Janacek, Adès, Castiglioni, Stravinsky, Nancarrow: Thomas Adès, piano, Herbst Theater, San Francisco, 09.12.2006 (HS)

 

 

Although best known in America as a composer, Thomas Adès made his first San Francisco appearance as a pianist Saturday evening as part of the San Francisco Performances series, offering an unusually intelligent program of quirky, lesser-known music.

Only two of the pieces on the program were by Adès himself, dating from the 1990s. The inward-looking Darknesse Visible (from 1992) and Traced Overhead (from 1996) share the same intimacy that characterize the progression of miniatures by Janacek that opened the evening.

The second half of the concert looked outward, opening with a witty suite by the mid 20th century Italian composer Niccolò Castiglioni titled How I Spent the Summer. Three broad, hyper-rhythmic musical winks by Igor Stravinsky followed that, finishing with the fiendishly difficult tempo clashes of Conlon Nancarrow's Three Canons for Ursula.

Clad in black slacks and an open-collar black shirt, Adès walked out on stage and, after a quick bow, sat at the piano to start playing. He is as no-nonsense a pianist as that description indicates. The music was satisfying for the way he got to its core. Although he left no technical demands unanswered, there was nothing flashy about his playing.

The quiet simplicity and generally wistful sensibilities of the Janacek pieces, especially V Spominka (Reminiscence), set the tone and displayed Adès' un-fussy approach. Also magical was the vanish-into-the-vapors ending of I Am Waiting For You. Adès gave In the Mist, a suite from 1912, a similarly intimate, uncluttered reading.

Darknesse Visible weaves an early 17th-century John Dowland lute song, In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell, through a series of late 20th-century glosses. It uses the ends of the piano's range with jagged countermelodies (for lack of a better term) and tone clusters, all the while spinning out the slow Dowland theme in pianissimo tremolos. Adès probably meant to emulate the sound of a lute, but it reminds me more of the way solo marimba players use tremolo to sustain notes. Either way, it was beautifully played and left a haunting feeling.

Traced Overhead made less of an impression, probably because it lacked the technical effects of Darnesse, but it spun out a sound world that did not lack for color and a real sense of development.

The whimsical Castigilioni suite, with titles such as "We Get Away to Bergamo" and "Song for My Birthday," juxtaposes moments of pure 19th-century Romantic charm with humorous dissonances. It was easy to hear what attracted Adès to this music, and to Stravinsky's tongue-in-cheek pastiche of a German march, Souvenir d'un marche boche, which Adès dispatched crisp and loud, the cheeky tune of Valse pour les enfants, and the highlight of the Stravinsky set, the rhythmic zigzagging of Piano Rag Music.

Stravinsky's ragged rag perfectly set up the final Nancarrow set, which uses the same sort of complex rhythmic juxtapositions as his better-known Studies for Player Piano. The second line comes in at a  tempo 20 percent faster than the start-and-stop first line, which goes on at the original speed.  The four separate lines of the second canon compete at ratios of 6:9:10:15. I have no idea whether he nailed these ratios with technical accuracy, but the net effect was dazzling and mesmerizing.

After all that, what can you do for an encore? Not much, apparently. For his, Adès went back to Janacek, introduced the piece as one believed to be the composer's last, and played about eight seconds of music. Who could blame him?

 

 

Harvey Steiman