St John’s, Smith Square
Copland – Piano Variations
Carter –Tri-TributeCarter – Two Thoughts about the Piano
Ives – Piano Sonata no.1
This will prove, I think, to be
a recital long echoing in the memories of those present. The music of three very different composers were here
heard, a common theme perhaps more the utterly compelling advocacy and
virtuosity of Tamara Stefanovich than any intrinsic musical connections between
the works. That did not matter a jot. Stefanovich’s welcoming manner – she prefaced
the Carter pieces and the Ives with very helpful introductions – would have
drawn anyone in. The warmth and volume of the applause following Charles Ives’s
First Sonata said it all.
If Aaron Copland wrote a better
work than his 1930 Piano Variations,
I do not know it. Stefanovich gave at least as good a performance as any
recording I have heard. (I do not think I had previously had the opportunity to
hear it live.) The opening sounded stentorian, provocative. It took, quite
rightly, a little while to yield, construction and drama revealed to be as one.
I loved Stefanovich’s grand, Romantic manner with the work, sounding every bit
as much music for the Steinway as Rachmaninov; indeed, at times, Copland
sounded positively Lisztian. The music could melt, tenderly, in similar fashion
too. Leonard Bernstein called the work ‘as hard as nails’. That was not really
how it sounded here. Rather, Stefanovich seemed to posit – or at least I heard –
something of a rapprochement avant la
lettre between Schoenberg and Stravinsky; perhaps there was even a sense of
Prokofiev at his most radical. More importantly still, Stefanovich proved
herself here an unmistakeably original musical thinker, beholden to no
performing tradition; I really must hear her again in Boulez’s Second Sonata,
since I now fear that, on a previous occasion, I listened far too much with my
own preconceptions to the fore.
Elliott Carter is widely
recognised as the greatest of all American composers. Here we heard works from
his extraordinary final period, approaching his century. Slipping in a
cunningly unattributed Ivesian reference (his father’s advice) to her
introduction, Stefanovich told us that this was music to ‘stretch the ears’. It
was indeed, but so had Copland’s work been too. Different metrical speeds ‘in a
very confined space’ was an apt frame of reference for us to hear the three
miniatures of Tri-Tribute. They
sounded, in their way, as something of a petite
suite, and had a wonderful sense of playfulness. In Two Thoughts about the Piano, ‘Intermittences’ brought what sounded
like a post-Messieanic hierarchy of dynamics. And again, I thought: what
wonderful use of the Steinway! Sparks flew, as it were, in ‘Caténaires’:
electric as well as electrical, with an intriguing, indeed delightful
post-Webern sonority. The sense of a single line – akin to a cable – was unmistakeable,
a moto perpetuo for the Internet age.
It was also my first
opportunity to hear Ives’s Sonata no.1 in concert. If less single-minded than
Mahler, it emerged certainly as more akin, in that most celebrated of symphonic
contrasts, to Mahler’s vision than to that of Sibelius. If it did not quite
embrace everything, it had a wonderful stab at doing so, perhaps all the more
touching, all the more daring, for its defiant lack of polish. Again,
Schoenberg came to mind, especially at the beginning; I had to remind myself
that Ives’s writing preceded Schoenberg’s op.11. Thereafter, take your pick:
everything seemed to be present. The grand, Romantic sound we had heard in
Copland seemed revivified here; we did not seem so very far from the challenge
of the Hammerklavier Sonata. The revelations
and mysteries of Ives’s compositional choices – what are we to make of the appearance of What a Friend we have in Jesus, and the use to which it is put? –
were as extraordinary, as baffling, and yes, as moving, as ever. This was a
bravura performance, if ever I heard one. ‘Silent’ Kurtág was the perfect
encore response: witty and surely just as loving.
