Review: Yefim Bronfman

March 21, University of Richmond

The virtuoso pianist was largely a creation of the 19th century; and for most of the 20th, pianists secured their reputations as virtuosos by mastering the romantic repertory. Yefim Bronfman, the Israeli-born American pianist, recalled that tradition – and its limitations – in a recital at the University of Richmond. Bronfman devoted most of his program to Schumann and Chopin, whose 200th anniversaries were celebrated last year, with a brief nod to this year's bicentennial birthday boy, Franz Liszt, in the second of two encores.

His treatments of Schumann's "Humoreske," Chopin's 12 études, Op. 10, and encore performances of Schumann's Arabesque and Liszt's arrangement of an étude by Paganini reflected a thorough immersion in the stylistic and spiritual world of romantic pianism.

Bronfman traced the long expressive arc of the Schumann, masterfully balancing its lyricism and dramatic rhetoric, and placed each of the Chopin études in harmonic, expressive and technical context with the others.

The pianist's formidable technique was evident throughout, but never an end in itself, even in the most florid and expressively uninhibited music. The moody lyricism of Chopin's Étude No. 9 in F minor, for example, was no less impressive than the grand portent of the "Revolutionary" Étude No. 12 in C minor.

Bronfman's undemonstrative, even stolid, onstage presence consistently directed the listener’s attention to what he was playing, not how he played it.

The program's opening selection, Haydn's "English" Sonata in C major (Hob. XVI/50), comes from a different sound world. Although written (circa 1794) for the most tonally advanced of the pre-modern pianos, it is by no stretch grand-piano music; and it offers rather little to pianists who thrive on romantic passions. Bronfman gave the piece a playful reading but one that played with a poker face, understating its humor and blunting its surprises.

Confessions

A nice feature from the classical corner of the NPR Music website: "Guilty Pleasures," in which noteworthy musicians come clean on their secret loves for music they're not supposed to like. The latest is from Tim Munro, flutist of eighth blackbird, who doesn't sound especially guilt-ridden or defensive about loving Tchaikovsky and the Swingle Singers:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2011/03/19/134653618/guilty-pleasures-wisdom-teeth-tchaikovsky-and-tim-munro#more

A happy orchestra

In a welcome departure from all the news and commentaries about the sad state of orchestras, The New York Times' James Oestreich examines the revival of the Toronto Symphony, which he credits to the imaginative leadership of its music director, Peter Oundjian, and chief executive, Andrew R. Shaw:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/arts/music/peter-oundjian-toronto-symphony-orchestras-music-director.html?ref=music

Having 25 to 30 percent of its budget covered by the government no doubt helps.

Falletta's 20th

JoAnn Falletta is marking her 20th anniversary as music director of the Hampton Roads-based Virginia Symphony – one of the longest tenures among conductors currently at work with major or mid-sized U.S. orchestras. (The 57-year-old Falletta also been music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic since 1999.)

Teresa Annas of The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk) profiles the maestra, on- and offstage:

http://hamptonroads.com/2011/03/vso-conductor-knows-sweet-sound-success

Mass popularity

A new recording of the long-lost "Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno" by the 16th-centrury Italian composer Alessandro Striggio has made an unlikely debut at No. 68 on the British pop charts, The Independent's Rob Sharp reports:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/news/lost-choral-masterpiece-finally-finds-a-home-in-the-pop-charts-2244098.html

As Dave Barry might say, Striggio would be a good name for a band.

Quake donations at KODO show

The American Red Cross will seek donations to its Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami Relief Fund at this week's Richmond performance by the KODO Japanese Drummers.

The concert, March 17 at the Landmark Theater, is presented by the University of Richmond's Modlin Arts Center.

Donations may be made at tables in the theater's main lobby before and after the concert. For more information, visit www.redcross.org

Review: eighth blackbird

March 14, University of Richmond

In its current season at the University of Richmond, eighth blackbird has staged two programs testing this remark by Igor Stravinsky: "Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all."

Last fall's "powerFUL" pushed against that notion with pieces of highly expressive and evocative, if not quite representational, character. This spring's "powerLESS" was supposed to be the counterweight, a program of works that are, in varying degrees, about "relationships of the notes themselves," as Tim Munro, eighth blackbird's flutist, puts it in a program note.

Munro was to have sung John Cage's Aria (1958) for solo voice, but after a two-week illness felt unable to handle the piece. Pianist Lisa Kaplan substituted two short works, David Lang's "Wed" and Cage's "In a Landscape," that were neither abstract nor powerless.

Another substitution: Esther Noh, a New York-based violinist auditioning to replace Matt Albert, who is leaving the group after 15 years. Albert joined the audience for the concert.

The program opened with Philip Glass' "Music in Similar Motion" (1969), one of his earliest exercises in what he calls "music with repetitive structures," which everyone else calls minimalism. Perky rhythm and the varied musical textures produced by the layering of instruments and tonal registers are the piece's principal attractions – or, if you prefer, the principal obstacles to zoning out from repetition.

The musicians played with palpable concentration (counting like mad will do that) and mechanistic energy. The sight of clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri playing measure after measure, motionless except for breathing and moving one finger, is now my default vision of high-minimalist performance.

In Steve Reich's "Cello Counterpoint" (2003), cellist Nicholas Photinos played with a recording overdubbing the sounds of seven other cellos, played by Maya Beiser, for whom the piece was composed. Like Reich's Sextet, which the ’birds introduced in 2008 at UR and which subsequently was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, "Cello Counterpoint" is structured very traditionally – fast-slow-fast – and leavens Reich's familiar rhythm-centered idiom with a lyrical central section, which gave Photinos a chance to play with expressivity as well as precision.

I don't know how many classic cartoons Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez has seen over the years, but his "Five Memos" (2010) suggests he's seen – and, more importantly, heard – his share. This suite of five mostly wildly animated miniatures, one titled "Gli Uccelini del Signor Tic-Tac" ("The Little Birds of Mr. Tic-Tac"), is peppered with the tightly organized collision noise, hairpin turns and off-the-cliff-and-stationary-in-mid-air silences of the great Looney Tunes scores of Carl Stalling. Sanchez-Gutierrez's suite progresses from the jagged and fragmentary to the more tonally cohesive, but keeps its antic energy level from start to finish.

"Five Memos" and Stephen Hartke's "Meanwhile: Incidental music to imaginary puppet plays," reprised here for the second time since the ’birds introduced it at UR in 2007, were the program's big ensemble pieces, both boasting the complexity and variety on which these musicians thrive.

The group used Erica Mott's choreography for Hartke's "Meanwhile," in which the string and wind players "migrate" between the poles of pianist Kaplan and percussionist Matthew Duvall, suggesting that (to Mott, at least) the strings of the puppet master are rhythmic.

Contemporary chamber music does not offer pianists many chances to play with the lyricism and phrase-shaping of romantic or early modern music. Kaplan took full advantage of two such chances in Lang's "Wed," a deeply felt but stoic Liebestod written after the composer witnessed a wedding in which one of the spouses was dying, and Cage's "In a Landscape," a mistily impressionistic tone painting that pretty comprehensively defies every stereotype of this composer.