Doubled Reimaginings

The Finnish musician Magnus Lindberg is a man of many talents. He performs professionally as a pianist and as a percussionist. Moreover, he is a decorated composer whose compositional honors include the Prix Italia, the Nordic Music Prize, and the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize. On Monday he made his local recital debut with a concert for San Francisco Performances at San Francisco Conservatory's recital hall. But this recital seemed special not merely because it was Lindberg's first in the area. Beyond its being his debut here, both his compositions and his performing occupied center stage, as Lindberg himself performed on this program of exclusively his own compositions. Since the program featured a few cello pieces, Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen shared the stage, assisting Lindberg on both performing and compositional fronts. Together, they offered a thoughtful array of piano, cello, and duo pieces. Karttunen collaborated with Lindberg to create two of these duo pieces. One was a transcription of Stravinsky's Pulcinella suite, which Lindberg and Karttunen created in 2007. Stravinsky's Pulcinella is a "neoclassical" work from the early 1920s. In Pulcinella, Stravinsky reworked preexisting music by another composer: Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. Subsequently, Stravinsky arranged the original work, which was for small orchestra, for violin and piano. He gave the new arrangement the name Suite Italienne, which a cellist, Gregor Piatigorsky, later arranged for cello and piano. While the program notes left the relationship between these previous reworkings and the transcription by Lindberg and Karttunen uncertain, surely their transcription of this piece, which has historically been subjected to many reworkings, sounded quirky and uncanny. Another duo piece, Dos Coyotes (2008), opened the recital. This composition is also a reworking of preexisting material, that of Lindberg himself. Coyotes began as a composition for children's choir, which was never much performed because of its difficulty. Eventually, Lindberg adapted material from the choir piece into Coyote Blues, a small-ensemble work whose material Lindberg and Karttunen then adapted for Dos Coyotes. The cello part of Dos Coyotes is saturated with glissandos, double stops, and other string techniques, making it a challenge to imagine the music in its previous vocal and instrumental ensemble incarnations. Then again, Lindberg did concede to having reworked the material quite freely.

Encore of Possibilities

Concluding the recital was a third and final duo piece, Konzertstück, that Lindberg and Karttunen themselves premiered in 2006. True to its name, this concert piece was the longest and most flashy single piece on the program. By closing with this piece, which includes an impressive solo cello cadenza, the duo virtually guaranteed that the audience would ask for an encore. The encore that Lindberg and Karttunen performed was an improvisatory piece that required the performers to be attentive about even the most untried possibilities for their instruments. In this sense, the encore was not at all unlike the solo works for piano and cello on the program. These solo works also amounted to sensitive ruminations on the timbral and textural possibilities of each instrument. The program featured two sets of solo piano pieces: Jubilees, and Études I and II. Lindberg's program notes claimed that he finds writing for piano difficult, even though — or perhaps precisely because — the instrument is his own. Each of the six movements within Jubilees experiments with a unique pianistic texture. While Études I and II are also textural studies, Lindberg regards Jubilees as a coherent whole, whereas he plans to add more études to his current set of two. The solo cello Partita parallels Jubilees in that it too has six movements that each explore a unique texture. Lindberg's Partita sounded nothing like the Baroque dance suites for unaccompanied stringed instruments with the same name. Karttunen performed it well, and the third movement, a lyrical "Aria," was particularly expressive. Ultimately, this entire recital expressed a certain candor. Like the no-frills, down-to-earth demeanor of the performers, this program did not aim to dazzle the audience with perfectly wrought, tried-and-true audience pleasers. Rather, Lindberg and Karttunen performed, by and large, quite recent work that reveals the duo at their most experimental and reflective. These two musicians are serious about making new music together, and Monday night, they shared a refined version of that process with their audience. Thus this concert, by a doubly talented Magnus Lindberg being doubled still again by Anssi Karttunen, was singularly engaging.