Purcell Room
Schoenberg – Piano Pieces,
op.33a and op.33b
Webern – Variations, op.27
Gerhard – Three Impromptus,
op.8
Cage – The Perilous Night
Wolpe – Three Pieces for Youngsters
Boulez – Notations
This third and final recital
in Karim Said’s Purcell Room series, part of the broader Southbank Centre
festival, ‘The Rest is Noise’, made me wish I had been able to attend the
previous instalments. Each recital had centred around Schoenberg’s piano music;
this mostly looked forward. That Said had given due thought to the works
concerned was clear from the introductory discussion with Sara Mohr-Pietsch: a
welcome change from the dreadful platitudes such introductions often bring. The
proof of the aural pudding was in the listening, though, and it was very good
indeed.
I do not think I have heard
either of the Schoenberg op.33 Pieces in recital before (save, years ago, when
I played them myself, which does not really count). Said immediately revealed a
fine ear for sonority, making excellent use of his Steinway, and line,
including rhythm: a parameter which one still hears the ignorant deride in
music of the Second Viennese School. Ghosts of Vienna danced – and remembered. The
very different characters of the two pieces was evident, and yet, the second
was certainly in context made to follow on from the first, Schoenberg’s writing
seeming poised between the expressionism of the op.11 Pieces and the somewhat
more neo-Classical world of the Piano Concerto.
Webern’s Variations brought a
more analytical, though certainly not dry, approach. My sole reservation would
be that the work perhaps opened a little stiffly, but if that were the case,
this remained an accomplished, indeed beautiful performance. There was
certainly joy in the pianism of the second variation. Real sense was made of
dynamic contrasts as well as the phrasing: all those sighs! Said, we had
learned earlier, had studied a score with performing instructions by the
composer – presumably, though he did not say, those given to Peter Stadlen. The
experience seemed to have offered him the opportunity to penetrate deep beneath
the surface in a highly committed performance.
Roberto Gerhard’s 1950
Impomptus offered, both in work and performance, an intriguing and convincing injection
of Iberian rhythms in their encounter between Schoenbergian and post-Granados
soundworlds. (Gerhard studied with both Schoenberg and Granados.) Said proved
an excellent advocate, playing the pieces as if they were repertoire works,
Debussy also more than once coming to mind in passages of intensity and languor.
Above all, however, there was life: this was music as colourful as anything in,
say, Images. Moreover, one could
undoubtedly hear the composer’s twelve-note workings, testimony to the pianist’s
understanding and communication.
For John Cage’s The Perilous Night (1944), the piano was
transformed into an Eastern percussion ensemble, the composer having employed
the prepared instrument in his work as dance accompanist at the Cornish School.
To my ears, rhythm rather than pitch ruled, although the latter was not
entirely irrelevant. Whether the very business of preparing the piano were
intended as performance, it certainly came across as such. Intriguingly, a
degree of rhythmic kinship emerged with Boulez’s Notations, be it by ‘chance’ or otherwise, though the latter pieces
are of course far more varied, Cage being both less terse and more repetitive.
The harmony of Stefan Wolpe’s
Three Pieces for Youngsters imparted
a sense of returning home after Cage’s experimentalism. (Whatever one might go
to Cage for, it is certainly not harmony.) Wolpe’s chiselled miniatures were
not entirely unlike Webern’s own Kinderstück,
op. posth., though more reflective and without its almost Scarlatti-like
hypertension. There were hints of Berg, too, not least in the harmony of the
third. Teachers really ought to offer these pieces to children – and adults
should relish them on their own accord. Or rather, that might happen, if only someone
would publish them.
Finally, Boulez’s Notations. Said displayed clarity and
purpose in his delineation of their character and expressive power. The second
offered éclats in abundance, whilst
Debussyan languor – insofar as that be possible in pieces of twelve-bar
duration! – could be heard in its successor. Boulez’s suggestion of
improvisation – ‘Doux et improvisé’ – was communicated in the fifth, though
rigour, never didactic but rather enabling, was always the order of the day.
The suggestion of bass drum in the left hand of the ninth, apparently
communicated personally by the composer to Said, came across highly
convincingly, putting me in mind of Schoenberg’s op.19 no.6 (cleverly chosen by
Said as an encore). ‘Mécanique et très sec,’ is Boulez’s marking for the tenth,
and that is how it sounded, offering the strongest of contrasts. Quiet scintillation
characterised the eleventh, before the return of Messiaenesque tendencies,
already accounced in the ‘hieratic’ seventh, in the imaginary (secret?) theatre
of Boulez’s final Notation. I very
much hope that Said will go on to essay Boulez’s other works for piano, the 2005
une page d’éphémeride included.
