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The Sum of Its Parts New York
Carnegie Hall
11/27/2001 -
Leos Janacek: Sonata 1.X.1905
Claude Debussy: La Soiree dans Grenade; Pour le piano
Frederic Chopin: Ballade in F minor; 24 Preludes
Ivan Moravec (piano) “I think that we must accept that the Preludes are conceived only paradoxically as a whole, and yet that modern performances of the entire set bring out aspects of the work certainly present in, and even integral to, its conception, but which Chopin did not consider essential to its realization in sound.”
Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation
It has become standard practice to present the 24 Preludes in recital as a totality, although this is something that the composer himself never did, nor apparently intended. Our musical age is an encyclopedic one, obsessed with completeness and authenticity. The archival study of the great masters has led to the elevation of juvenilia and marginalia to lofty heights. A self-respecting CD producer would never consider a comprehensive study of a particular work without presenting alternate endings, deleted passages, and source material along with the piece itself. As admirable as this anal drive may be, it has led to some controversial (and sometimes meretricious) new bottles for vintage wines. Although Chopin may have been inspired by The Well-Tempered Clavier and arranged the grouping in a natural order (following, unlike Bach, the circle of fifths), his vision for his tiny children was for independent lives. A couple of them have survived as encore pieces (especially the lovely and turbulent D-flat), but in today’s environment they have become, for better or worse, joined at their respective hips. These wondrous poems are neither didactic (it is easy to confuse them with his Etudes) nor programmatic (the appellation “raindrop” has, at various times, been applied to three different numbers). They are rather, as Rosen suggests, romantic fragments, frozen moments of time like the shockingly brief finale of the Sonata # 2.
The trick in modern performance is to make each of these little gems interesting within this artificial context. The harmonic cohesion may be present (although, unlike in Bach, there is little sense of beginning, middle and end), but there is a danger of epigrammatic overkill. It takes an artist with a very big palette to sustain our sense of wonderment, as Feltsman does in his recording. But live is a different matter: like a recitation contest in ancient Greece, this is a set to separate the poets from the boys.
Czech pianists are fortunate to have such a vast nationalistic repertoire at their disposal. Ivan Moravec has championed the works of Novak and Suk, Korte and Smetana over the years and last evening at Carnegie Hall began his recital with a moving essay by Leos Janacek on an incident similar to America’s Kent State which occurred in the composer’s native town of Brno (the program booklet compares this music to the Symphony # 11 of Shostakovich, although the mood couldn’t be more dissimilar). This pianist’s understatement allowed the poignancy of the piece to reach our ears undisturbed. The rest of the program, however, suffered from his penchant for the dispassionate and mechanical. A quintessentially romantic work such as the Chopin Ballade requires an interpreter willing to make the grand gesture and Mr. Moravec is not so inclined. Although all of the notes were there, much of the interpretive power was sadly lacking. In place of a standard, or even an idiosyncratic, rubato, this recitalist substituted long periods of silence at the oddest places, little rest stops apparently intended to allow us time for reflection. This approach seemed not profound but simply precious.
Moravec brought bags of technical competence to the Preludes. His performing method is impressive, employing intelligently rationed bodily movement and maximizing digital effort, saving significant downward thrusts for fortissimo emphasis. But in the end his style is too foursquare for such liberated music. There was little lyricism and no flamboyance in this reading and not much variation in touch, color or timbre. It could be argued that individual renditions of certain of the 24 were well crafted in a workmanlike sort of way, but the overall impression was one of slavish attention to detail subsuming all hints of exalted poetic insight. He might just as well have been performing the Gradus ad Parnassum (perhaps Moravec had confused this work with Chopin’s Etudes after all). As an objective journalist, I should point out that the audience seemed to enjoy this performance well enough; the format of the final piece gave them 23 opportunities to cough.
Frederick L. Kirshnit
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