Peter Serkin with the SA Symphony:
Bach and Stravinsky, finding freedom in constraint
January 19, 2008Joining the San Antonio Symphony on Friday in deeply etched and fully considered accounts of works composed nearly 200 years apart, pianist Peter Serkin illuminated the similarities between a conservative modernist and a modern ancient.
Serkin was the soloist in Igor Stravinsky's infrequently heard Capriccio for piano and orchestra of 1929 and J.S. Bach's very familiar Concerto for Keyboard, Strings and Continuo in D Minor, from about 1738. Music director Larry Rachleff conducted the Majestic Theater concert, which closed with Serge Prokofiev's landmark Symphony No. 5 of 1944.
The Capriccio, in all but name a three-movement concerto, is a crackling, prickly, witty piece from Stravinsky's neoclassical period. Some ideas anticipate the better-known Symphony in Three Movements of 1945. The piano part is full of explosive interjections and tight hairpin turns, and the orchestration is brilliantly colored with brass and woodwinds (which played superbly on Friday). The piece is more charming and congenial than Stravinsky's norm, and the driving, dance-like finale positively ebullient.
Although Stravinsky's textures and harmonies are acridly modern and far from the sound world of Bach, the two composers are brothers under the skin, united by a cogent, near-mathematical formal discipline. Stravinsky's modernism is akin to that of the Bauhaus in architecture -- tightly constrained, rational and classical in its bones. As Stravinsky wrote in his Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, "My freedom consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings."
As for Bach, he was an innovator and form-giver. In particular, he virtually invented the concerto as a musical genre. In the way Bach elaborated the solo part and its interplay with the orchestra, the D Minor Concerto, the first of those that Bach composed for the Collegium in Leipzig, established the model.
Serkin addressed both works with crisp, clipped diction, an angular, machine-gun execution of florid details and a firm sense of structure, which governed the performances without inhibiting them. He got a big sound from the piano, but he avoided any suggestion of romanticism. In Bach his tempos overall were steady, but modulated effectively at strategic moments. His most intense playing came, somewhat paradoxically, in the Bach slow movement, every syllable given its specific weight and delivered with urgency and passion. Think of Jacques Brel singing "Ne me quitte pas," and you'll get the idea.
Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony is a relatively conservative work by a composer who had previously sought to break new ground and, in his early years, had relished disapproval from teachers and critics. Disapproval from Stalin's culture police was another matter, however.
If the Fifth is relatively accessible, it is far from anodyne and contains enough substance and arresting ideas to count as Prokofiev's most important symphony.
Rachleff conducted it with a seamless sense of line and a lyrical flow that seemed almost Brahmsian. At times one might have wished for more pungency and punctuation. Still, Rachleff's view of the piece yielded its own insights and pleasures, notably the relentless forward motion of the second movement and the dreamlike almost-waltz of the third.
Apart from some tuning issues in the woodwinds, the performance was polished, crystalline and spirited, with especially nice work from principal clarinetist Ilya Shterenberg.
Kristin Roach scored a hat trick, as Serkin's page-turner in the Stravinsky, continuo harpsichordist in Bach and orchestral pianist in Prokofiev.
