Olmos Ensemble
When one plus one equals one
March 18, 2010What happens when two first-rate collaborative pianists -- those are the underappreciated folks who used to be called “accompanists” -- collaborate with each other?
The question might evoke images of a musical Alphonse and Gaston routine, but the actual results were pure magic in Franz Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor, apex of a remarkable Olmos Ensemble concert March 16 in First Unitarian Universalist Church.
The pianists were New York-based Warren Jones, a long-time Olmos member and widey recognized as the premiere collaborative pianist in the country; and Anne Epperson, who heads the collaborative piano program at UT-Austin’s Butler School of Music. They were joined by two superb Olmos Ensemble (and San Antonio Symphony) wind players: Clarinetist Ilya Shterenberg was Epperson’s partner in Robert Schumann’s Fantasiestucke, Op. 73, and hornist Jeff Garza was Jones’s partner in Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano with Horn, Op. 17. Jones took a solo turn in Johannes Brahms’s Three Intermezzi, Op. 117.
The Schubert is a particularly cherishable memory. Much of Schubert’s music is suffused with a sense of longing and of unrequited love, but those qualities are never more palpable than in this piece -- and seldom have they been more poignantly expressed than in this performance.
Its distinctive character asserted itself right at the start. The treble part (Jones) opens with a stuttering, rising and falling motive, obsessively repeated, that is the very soul of hopeless, ceaseless yearning. Meanwhile, the bass part (Epperson) has material that, on the page, looks like a generic, rather boring rhythmic groove and harmonic underpinning.
But what Epperson did with that unpromising material was miraculous. She made it swell and sigh. It became a supple garment for Jones’s beautifully played melodic line, whose contours were accentuated by the fabric’s drape.
That kind of mutual support and responsiveness continued throughout the piece. This was an extraordinarily unified performance in both the trivial sense (the pianists’ clocks were synchronized to the split second) and in the deep sense that they seemed to share a single limbic system. And thus the answer to the question: When two great collaborative pianists collaborate with each other, they become one.
The rest of the concert maintained comparably high standards. Jones and Garza gave a zesty, exciting, cleanly articulated account of Beethoven’s sunny piece from 1800, and Garza (of course) nailed the difficult low Gs that lurk like pools of quicksand near the end of the first movement. Shterenberg’s warm, elegant tone and Epperson’s flexibility made an excellent showing in Schumann’s Fantasiestucke.
In the Brahms Intermezzi, composed as lullabies for a beloved dead child, Jones applied great sensitivity to the generous sculpting of tempi, and he wisely observed the compressed, soft dynamics Brahms called for. Many other pianists do not. Even as a soloist, Jones is an attentive collaborator.
Mike
Greenberg
