Pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute at Settlement Music School
If you combed through the piano recital programs of the coming year and put the most forbidding pieces into one concert, you'd have Ieva Jokubaviciute's recital Thursday at Settlement Music School.
If you combed through the piano recital programs of the coming year and put the most forbidding pieces into one concert, you'd have Ieva Jokubaviciute's recital Thursday at Settlement Music School.
In the program, titled "New Century, New Paths" and presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, this fully matured Lithuanian pianist skillfully guided one's ears through Debussy, Schoenberg, Scriabin, Janacek, and Berg in performances that confidently created a trajectory from which all the composers benefited.
The program arose from Jokubaviciute's obsession with Berg's Piano Sonata (Op. 1): No stranger to piano recitals but hardly a repertory item, the sonata was the point of destination of a program that began with some particularly abstract Debussy preludes, leading to the atonal Viennese romanticism of Schoenberg's Sechs kleine Klavierstucke (Op. 19). Yes, romanticism. Jokubaviciute prefaced her performance with an anecdote about discovering that quality with her Curtis Institute teacher Seymour Lipkin, and then played the music with the coloristic range and the rhetorical implications of Brahms.
Scriabin's Piano Sonata No. 4 is hardly his best piece, but it's the one where the Russian mystic traded Chopin-esque melodious charm for more concise motifs that freed him to pursue a more dense, personal harmonic language. Selections from Janacek's suite On an Overgrown Path used exterior description to probe interior states. Even in spare moments, Jokubaviciute refused to resort to received pianistic refinement in her phrasing and touch. This music has no use for elegant.
She played the heavily layered Berg sonata with great architectural clarity - more than in her 2009 recording of the piece - but she didn't stop there. The postscript was Debussy's L'isle joyeuse, which, like much else in the program, subverted melody to create a larger world of sound and expression.
Such was the message of the recital: The death of traditional harmony is often seen as leading 20th-century music on a path to obscurity - though not for those who knew how to harness the freedom of this new world. However impressive Jokubaviciute's fingers were in the music's execution, it is her brain that is most entrancing. The totality of her talent will be more apparent when one hears her big sound in a larger space. However pleasant, Settlement's Presser Hall was overwhelmed.