Andsnes Recital Highlights Latest Album

courtesy of Jensen Artists

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Leif Ove Andsnes presented the second solo piano recital in this season of the San Francisco Symphony Great Performers Series. The second half of the program was devoted entirely to a cycle of thirteen compositions that Antonín Dvořák called Poetic Tone Pictures, his Opus 85. This is also the title of Andsnes’ latest album for Sony Classical, which was released at the beginning of this past November. Presumably, last night’s recital was part of a tour conceived to promote the recording.

The duration of the entire album is 56 minutes, which is a significant amount of time to listen to thirteen unfamiliar pieces of music. To be fair, Dvořák provided vivid titles for each of the individual pieces; and Andsnes cannot be faulted for providing accounts that clearly reflected those titles. One also encounters a few surprises along Andsnes’ journey through these thirteen pieces. The most vivid of these comes around the halfway mark with the performance of “Sorrowful Reverie,” which turns out to have a tango as its primary theme!

That tango may have been a valuable stimulus for those whose attention was beginning to lag. Movements like “Goblins’ Dance” and “Bacchanalia” may have been strategically placed as subsequent prods to attention, but they did not have quite the same effect as that tango. The “Furiant” movement made for a better draw of attention, particularly since its Allegro feroce tempo was applied to a mazurka. For all the many assets that an attentive listener can mine from this cycle, there still remains the possibility that the entire journey will not be able sustain full engagement.

However, the “path of discovery” followed the Tone Pictures with an unfamiliar encore. This was a short composition by Norwegian composer Harald Sæverud, whose “Ballad of Revolt” is well known in his native land. Andsnes then closed out the evening with a more familiar encore, the last of Frédéric Chopin’s four Opus 30 mazurkas, composed in the key of C-sharp minor.

The first half of the program also served as a journey from the less-known to the familiar. Andsnes began the program with “Lament” by Alexander Vustin, one of the less-known Russian composers of the twentieth century. This 1974 composition was followed by an early twentieth-century work by Leoš Janáček, the two-movement piano sonata he composed in 1905. In fact, the sonata has the title “1. X. 1905,” named for the date of a demonstration at which one of the protestors was bayoneted. This was followed by the third of Valentin Silvestrov’s thirteen bagatelles. Andsnes then closed out his program by reverting to the first quarter of the nineteenth century to play Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 110 piano sonata in A-flat major, which is probably best known for the composer’s wild approach to a fugue whose subject is also played in inversion.

Taken in its entirety, Andsnes’ program was impressively extensive. Nevertheless, duration tended to lead to occasional lapses in attention. Personally, I would be happy to see Sony Classical provide a “companion” album accounting for all the works that were performed in addition to the Dvořák Opus 85 collection.