Chochieva’s Disappointing San Francisco Debut

This afternoon Chamber Music San Francisco launched its 2024 season with a solo piano recital by Zlata Chochieva. In his introductory remarks to the audience, Executive Director Daniel Levenstein remarked that Chochieva was a highly sought-after performer, suggesting that her slot in this season’s schedule was one of very good fortune. Walking home from Hertz Theatre, I kept turning over in my mind just why the demand for her was so great. In my own “mental balance sheet” there were so many entries in the Liabilities column that the items in the Assets column were barely memorable if not noticeable at all.

The greatest source of those liabilities could be found in Chochieva’s performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 22, a set of 22 variations based on the C minor prelude, the twentieth selection in Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 28 collection of 24 preludes in all of the major and minor keys. That particular prelude is so well-known that many probably can sing it in their sleep. However, I knew this familiar tune was in for a rough ride when Chochieva took the first variation at the same Largo tempo that Chopin had assigned to the prelude, while Rachmaninoff gave the first variation the tempo of Moderato.

This disclosed the critical flaw in the entire performance. There was never anything even approaching Moderato in Chochieva’s approach to the keyboard. (Rachmaninoff assigned the tempo to three of the variations.) Instead she charged ahead from variation to variation, spilling notes off the keyboard in all directions in such a way that even the most attentive listener could barely associate any of the variations with the theme. Flamboyance was the order of the day, slipping over to the preceding composition that began the second half of the program, Chopin’s Opus 61, an extended work in A-flat major that the composer called “Polonaise-Fantaisie.” Suffice it to say that Chochieva gave little attention to any rhetorical qualities associated with either a polonaise or a fantasia.

At least the first half of the program got off to a promising start. The five Opus 15 preludes composed by Alexander Scriabin seemed to be within Chochieva’s rhetorical comfort zone. The attentive listener was more likely to be rewarded with an appreciation of both thematic content and the development of that content. She then moved on to the twelve Opus 10 études by Chopin (although I think she dropped the third in E major). These were technically dutiful, but there was little attention to giving each of those études its own characteristic rhetorical stance.

Rachmaninoff ruled again over Chochieva’s first encore. This was his over-the-top embellishment of the Preludio movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1006 violin partita in E major. In spite of my preferences for “historically-informed performance,” Rachmaninoff’s version always brings a smile to my lips. On the other hand, Chochieva hammered away at it (possibly embellishing one of Rachmaninoff’s embellishments every now and then), adding brutality to her already-established flamboyance.

Sadly, her diction was almost as brutal as her keyboard work. Her announcement of her second encore was too garbled for comprehension. I do not think I missed anything of significance.