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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
February 2, 2015
"I think of these [North American] 'ballads' as representing the things I believe in. They were all written around the same time, and are all based on traditional American work and protest songs".
Of Frederic Rzewski's four ballads, dating from 1979-80, the most talismanic (although perhaps not the most interesting musically) is "Which Side Are You On?" which provided one of the highlights of Milton Schlosser's recital on Monday night.
Rzewski relates that it was Pete Seeger who first suggested to him that he needed to "follow the example of Bach", by which he meant including (in the regular meetings of the songwriters' collective Rzewski was organising) known melodies which the audience could join in singing. In the case of the North American Ballads he followed Bach's example by treating the four songs as source material in the fashion of a chorale prelude.
Schlosser took Rzewski and Seeger at their words and preceded the piano piece with an audience participation section in which he sang the verses and the audience provided the chorus.
The authorship of the piece itself is immediately apparent, Rzewski's music, as Christian Wolff remarks, "simply sounds like no other". Schlosser dealt with its virtuosic demands almost nonchalantly, while still clearly totally engaged with both the music and its extra-musical aspects.
"Which Side" is one of a number of works in which Rzewski invites the pianist to improvise a cadenza; not every pianist is brave (or foolhardy) enough to take him up on this, but Schlosser did, most effectively, incorporating his own singing of Garth Brooks' "We Shall Be Free", before having the audience once more sing along as a prelude to the big, dramatic finish.
Ask most music-lovers with more than a passing acquaintance with Beethoven's thirty-two piano sonatas which is the longest and they will probably reply, without a second's hesitation, the "Hammerklavier".
Ask the same music-lover which is the second longest and I'll warrant the answer will be a lot longer in coming; I also suspect that few would actually provide the correct answer: the sonata number four, opus seven, from 1796.
Beethoven's Op.7 was the most substantial work on the programme; in Schlosser's hands it seemed brimming with ideas, a laboratory, if you will, in which Beethoven experimented with techniques to which he would later return in other sonatas.
The opening movement seemed playful enough, although there was a definite feeling that something more ominous lurked beneath the surface. The ending of the movement also witnesses, if not precisely a false ending, an early example of Beethoven's misdirection, which reached its culmination in the scherzos of the seventh and ninth symphonies.
The solemn opening of the slow movement led to a flowing cantabile; the movement had tremendous concentration and excellently-observed dynamics. The third movement is definitely feeling its way towards the scherzo, whereas the final rondo shows us a young composer "feeling his oats" and really rather pleased with his own abilities - and who, in the final decade of the eighteenth century, had more right?
A fine performance of a sonata which should be heard more frequently.
In the 1880s, Alexander Scriabin studied the piano under the tutelage of Nikolai Zverev alongside, inter alia, the young Sergei Rachmaninov (who was his junior by fourteen months).
Nobody listening to either of the two early Scriabin preludes - Op.2 No.1 and Op.8 No.12 - would have been surprised at this information. Even more apparent, though, was the influence of Chopin.
Schlosser gave fine, richly-toned accounts of the two preludes, a welcome reminder that Scriabin's later eccentricities were founded on solid ground.
Debussy's Estampes closed the recital. Pagodes, that extraordinary evocation of the Javanese gamelan orchestra was brilliantly coloured; La soirée dans Grenade highly atmospheric; and the toccata-like Jardins sous la pluie (surely Ravel must have, at least subconsciously, had this in mind when he composed Scarbo five years later) provided a highly virtuosic finale.
The opening work of the recital was Blue Virgin/Vierge Bleue by Schlosser himself, inspired, as he told us, by a stained-glass window at Chartres Cathedral.
The music began with slow, arpeggio-like limpid figurations with the occasional "blue" note hinting at Schlosser's admiration for Rzewski, then became increasingly complex and agitated, culminating in what is known in wrestling as a "forearm smash", before subsiding back to the slow music of the opening.
A most attractive work.
This was a superb recital, superbly played. My sole regret is that there was no more Rzewski on the programme. Perhaps another time?
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