SFIPF: An Uneven Finale

Last night the San Francisco International Piano Festival made its concluding visit to Old First Presbyterian Church to present the Festival Finale, given the title A Night at the Cinema. The entire second half of the program was devoted to the screening of a silent Buster Keaton film with “live” musical accompaniment by pianist Stephen Prutsman and the members of the Telegraph Quartet, violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw. However, the high point of the evening preceded the intermission.

This involved the return of Parker Van Ostrand, whose solo recital on Friday evening was the high point of the entire Festival. Having established his command of the Franz Liszt B minor piano sonata, Ostrand shifted his attention to Sergei Rachmaninoff in celebration of that composer’s 150th year. (Rachmaninoff was born on April 1, 1873.) The major work that he performed was the Opus 36 (second) piano sonata in B-flat minor, composed in 1913 and subsequently, in 1931, “revised and reduced.” Ostrand’s command of this major undertaking was as sure-handed as his interpretation of the Liszt sonata, and he knew just the right way to guide the attentive listener through all the rich embellishments and aggressive dispositions.

Ostrand decided to “warm up” his listeners with a somewhat more moderate account of Rachmaninoff. He selected that composer’s arrangement of “Liebesleid,” one of the most popular compositions that violinist Fritz Kreisler wrote for his own performances with piano accompaniment. Presumably, Kreisler was pleased with Rachmaninoff’s efforts, since the two of them gave several duo recital performances at Carnegie Hall. As one might guess, Rachmaninoff’s arrangement of “Liebesleid” had its own flamboyance; but one could still appreciate the Gemütlichkeit of Kreisler’s rhetoric.

Poster for Buster Keaton’s College (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The idea of accompanying Buster Keaton’s College with chamber music may have seemed more than a little odd, but subtle oddities provided the bread and butter of the films Keaton made. Keaton’s best known film is The General, which has more jaw-dropping moments than I could possible enumerate. College, on the other hand, lacks both spirit and flesh when compared with the more familiar Keaton films. Why Prutsman thought it would benefit from chamber music accompaniment is beyond my capacity for speculation. Nevertheless, it would be fair say that the visual totally overwhelmed the auditory during last night’s screening, probably because attention was focused almost entirely on the narrative. Put another way, the Festival deserved a Finale that had more to do with pianos.