Olmos Ensemble, pianist Warren Jones
A Haydn sonata in full color
October 30, 2008Some years ago, one of this country’s best music critics presented a case that, unlike violins or cellos or horns, the piano was physically capable of producing only one instrumental color, and the pianist was powerless to alter it. We should not say that one pianist plays “monochromatically” and another plays “colorfully.”
Strictly speaking, he was right. But a skilled pianist can produce a reasonable facsimile of a color palette through permutations and combinations of articulation, tempo, pedal, key velocity and, perhaps, body language, astral projection and prayer.
Whatever the means, pianist Warren Jones somehow managed to transform a Steinway into a Sherwin-Williams in an astonishing performance of Franz Josef Haydn’s very late Sonata No. 52 in E-flat, the pinnacle of an Olmos Ensemble concert Oct. 28 in First Unitarian Universalist Church.
Haydn’s sonata dates from about 1794 and points strongly toward the emerging Romanticism of the period’s rising star, Beethoven. Jones alluded to the awkward but outwardly polite relationship between Haydn and the young Beethoven, who studied for a while under Haydn starting in 1792. (It was rather like the relationship between John McCain and Sarah Palin.) Jones underscored the sonata’s Romantic tendencies with dramatic shadings of dynamics, very flexible tempos and, in the middle slow movement, a highly personal, probing approach that brought out the otherworldly strangeness of the music. Throughout, the colors were wonderfully varied and deftly applied, despite the laws of physics. Although Jones has made his reputation as one of the world’s top collaborative pianists, this performance served as a reminder that he’s also an intelligent and compelling soloist.
Jones returned to his collaborative role in excellent performances of Camille Saint-Saens’ compact Sonata for Bassoon and Piano, with bassoonist Sharon Kuster delivering her customary bright, velvety tone and sensitive phrasing; and in Johannes Brahms’s Sonata in F Minor for Clarinet and Piano, with clarinetist Ilya Shterenberg sounding luscious and burnished.
Flutist Hye Sung Choe and oboist Mark Ackerman were splendid partners in Thea Musgrave’s tough-minded, unabashedly Modernist but sinuously melodic Impromptu No. 1 of 1967.
Mike
Greenberg
