A bracing summer piano melange
On the surface, the Philadelphia Young Pianist Academy's concerts seem like a summertime variation on what's typically heard at the Curtis Institute, Astral Artists, and other local havens for young musicians.
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On the surface, the Philadelphia Young Pianist Academy's concerts seem like a summertime variation on what's typically heard at the Curtis Institute, Astral Artists, and other local havens for young musicians.
However, the first three PYPA concerts in the eight-day festival, now in its second year, featured mavericks of varying sorts, all artists through and through, but at times crossing the line into full-blown eccentricity. By design or by accident, PYPA is not more of the same.
Certainly, Jerome Lowenthal's faculty recital on Sunday was singular, given his quirky programming and fingers that show little or no wear from decades of playing. A champion of Charles-Valentin Alkan, Lowenthal, 82, played Alkan's Super Flumina Babylons, which embodies the composer's arresting originality, steep technical challenges, and curious vulgarity.
George Rochberg's Carnival Music, which was dedicated to Lowenthal, showed the composer hurling himself into vernacular music, namely blues and ragtime, though with a probing ear that asked what this music is really about. Answer: The toughness, existential and otherwise, of getting through a marginalized life.
Though Lowenthal hails from the fierce postwar generation that rejected sentimentality and repose in music, he played Milhaud's Saudades do Brazil, a collection of early-period portraits of Rio in which tango and samba intersect with the new world of post-Rite of Spring harmony and rhythm. The encore was a reward for a rigorous evening - Debussy's Clair de lune, played with no-nonsense clarity.
The recklessly chatty, artistically formidable presence of Alexandre Moutouzkine, familiar to Philadelphians through Astral Artists, showed how imaginatively he can inhabit standard Beethoven and Chopin repertoire while confidently exploring far less familiar music. His reading of Beethoven's Sonata "quasi una fantasia" Op. 27 No. 1 on Monday suggested how shocking the music had been in the composer's own time, while his Chopin Etudes Op. 25 were so considered as to suggest this music was a laboratory for much that was to come.
Less conventional moments came from M.C. Graves' Currency, a work that stands on the abrasive shoulders of Prokofiev's Toccata, as well as Moutouzkine's transcription of Stravinsky's Firebird suite, made for the film Who Stole the Mona Lisa? and showing how radical the music still feels when lifted from its orchestral outer garments.
Though PYPA founder/director Ching-Yun Hu is an absorbing, feverish Chopin interpreter, at Saturday's opening-night concert signs of fatigue were evident from the start, for which she perhaps compensated by playing faster and louder than usual. One factor may have been that the performance was recorded for Sony and included hours of rehearsal for backup. This typically sensitive artist also wasn't helped by the forthright brassiness of the Yamaha grand that overwhelmed the intimate environs of the Curtis Institute's Field Concert Hall.
Works such as Nocturne Op. 55 No. 2, Introduction and Rondo Op. 16 and the great Barcarolle Op. 60 showed how delicate her legato can be. No doubt her closing-night chamber music concert with Philadelphia Orchestra members on Saturday will be a more complete account of her talent.