fauré and Schumann. However, anything he really wanted to say to the audience was delivered through his interpretations of the works he had chosen to perform.

Driver had clearly calculated an identifying rhetorical stance for each of his selections. Both the Franck and the Schumann offerings positively roared with the energetic dispositions that covered the full range of the piano keyboard. On the other hand the Boulanger compositions were intimately under-spoken, leaving the attentive listener to crave more samplings of the music she had composed over the course of her sadly short life. Nevertheless, for all of the breadth of intensity, Driver never overplayed any of his selections. He clearly wanted listeners to be engaged by both the overall sweep of his journey and the intimacy of his attention to details.

I suspect I was not the only one to leave Herbst last night wondering when Driver would return to offer another imaginatively conceived piano recital.