Pianist Tiffany Poon made her San Francisco debut during the 2022 Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF) season. My schedule did not allow me to attend that performance, but yesterday afternoon she returned to Herbst Theatre for a return appearance. Sadly, I have no idea what prompted the return, because the entire program, including the three encores, amounted to one major disappointment after another.
There was some sense that she was seeking an innovative approach performance. In the first half of the program, she played Robert Schumann’s Opus 15 Kinderszenen (scenes from childhood) and then launched into Claude Debussy’s Children's Corner without leaving room for applause. The prevailing rhetoric was affectation, poured on particularly thick in her approach to Schumann. The second half of the program was devoted to Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 28, his set of 24 preludes in all major and minor keys, introduced with an “overture of sorts” by Johann Sebastian Bach, the BWV 846 and BWV 847 prelude-fugue couplings in C major and minor, respectively, that begin The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 (again with no interruption between the selections). The Bach selections were tolerable, but the Chopin cycle showed no appreciation of or respect for the composer’s efforts from start to finish. The three encores were no better: the first (in the key of E-flat major) of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 117 set of three intermezzi, Franz Liszt’s transcription of “Widmung,” the opening song in Schumann’s Opus 25 Myrthen song cycle, and one of Liszt’s “Valse oubliée” compositions (the first?).
This made for a very long program that offered absolutely nothing to satisfy any seriously attentive listener.
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