Pianist Carolyn True
Music from the tough and tender
American landscape
December 18, 2008It would not be quite accurate to say that the SOLI Chamber Ensemble's estimable pianist Carolyn True gave a Beethoven-free recital on Beethoven’s birthday, Dec. 16 in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall. The exploratory spirit of the man was present, even if his direct authorship was not, in a greatly varied program of recent (loosely speaking) music, all played with a fine ear for style.
Eight living American composers were represented, and together they covered the tough and tender extremes.
Most intriguing at the tough end was the Argentinian-American Mario Davidovsky’s “Synchronisms” No. 6, a 1970 work for live piano and electronic sounds. The synthesized sounds are the chirps, twitters and dings that are typical of the limited electronic vocabulary of the period, but Davidovsky deploys them with great discipline. Generally of brief duration and discrete, punctuated by silences, they complement the live piano part, which dominates, and seem more an extension of piano technique than an alien intrusion. The whole is uncompromisingly modern, avoiding conventional tonal, metric and melodic feeling. But the piece also establishes its own distinctive, consistent and very musical sound universe, especially as conveyed by True’s spirited, cleanly etched performance.
Steve Reich was one of the leaders of the “minimalist,” pattern-oriented insurgency against the supposedly arid complexities of advanced modernism. In his early “Piano Phase” of 1967, the same repeated figure is played at slightly different tempos on two pianos set up at right angles. It’s hypnotic, and a huge challenge to the attention and endurance of the pianist, but ultimately not interesting enough to justify its length.
Elliott Carter is an admirer of Beethoven and perhaps the strongest living candidate to inherit his mantle. Carter was represented by a relatively early work, the second movement from his Piano Sonata of 1945-6. Predating the complex time play and tonal freedom of his mature style, this music shows some influence of Aaron Copland, but with more granularity of texture. The movement is also exceedingly verbose, in contrast to the concision of Carter’s music from the past few decades.
True opened with the original Bach “Goldberg” aria -- suspended in air in this performance -- and four of the “13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg: New Variations on the Goldberg Theme,” a 2004 assemblage of variations by composers from many different camps. The one I’d most like to hear again was young Chicagoan Mischa Zupko’s ethereal “Ghost” Variation. In Lukas Foss’s “Goldmore” Variation, calm passages of thick jazz harmonies alternated with sprightly, fizzy music of strikingly Bachian character, superbly played by True. William Bolcom contributed a left-hand canon of fairly narrow ken, a little too close to the Bach aesthetic. David Del Tredici offered a lyrical piece in relaxed triple meter dubbed a “gymnopedie,” evidently in homage to Erik Satie, though the “Goldberg” aria does sneak in.
True closed with the tender extreme of Aaron Jay Kernis’s 1987 “Lullaby,” sweet (but not cloying) and dreamy but with a climax of tougher character. A lot of contemporary composers have returned to Romantic or early Modern tonality, but few have done so with Kernis’s combination of direct feeling, high craft and extraordinary beauty.
Mike
Greenberg
