High Notes / Impromptu concert review
The Impromptu Concerts continued its 42nd season with another session at St. Paul’s last Sunday, this time by the piano duo of Jiayin Shen and Michael Berkovsky. With both seated at the church’s single piano, they played music by Mozart, Schubert, Dvorak, Ravel, Piazzolla, and—a jazz suite—Mike Cornick. Throughout the concert they played with a truly lovely legato touch on soft slow passages; on faster and louder ones they showed an exceptional technical virtuosity, though on occasion perhaps a little too much of that.
The opening selection was a sonata by Mozart. In writing for four-handed piano, twenty fingers, there is always the temptation to make the music too thick, a difficulty Mozart did not quite avoid in the first movement; whereas in the second, slow, movement the extra pair of hands showed up to great advantage, with a simple melody played in the upper register, supported by a complex arpeggiated bass line in the lower—all of that unplayable by a single pianist. The third movement featured, even at the fastest tempos, some fine, rippling legato playing up top by Ms. Shen.
The pair opened the second set with Cornick’s Jazz Suite. That’s a very interesting piece of music, consisting as it does of movements in several jazz genres: Latin, Blues, Swing, Waltz time, and a kind of Latino Boogie-Woogie. Most of the rhythms were played in a way which was idiomatically convincing, although the piece itself, whoever plays it, would be improved by the addition of a good bass player.
Their last selections were two tangos by the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, whose work has been showing up lately in concerts nearly everywhere. The second of these was his best known one, “Libertango” (listed in the program as “Ubertango”—a German-Argentine connection there?). That piece consists of a melody of sustained notes against a bass line of rapid short ones, and it is the contrast between the two which makes it work. The arrangement the duo chose was extremely thick—they played it well, but there was so much extra music going on in it that the basic contrast nearly got lost.
Interspersed among these were pieces by Schubert, Dvorak, and Ravel. All were played well, with particular attention to the softer passages. In particular, Ravel had an acute sense of real beauty on the piano, and they brought that out brilliantly.
I had two reservations about this otherwise remarkable and enjoyable concert. One was the pair’s tendency to push their virtuosity to the limit, which sometimes resulted in a rushing of the time. This may be an occupational hazard in four hand piano playing: since lagging behind one’s partner will always ruin the music, one may be tempted to compensate by playing faster, which will cause the partner to play faster still, and so on. My other complaint was that loud passages were often too loud. Their interpretations often involved audacious dynamic extremes: in several of the selections there were sudden shifts from soft to loud or vice versa, and the strong expressiveness of the soft passages, a fine and consistent quality of their playing, was to some extent canceled out by the succeeding loud ones.
This may have been the fault of the acoustics in St. Paul’s, a problem which has come up many times in the past. Four years ago, in an Impromptu concert by a cellist and pianist, the piano accompaniment was too loud. It was impossible that this could have been the fault of the pianist, who had world-class credentials as an accompanist, including having played with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. In that league one simply does not ever play too loud. Clearly, she had made the balance perfect where she was—it was the church’s acoustics which were at fault. On Sunday this difficulty was amplified by the fact that there were four hands at work, which doubled the volume. St. Paul’s is a good place to play—it gives a fullness to any musical sound—but visiting musicians should be warned to conduct the most comprehensive possible sound checks
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