Lise de la Salle’s Return to SFP Disappoints

Pianist Lise de la Salle (photograph by Lynn Goldsmith, courtesy of SFP)

Last night French pianist Lise de la Salle returned to Herbst Theatre for her third San Francisco Performances (SFP) recital. She made her SFP debut in January of 2009, after having made her debut with the San Francisco Symphony in 2007. Her previous SFP recital took place at the end of February in 2014.

The primary work on last night’s program was also the only piece to be performed after the intermission, Franz Liszt’s monumental B minor piano sonata. De la Salle brought an aggressive rhetoric to the first half of the program, in which the first of Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz” compositions was sandwiched between Isaac Albéniz’ five-movement Cantos de España suite and the three Danzas Argentinas of Alberto Ginastera’s Opus 2. Those offerings seemed to serve as a “warm-up” for her bringing that same rhetorical stance to the Liszt sonata.

Sadly, where the sonata was concerned, that rhetoric was little more than (to loosely paraphrase Winston Churchill) one damned outburst after another. Mind you, those outbursts reflected secure command of every gesture that de la Salle brought to her keyboard. However, I have had the good fortune to encounter at least one pianist whose technique delivered an account of this sonata that was far more than a roller-coaster ride of outbursts. As a result, I have come to appreciate that there is a solid infrastructure of expressiveness that lies beneath all those churning outbursts; and I came away wishing that de la Salle had invested a bit more of her practice time into seeking out that infrastructure.

Unfortunately, in the context of the overall program, the sonata performance came across as a more-of-the-same “response” to the “call” of her performance of “Mephisto Waltz.” Mind you, the intensity of de la Salle’s technique certainly endowed that waltz-that-is-not-really-a waltz with a diabolical delivery. This was one of those accounts in which an attentive listener could recognize (if not enjoy) the presence of Mephisto in every phrase that she hammered out.

Sadly, however, de la Salle brought that same keyboard technique to both Albéniz and Ginastera. Both of those suites were clearly conceived with dispositions that were anything but diabolical. Rather, those compositions seem to have been created out of some combination of love and pride in the nature of national identity, Spanish in the first selection and Argentinian in the second. Unfortunately, that sense of identity was entirely lacking in de la Salle’s performances, which had more to do with jumping through all of the technical hoops in the score pages with little attention to why the composers put those hoops there in the first place.

Considering how consistently satisfying SFP recitals have been over the last month or so, last night emerged as a rather sad disappointment.