CMSF: Olga Kern’s Disappointing Rachmaninoff

Pianist Olga Kern at a Steinway piano (photograph by Natalia Rostova, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

Russian-born pianist Olga Kern has been a favorite with audiences for Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF) performances, at least for the many seasons I have attended. She became an American citizen in 2016, which was the year in which she launched the Olga Kern International Piano Competition, having received the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Gold Medal in the Eleventh Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in June 2001, the first woman in over thirty years to win that competition. Ironically, I had not been able to schedule an opportunity to listen to her in recital until yesterday evening’s second program in the CMSF 2023 season.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sergei Rachmaninoff. By now many of us know that Yuja Wang marked the occasion with a marathon performance of the four piano concertos and the Opus 43 “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” Kern’s program, on the other hand, was more of a tribute to Rachmaninoff’s legacy of recordings, most of which were products of Rachmaninoff’s 23-year association with the Victor Talking Machine Company, which was absorbed by RCA in 1929. For last night’s program, she singled out the 1929 recording of Robert Schumann’s Opus 9 Carnaval suite. In addition, the diverse assortment of Rachmaninoff compositions was supplemented with three of his transcriptions.

Taken as a whole, the program provided an excellent account of Rachmaninoff’s achievements. Sadly, where execution was concerned, none of the performances rose to the standards of the music itself or Rachmaninoff’s recorded accounts. While he could bring intense rhetorical turns to those recordings (even in the context of inadequate technology), Kern never seemed to rise above the level of mere heavy-handedness. As a result, most of her selections flew by in a blur, almost as if speed mattered more to her than phrasing. Furthermore, that sameness of forceful execution sadly masked the underlying thematic and structural diversity of the selections on her program.

The result amounted to one of my favorite punch lines: “This is the sort of thing that people who like that sort of think will like.” Herbst Theatre was well filled with Kern enthusiasts, and that enthusiasm erupted with bursts of applause after each of her selections. By the end of the evening, that enthusiasm could only be satisfied with three encores. To be fair, Kern certainly knew how to engage her fans with not only her selections but also her brief and informative commentary on those selections. However, she never really captured the subtleties of performance technique that remain with us today thanks to the RCA legacy.