Even before Polish piano virtuoso Rafal Blechacz struck the first chord in his San Francisco debut recital Sunday at Herbst Theatre, the hall was brimming with anticipation. A former student of mine, a Polish-born young woman, came up to me with her mother, who said excitedly, "We are so proud of him!" Polish was spoken everywhere, of course. Then Daniel Levenstein, director of Chamber Music San Francisco, came onstage and thanked the concert sponsors, James and Arlene Sullivan. After that the Honorary Consul of Poland, Christopher Kerosky, greeted the audience and introduced the pianist.
The celebratory mood carried over into the opening of the program, with Mozart's early Sonata in D Major, K. 311. The collaboration between the 21-year-old composer and the 22-year-old pianist was imbued with youthful enthusiasm and sparkling wit. Mozart's incessant, abrupt shifts in dynamics may now seem to be over the top, but we have to keep in mind how fresh the fortepiano was at the time. It was a new and exciting toy, capable of wondrous dynamic changes, and the young Mozart delighted in the newly found special effects.
Regrettably, many pianists today smooth over these sharp contrasts, probably because it is, indeed, difficult to justify most of these effects. To his credit, Blechacz made this tug-of-war between the tender and the rambunctious sound natural and utterly charming.
Another highly successful part of the program was Karol Szymanowski's Variations in B-flat Minor, Op. 3. Written in 1903, the Variations contain a wide scope of moods and stylistic references. Blechacz was entirely at ease, moving deftly from a somber chorale to an elegant mazurka, from poignant lyricism to powerful climaxes.
Debussy's
Estampes, which preceded the Szymanowski, were not as effective. This group of three pieces, conceived as a set of picturesque prints, requires more tonal opulence than Blechacz was able to extract from the Steinway. The opening number, "Pagodes" (Pagodas), was rendered clearly, but blandly, while in the last number, "Jardins sous la Pluie" (Gardens in the rain), the tone was too substantive, too material. Debussy's call for "an instrument without hammers" should certainly apply here.
"La Soirée dans Grenade" (An evening in Granada), by contrast, came out irresistibly passionate, even sexy. This mishmash of contrasting fragments is difficult to assemble in a performance, and Debussy never found this piece played as he wanted it. Despite all odds, Blechacz convincingly strung this rhapsodic whimsy together.
A Wild Motley
Chopin's 24 Preludes, Op. 28, were featured in the second half of the program. When the preludes appeared in 1839, many of the composer's contemporaries did not quite know what to make of them. In some respects, Op. 28 still remains an enigma.
It was not the lack of fugues or any other subsequent pieces in Chopin's set that made a perplexed Schumann call the Preludes "strange pieces," "sketches," and "ruins," "a wild motley" containing "the morbid, the feverish, the repellent." André Gide's famous bafflement is a much later development: "I admit that I do not wholly understand the title that Chopin chose to give these short pieces;
Preludes. Preludes to what? Each of Bach's preludes is followed by its fugue; it is an integral part of it."
In this 20th-century view, Chopin was a trendsetter who dropped the main dish (the fugue) and kept only the appetizer, establishing a precedent for the sets of preludes by Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Debussy, Shostakovich, and others. Chopin's contemporaries, however, were not at all bothered by the absence of fugues or any other larger compositions in Op. 28 that would follow every prelude. They knew perfectly well that Chopin's book of preludes had been preceded by dozens of prelude collections by various composers.
These earlier preludes, however, were not supposed to be performed as independent works. Their function was different. At that time, musicians were expected to improvise before practically every piece they performed in concerts. Not all of them could. In that case, they would just pick a prelude from one of the numerous prelude collections and play it with an improvisational flair, as if made up on the spot.
The cardinal difference between the preludes of Chopin and those of his predecessors was that, as Liszt put it, "Chopin's Preludes are compositions of an order entirely apart; they are not merely, as the title would indicate, introductions to other
morceaux." Chopin's preludes turned out to be independent, self-contained pieces rather than introductions to something else. After Chopin the term
prelude began to indicate a short character piece.
Knuckle-Busters
The difficulty of playing Chopin's preludes is not so much technical, even though some of them are real finger-breakers. It is a conceptual complexity that makes the performance of these "strange pieces" so challenging. Blechacz is a brilliant pianist, with a beautiful tone, infectious expressivity, and an innate musical sense. Some preludes (Nos. 1, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 23, and 24) were delivered with a fluid rubato, sheer poetry, and, at times, an enthralling, white-hot intensity.
A few others, however, sounded fairly conventional. There are many things that performers can discover in Op. 28. Even such a seemingly minor point as pedaling often plays a significant role. Chopin was extremely meticulous in indicating the pedal, correcting the pedal markings in his manuscripts and published scores again and again. But hardly any pianist, including Blechacz, follows the unusual pedal indications in Preludes 2, 6, 13, and 21. Anyone, however, trying to re-create the original pedaling may be rewarded with remarkable and unexpected artistic results.
The second prelude would have sounded much more bleak and otherworldly without the pedal through most of the piece. And the conclusion of the last prelude would have sounded much more horrifying if Blechacz had heeded Chopin's wish and held the sustaining pedal down for the last five bars.
The concert ended on a high note. A girl in a gorgeous Polish national dress presented Blechacz with flowers. Then he played two marvelous encores: Chopin's Waltz in C-sharp Minor and Moszkowski's
Étincelles (Sparks).