Brent Watkins, pianist
Big sound, big risks, big payoffs
February 19, 2012Dawn came as something of a surprise on Feb. 18, because the previous evening pianist Brent Watkins played a varied program as though there’d be no tomorrow.
Mr. Watkins leads three musical lives. He is a classical pianist, a welcome if too-infrequent collaborator in local chamber music concerts; he plays at Bohanan’s and elsewhere with his South Texas Jazz Quartet; and he’s the musical arts director at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. All three strands could be heard in his Feb. 17 program in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall.
The bookends were works that make outrageous technical demands. Mr. Watkins opened with Ferruccio Busoni’s piano transcription of J.S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D for organ and closed with Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp Minor.
It is fortunate that Alamo Stadium, across the street from the recital hall, was not occupied with a high school football game. Had it been, a school official doubtless would have asked Mr. Watkins to play more softly in the Bach/Busoni so the marching bands could be heard. The fellow made a seemingly ordinary Baldwin sound like a cathedral pipe organ on steroids, the low end passably impersonating a trombone pedal stop that could induce earthquakes. He could pipe down, too: He opened the fugue with a delicate sound that was very much like an organ flute stop.
Mr. Watkins brought good but not excessive flexibility to the prelude, and he took care to underscore the weirder harmonies. He maintained a fairly strict tempo in the fugue, but variations in touch and dynamics gave the music great momentum, and the performance was very exciting indeed.
It would have been nice to hear more folk character in the rhythms of the Hungarian Rhapsody, but the performance was snappy, vivid and utterly without fear or equivocation. Both here and in the Bach/Busoni, Mr. Watkins evidenced enough technical headroom to damn the torpedoes and live to tell about it.
He brought a fine singing line and a fetching sense of intimacy to Liszt’s transcription (with embellishments) of Franz Schubert’s “Ständchen.” He closed the first half of the program with crisply stylish accounts of three pieces from Serge Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” ballet score, in the composer’s own transcriptions. He galumphed shamelessly through “Masks” (this is one instance in which shamelessness is nothing to be ashamed of), and his cool control made the fading heartbeat of “Romeo and Juliet Bid Farewell” uncommonly affecting.
Jazz was a bit too reverential in Jon Cowherd’s arrangement of the hymn “I Need Thee Ev’ry Hour,” but Mr. Watkins’s taste for risk and boldness came to the fore in his takes on Maria Grever’s “What a Difference a Day Made” and Monty Alexander’s “Renewal.” The pianist drew freely and comfortably from a wide range of jazz traditions. He favored a complexity that sometimes led to awkward moments, but on the whole he rewarded close attention.
Mike Greenberg
