Last night the San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF) got off to a rocky start, at least for those of us that opted for a livestream of the performance. The performance took place in the Old First Presbyterian Church, presented by the Old First Concerts (O1C) series. O1C has been one of the best sources of live-streamed content, the result of an impressively rapid learning curve to compensate for pandemic conditions. Unfortunately, neither SFIPF Founder and Artistic Director Jeffrey LaDeur nor opening night solo recitalist Tanya Gabrielian seemed to know “the drill” when using a microphone for the benefit of both the immediate audience and the remote one. Presumably, those in the “physical” audience were satisfied; but those of us in cyberspace heard nothing but garbled text.
Fortunately, there were no faults at all when it came to listening to Gabrielian’s piano performance. This was good, since there was much to attract and hold the attention of the serious listener. Indeed, considerable imaginative thought seems to have gone into preparing the program.
The first half of the program consisted of eight relatively brief selections, all of which were transcriptions for solo piano by Alexander Siloti. The very idea of such transcriptions can be traced back at least as far as Franz Liszt (who, more often than not, added generous embellishments to the music being transcribed). Siloti may well have been as prodigious as Liszt in preparing transcriptions. These days, however, he is recalled for only one of them, Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 855a, the prelude from the E minor prelude-fugue coupling in the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 855).
Gabrielian seems to have sympathized with those of us that feel we have had enough of that transcription in encore selections. Instead, she chose for her Bach selection the BWV 565 coupling of a toccata and fugue in the key of D minor. This was her opening selection, which proved to be effective for seizing the attention of the serious listener. Nevertheless, eight Siloti transcriptions tended to strain the attention of even the most serious and dedicated listener, sometimes because the music simply did not lend itself to transcription (Maurice Ravel’s setting of the Hebrew Kaddish text for solo vocalist) or because we have already heard it too many times (the last of Niccolò Paganini’s caprices, originally composed for solo violin). That was the final transcription that Gabrielian played, and I would have preferred her to wrap things up a bit sooner.
The second half of the program made for a diverse but somewhat odd collection. Gabrielian began with a short piece by Aaron Copland entitled “Three Moods,” which made for an engaging departure from what we usually expect of Copland. This was followed by the “Meditation for the Left Hand” by Leopold Godowsky, which provided Gabrielian with an opportunity to present the strength of her left hand. Nevertheless, the overall duration was too long and repetitive to sustain serious attention. The program then concluded with Carl Maria von Weber’s Opus 39 sonata in D minor, which overstayed its welcome even more exhaustively than Godowsky’s “Meditation” did.
This made for a long evening, but Gabrielian still had the energy for an encore (but not, apparently, any need to introduce it to the audience).
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