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Garrick Ohlsson is a pianist with rare wit, and the most
delightful part of his recent recital of Beethoven and Liszt at Alice Tully Hall came in
his encore -- a Beethoven bagatelle barely 30 seconds long, delivered with a wry smile, as
if to say, "That's all folks!" He'd just done the exhausting
"Hammerklavier" sonata, one of Beethoven's craziest pieces, and everybody got
the joke: He just didn't have more piano playing in him.
This was the second of three
Liszt-plus concerts that Mr. Ohlsson is giving as part of Lincoln Center's "Great
Performers" series, but the first was more gripping if only because it showed that
Liszt -- at least in some of his more popular works --isn't wholly a classical composer.
Of course Liszt wrote in what we'd now consider a classical style, and his pieces show
many structural traits of what we'd now call classical music. But when he first made his
reputation early in the 19th century, he was emphatically not considered classical. He was
a popular entertainer, adored by multitudes in the growing middle class, and especially by
women, who sighed at every note he played in his piano concerts, and even rushed to
collect his discarded cigars.
Can we hear that side of Liszt today? Well, just listen to his Sonata
for Piano in B minor, which Mr. Ohlsson played at that first recital. Or, better, start by
looking at the printed score. The classical-music structure of the work --
its division into
separate parts, flowing together to make an integrated whole -- is apparent at first glance,
and in the most elementary way. Liszt will grab hold of a musical idea, and simply repeat
it, until it dissolves into whatever's coming next.
But when you hear the piece,
the structure comes to life in ways a printed score can't show you. The repetitions, it's
suddenly clear, aren't repetitions at all -- they're waves that keep coming at you,
sweeping you (at least in theory) higher and higher, until you're simply overwhelmed.
Liszt, let's not forget,
made his living as a pianist, and the sonata shows us how he must have played. Was he
charismatic? The word's not nearly strong enough. Surely he could stop your heart. He must
have been hypnotic and wholly abandoned, able to reach the stars and top himself a moment
later, able to play his listeners as if they themselves were his instrument, as if he were
Elvis, the world's wildest circus act, and a screaming locomotive, all combined.
Could Mr. Ohlsson match
that? No, but hardly anybody could, and let me quickly say that Mr. Ohlsson is a
thoughtful and resounding pianist, one who lets music grow almost like organic life, from
the ringing depths of his Bosendorfer grand. In his opening selection, a Liszt
transcription of a Bach organ work -- because here he was pairing Liszt and Bach -- he
seemed to listen with intent but easy concentration to every note he played, grouping
sonorities into phrases, and phrases into musical paragraphs. He forged a collaboration of
sound and logic, doing full justice, I thought, to the spirit of both composers.
But the sonata was another
story. Here I was reminded of a phenomenon in digital audio. If you feed sound that's too
loud into a digital recorder, it clips, as the expression goes, meaning that the extra
volume simply disappears, and any detail carried with it vanishes as well, crashing into a
limit as absolute as a thick brick wall.
Mr. Ohlsson, I'd estimate,
clipped (or in other words reached his own sonic limit) at around 70% of the madness that
the Liszt sonata needs. This isn't any failure, by real-world standards; Joseph
Kalichstein, playing a smaller Liszt piano piece at a Carnegie Hall recital some time ago,
clipped at something like 30%. But the Liszt sonata demands something beyond the real
world, and so-much as I respect Mr. Ohlsson -- I wasn't really satisfied.
But what about linking Liszt with Bach, the most precise and orderly of
all composers? Mr. Ohlsson raised the stakes by picking the "Goldberg
Variations" as his major Bach work. That's a brave choice, first, because the piece
is massive, and as demanding to play, I'd guess, as Liszt, especially since Mr. Ohlsson
had never tried a large Bach piece in public before. Beyond that, though, the
"Goldberg Variations" have a structure that's rigorous even for Bach. An opening
theme is followed by 30 variations; each variation has the same harmony as the theme. As
we listen to the piece, it's like we're touring 31 houses, each with the same shape, and
the same arrangement of rooms.
But each room is furnished
differently, and here's where Bach starts to be crazy in his own way. Within his preset
structure, he writes music that ranges from simple dances to involved constructions
that fold back on themselves, displaying two versions of the same thing at once. And each
variation is in a different style. Thinking of the piece, again, as a tour of similar
houses, each would be furnished differently, some colonial, some modern, some homemade,
and some nothing more than cushions and deceiving mirrors, with one room at the end coming
straight from a thrift shop, as Bach combines scraps from popular melodies he might have
heard on some 18th century street. On top of that, the music is unpredictably
accessorized, with unexpected shifts of emphasis, and dazzling new ideas that last only an
instant. As you listen, you keep saying, "I can't believe he did that,"
as the latest oddball detail catches your ear.
So here's how I'd connect
Bach and Liszt -- they're both excessive. The "Goldberg Variations" are
intellectually excessive, and the Liszt sonata is excessive emotionally. This is my
theory, of course, and not necessarily Mr. Ohlsson's. He in fact played the Bach work
soberly, choosing to repeat the two halves of the scrappy thrift shop variation, or, as
Bach called it, the "Quodlibet," as if to give the whole a stronger climax than
Bach himself devised. (Bach actually wants each half of every variation to be repeated,
but most pianists don't go down that doubly excessive road.)
I'd never fault Mr. Ohlsson
for his comparative sobriety; his performance was clear, strong and wonderfully
engrossing. When I need a more whimsical "Goldberg," I can always listen to
Andras Schiff's recording, reissued in Polygram's "Penguin Classics" series,
complete with all repeats, and with each separate strand in the complex texture so clearly
shaped that you'd swear Mr. Schiff had more than one independent brain, And if I want a
Liszt sonata that not only climbs mountains, but melts them, I can listen to the version
on the Marston label, by a long-forgotten but now triumphantly rediscovered pianist, Ernst
Levy.
But let me pay Mr. Ohlsson
one last compliment. Why do I know these Schiff and Levy CDs? Because Mr. OhIsson's
concert sent me rushing out to hear more Bach and Liszt. And for that, he deserves a place
on anybody's list of special pleasures. The last concert on his Liszt series, matching
Liszt and Schubert, is on April 25; it's a rare musician who can make us think for weeks
about the music that he plays.
Wall Street Journal, March 30, 1999
Hear Andras
Schiff play part of Variation 3 of the Goldberg Variations -- keeping the
three voices separate, as if he had three minds.
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