La Trianon is a relatively intimate space — what New York’s Town Hall used to be in relation to Carnegie. It was the perfect setting for a pianist who promised to be something other than the swashbuckling virtuoso who plays to the back row of large halls. By beginning his program with Leoš Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path, Lifschitz signaled that he was indeed one who would avoid the beaten paths. It also was a tribute to his audience, which was composed largely of Russian émigrés, whom he could count on to follow him down roads less traveled.
The titles of 10 pieces comprising On an Overgrown Path can be read either as folk-inspired character pieces or as clues to an autobiographical crypto-opera dealing with the death, in 1903, of the composer’s beloved daughter, Olga. The other piece he was working on during that harrowing year was the opera Jenůfa, which also deals with the death of a child.
The simplicity of means Janáček employs throughout the work is usually deceptive, and the restraint that he uses to evoke its effect can be truly heartrending. From the first notes, simply titled “Our Evenings,” you can hear a bird trying out a few insistent notes in the twilight, breaking the silence and eventually becoming a sinister figure, obsessively repeating the notes in the inner voice. It’s like a warning that, gentle and soothing as this quiet evening might seem, both performer and audience are being challenged to truly enter into and share it.
Similarly, the seventh piece of the set, called “Good Night” (possibly containing a reference to the opening of Schubert’s Winterreise?) begins with a soft, broken C-major triad that speaks volumes. The disturbingly agitated eighth piece (mistranslated on the program as “So Unutterably Wistful”) is, in fact, called “So Unutterably Anxious,” evoking the crisis actually taking place in the lives of a family that had lost one child, and was about to lose another — betokening a kind of inner catastrophe that ends in one of the most pathetic final cadences in the piano literature.
The understated denouement that follows finds a brief outlet “In Tears.” Here, Lifschitz did borrow a wistful Schubertian tone to access the vulnerability I had found missing in some of the earlier pieces. The piece seems to sigh, “How fleeting are the moments we share with our loved ones before they are taken from us.” This tone was to return in an encore, one of Schubert’s last piano pieces.
Hitting the Target, if Loudly
To follow the Janáček with Bach’s Partita No. 1 was also daring, in that it could easily have proved to be anticlimactic. However, the swift forward motion of the Allemand and the Corrente, along with the perfect marksmanship of the cross-hand passages in the Gigue, showed that the pianist knew no trepidation. Here, as in the previous work, I found the quiet passages in the Sarabande most congenial. It may have been an acoustic problem, but I often felt overwhelmed by the sound that Lifschitz produced in the relatively small space and found myself wishing I were sitting in the back row.After intermission, therefore, I was a little nervous about the double-octave outbursts that interrupt the minuet that opens Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 54. Comfortably seated in the lobby, I was able to take them in stride and to fully revel in the hair-raising broken-sixth passagework in the finale. Here, Lifschitz gave his inner virtuoso full rein, while possibly exceeding the speed limit (though not Schnabel’s record) in the final piu mosso section.
Another rarity on the program was César Franck’s Prelude, Fugue, and Variation in B Minor. The final Variation section was played with a liquid fluency that was beguiling. Chopin’s C-sharp Minor Scherzo was the closer and, again, it amply demonstrated the unfailing speed and accuracy of Konstantin Lifschitz’ technique. I only wished he had played the Chorale more expansively.