Friday, Saturday and Sunday, mid-October, and Alfas del Pi has three concerts in the renewed cycle of the Classical Music Concert Society. On Friday and Sunday there were solo piano recitals by Marco Tezza, while on Saturday, at Casa Cultura, we listened to Claudi Arimany and the Beaux Arts Trio in Mozart’s four-flute quartets.
Mozart quartets offer around an hour of music. As a soloist, Claudi Arimany called for melody and generally fast tempi for allegros, including rondos. This is not demanding music, but it is pleasantly melodious, memorable. But there are also moments of elegance. It is this mixture of the simple and the sophisticated, the thoroughly ordered along with less predictable elements that has kept Mozart’s music popular for more than two centuries. It was a perfect opportunity for Claudi Arimany to show off his indisputable virtuosity, while Joaquín Palomares, David Fons and Gonzalo Meseguer, the members of the Fine Arts Trio, played a fundamental role.
Marco Tezza’s two piano recitals presented the Alfas audience with something of a challenge. Friday’s program was Schubert’s B-flat Sonata D960 along with Leos Janacek’s In The Mists, while Sunday repeated Schubert’s, but together with Schumann’s Gesänge der Frühe, opus 133.
Schubert’s last piano sonata is a challenging work in any hand. It is one of the longest piano sonatas ever written and its deceptively light textures often give way to dark and depressed corners of the human psyche as its composer contemplated what would prove to be a fatal illness and death that was approaching in just weeks. in the future. And given that he had suffered from symptoms for several years, he was certainly aware of the process.
The tempo markings of the work are possibly ambiguous, but most pianists at least roughly stick to the broad moderato of the first movement in the even broader andante of the second movement. But the first movement is moderated by the composer with “molto” and the andante of the second with “sostenuto”. The mind could spend quite a bit of time figuring out how to be “very” moderate, or indeed how walking can be “sustained” other than not stopping.
Now it seems that most pianists play the rhythm of the first movement at the end of the moderato allegro and the andante of the second towards the adagio. The notable exception to this pattern was Sviatoslav Richter, whose YouTube performance of the 1972 piece has a time of over forty-seven minutes, with the twenty-four minute opening moderator. However, most performances do not go to such extremes. Alfred Brendel, for example, although he ignored one or two repetitions, was able to turn in the paper in just over thirty-five minutes.
Imagine, then, the level of surprise when, preparing to present the concerto, Marco Tezza asked me to request that there be no applause between movements because the piece would last no less than fifty-five minutes. And he did. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had said thirty-five minutes. I would have questioned forty-five, but fifty-five just slipped past me, so unexpected that they prevented reaction.
And it was the first two movements that stretched the time. Instead of a life story told to the rhythm of a narrator, the movement became an autobiographical reflection, a series of questions, perhaps from the incoherent diary of a dying composer, all of which led to the repetition of “Did I deserve this?” It’s a piece I’ve heard hundreds of times, but Marco Tezza’s playing was immediately something different when, at the end of the opening phrase, I realized for the first time that there is a semitone that clashes in the harmony. The second movement became a long fit of self-pity, interspersed with what seemed like flashbacks, speaking of better times in the past that contrasted more and more grimly with the dark present.
Movements three and four were more conventional, but from what had preceded them they took on a sense of denial, expressing an inability to face reality that had demanded attention in the first two.
I admitted that after the concert on Friday I was not convinced. After the concert on Sunday when he repeated the work, I was. It is an approach that will not replace the existing B-flat sonata in my head, but will now live forever alongside it as a different version of what had become the composer’s uncomfortable reality. And by the way, Friday night’s Janacek In The Mists and Sunday’s Schumann Gesänge der Frühe contributed to and actually emphasized the feeling of introspection. Both times, we were sent home with a little encore, Chauncey Olcott’s arrangement of My Wild Irish Rose, played, believe it or not, very slowly and introspectively. Music is a very powerful language, especially when it is discreet.