Last night the eighth annual San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF) presented a program entitled The World of Ravel with Asiya Korepanova. When Korepanova gave her debut recital last season, she presented a program of seven transcriptions, all of her own design. Sadly, this was not the Festival’s finest hour, due, as I put it at that time, to “ Korepanova’s overly aggressive keyboard technique,” which “tended to undermine any suggestion of expressiveness in either the music itself or its realization through transcription.”
Asiya Korepanova playing Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau” at SFIPF (screen shot from the YouTube video of the performance)
Expressiveness took it on the chin again last night to such an extent that I decided to limit myself to the first half of the program. The program was a promising one, beginning with the entirety of Claude Debussy’s L. 75 Suite bergamasque, accounting for all four movements, rather than just the third (“Clair de lune”). Debussy’s suite was paired with Maurice Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau.” These two twentieth-century composers were coupled with one of the major French keyboard works of the nineteenth century, the “Prélude, Choral et Fugue” by César Franck. While Korepanova could not be faulted for failing to account for each of the notes in these compositions assuming its proper place with the appropriate delivery of dynamics, there was little in her approaches to interpretation that would guide the attentive listener from one rhetorical outpost to another.
With the arrival of the intermission, I decided that I had had enough of “Korepanova’s Way!”
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