Mineva Plays Uncompromising Piano Music

Late yesterday afternoon at the Old First Presbyterian Church, Old First Concerts presented a solo recital by pianist Daniela Mineva. I had previously encountered her when she served as a pianist for the Light and Matter program that Earplay presented in February of 2020, the last Earplay program prior to the COVID lockdown. She performed a duo for violin and piano with Terrie Baune entitled “Late Show” by Gilad Cohen. I described this as music of “boldly declaimed phrasing;” and neither player was shy about being bold.

That boldness was given a far more extensive platform in the program Mineva prepared for yesterday afternoon. That platform supported two compositions by Galina Ustvolskaya (her fifth piano sonata and a set of twelve preludes) and single works by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh (“Music for Piano”) and Sofia Gubaidulina (the piano sonata she composed in 1965). The entire program was about 80 minutes in duration, performed without an intermission.

Once again there was nothing shy in Mineva’s approach to execution. She gave a spoken account about the individual pieces, which compensated to the lack of any such content in the program book. In many respects her capacity for verbal description was right up there with those bold declamations of the music itself.

She informed her audience that Ustvolskaya was known as “the lady with the hammer” and specifically called out what she identified as the “obsessive D-flat” in the piano sonata. All this was useful for anyone willing to pay attention to Mineva’s remarks, but the listening experience was still a rather demanding stretch. Of all the works on the program, the Ustvolskaya preludes were probably the easiest to negotiate, primarily due to their brevity.

The Ali-Zadeh composition, which began the program, was also relatively accommodating. This was due, in part, to the piano having been “prepared” in a manner that allowed for a back-and-forth exchange between piano sonorities and those of a cimbalom. The music itself was rich in modal qualities, which, when compared with the compositions that would follow, engaged the attentive listener with an intriguingly understated rhetoric.

Nevertheless, when one considered the program taken as as whole, there were only so many “hammer blows” the listener could sustain before giving in to fatigue. Gubaidulina was basically the “victim” of that fatigue. All of her piano works are relatively early, but they tend to express a rhetorical freshness. By all rights the sonata deserved an attention that had not sustained the hammer blows (literal and figurative) of the preceding compositions.