Review of Piano/Piano
by Dr. Gary Lemco
“Piano/Piano,” the August 3 concert for Music@Menlo, took place at Spieker Hall Center for the Arts and featured four-hand and duo-piano repertory from Russia and France, respectively, as performed by five distinguished keyboard artists. Besides the children’s suites by Arensky and Fauré and the potent sweep of Rachmaninoff’s 1940 Symphonic Dances, the musical revelation of the evening came in the form of a two-piano transcription – by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet – of Claude Debussy’s 1913 ballet Jeux that remains a challenging, iconoclastic tour de force for performers and listeners.
All photography by Harrison Truong
The musical proceedings opened with Anton Arensky’s 1894 Six Children’s Pieces for Piano, Four Hands, as realized by pianists Wu Han and Hyeyeon Park, who rendered the suite’s six movements with fervent relish. Arensky opened with a minor key Conte (Fairy Tale) in a staccato manner akin to a Schumann maerchen. Les larmes (Tears) subdivided its 5/4 metrics into a set of variations, of which one wandered into the Phrygian mode. I wondered how much of Arensky’s filigree crept into Rachmaninoff’s Op. 5 Suite No. 1 for Two Pianos. The Cuckoo has a colorful history, certainly a throwback to the French renaissance and its exploits in descending major thirds. The little Valse projected a sentiment close to the Glazunov sensibility. Berceuse (Cradle Song) anticipated the very first number of Fauré’s subsequent Dolly Suite, its rocking gestures pure enchantment. The final movement, Fugue on a Russian Theme, proffered the same tune, “The Crane,” used by Tchaikovsky in his Symphony No. 2 “Little Russian.” Its extroverted polyphony roused the Menlo audience to their first of several ovations.
Wu Han joined guest Jean-Efflam Bavouzet for Gabriel Fauré’s (1893-06) Dolly Suite, thus extending our tour of musical childhood. Like all of this composer’s music, the surface simplicity conceals a wealth of subtle harmony, so the penultimate section, Tendresse, seduces us without our quite knowing how. Conceived as homage to mistress Emma Bardac’s daughter, Dolly, the titles mischievously direct us to feline sources while actually making light of sibling rivalries and a pet dog. Witty polyphony and internal canons provide passing moments of a learned style bathed in nostalgia. Le jardin de Dolly, and the last of the set, Le pas espagnol, enjoyed a wistful panache, especially the equestrian gestures of the latter, its spirited lilts and exuberant dash.
The piece prior to the intermission, Bavouzet’s ambitious, two-piano arrangement of Debussy’s elusive and evocative Jeux, created for Vaslav Nijinsky, required a brief spoken preface from Bavouzet. He pointed out the startling, revolutionary character of the fifteen-minute ballet’s structure, an evolving series of fragmentary themes that refuses to repeat, each new theme a response to the last, and “none of them memorable.” The plot, a kind of tennis game/ménage à trois, maintains an erotic though cautious tension, even as rhythms and quick shifts in color and tempo evade any sense of emotional continuity. Anna Genuishene, the 2022 Van Cliburn Silver Medalist, joined Bavouzet at the second piano, having to apply a continuous demand for rubato, as a means for Debussy’s protagonists – a young man and two young women – to blur and defy the “rules.” The sheer display of keyboard techniques in their attempt to capture and to clarify the orchestral colors of the original: whole tones, bitonal and modal harmonies, ringing ostinatos, competing trill patterns, pentatonic scales – were all assembled to achieve a “mingled sense of ecstasy.” Whether or not the arrangement or the performance “clarified” Debussy’s textures for anyone familiar with the orchestral version, the potent sense of a musical tour de force for two keyboardists was never in doubt.
The one work post-intermission, Serge Rachmaninoff’s 1940 Symphonic Dances, Op. 45, guaranteed a crowd-pleaser finale. Pianist Chelsea Wang joined Ms. Genuishene for the Russian bells and morbid chants, respectively, that mark the composer’s perpetual fascination with ritual and mortality. Dedicated to conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the piece combines a sense of percussive pageantry and ubiquitous, gloomy reminiscence, saturated (as per expectation) with the Dies Irae from the Requiem Mass. In its more tender moments, the score resembles its thematic kindred Isle of the Dead, Op. 29, especially when Rachmaninoff invokes a lulling barcarolle. The pianos’ version seems hardly a “reduction” of any kind, given the epic percussion the two keyboardists delivered, alternately declaiming or charging forward in the manner of the composer’s Études-Tableaux. When the mounting crescendos and frenetically violent passages relented, our fine duo could indulge in persuasive, parlando moments of sighing intimacy. But the general tenor of the three sections, even the middle-movement Tempo di valse, insisted on percussive sound and fury, monumental clamor, a pandemonium that ultimately must forge a marriage of Heaven and Hell. The audience loved it.
All Photography by Harrison Truong
