Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Messiaen, and Debussy: Ilan Volkov, cond., Simon Trpčeski, piano, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 12.4.2007 (BJ)

 

That Simon Trpčeski is a consummate keyboard athlete was established pretty incontestably in the first half of this concert. Quite aside from the charm of his platform manner, the young (born 1979) Macedonian pianist commands a formidable array of technical equipment. In terms of marksmanship and agility his performance of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto was breathtaking, and even in the most breakneck passages he perpetrated never a harsh note.

Where he ranks as a musician is a question I should not care to answer with any certainty on the evidence of my first encounter with Trpčeski, simply because there are few openings for musicianship in performing this supremely silly piece. Prokofiev’s besetting flaw in his piano concertos is his inability to stay in any one register for more than a few measures. The pianist is condemned to dash headlong from the top of the keyboard to the bottom and back, deprived of the chance to establish any kind of sustained mood or atmosphere. The solo parts in the concertos remind me of nothing so much as the Grand Old Duke of York in the children’s rhyme, who “had ten thousand men; He marched them up to the top of the hill, And he marched them down again, And when they were up they were up, And when they were down they were down, And when they were only halfway up They were neither up nor down.”

Nevertheless, on the strength of all the things he did well, I would have to say that the presumption is all in Trpčeski’s favor. As to the conductor of the evening, Ilan Volkov, who was born in Israel in 1976, the first half of the program similarly facilitated technical rather than musical judgement. The Prokofiev was preceded by Stravinsky’s early Fireworks, a trifling jeu d’esprit that was despatched with considerable sparkle, as was the orchestral contribution to the concerto. The second half, however, presented the conductor with more substantial fish to fry, and in doing them to a turn Volkov impressed me mightily.

To tell the truth, at least from my own personal viewpoint, Messiaen’s L’Ascension, a set of four “orchestral meditations” dating from the composer’s early twenties, is no masterpiece. While I do not quarrel with the general acceptance of Messiaen as a master, what he was the master of was a kind of high-thinking and putatively sacred kitsch. Aside from one or two small-scale gems such as the Four Studies in Rhythm for piano, his finest moments were achieved when he gave vulgar religiosity full rein, in works like the Turangalîla Symphony and the Quatuor pour la fin du temps. The last movement of L’Ascension, scored for strings alone and largely eschewing the foundation of contrabass tone, provides a foretaste of the more swoony passages in Turangalîla, and exercises considerable allure in the process. But the lack of any contrapuntal interest, as static chord succeeds static chord, militates against the success of the work as a whole, and the endings of the two inner movements are altogether too much alike. In both of them, Messiaen cuts the Gordian Knot of “how to finish” with an attempted touch of epigram, but these hurried conclusions stick out like almost Ives-ian sore thumbs, because epigram is a mode ill-suited to Messiaen’s fundamentally monumental manner.

Still, despite my reservations about the piece, Volkov’s calm authority, exerted by means of an admirably economical technique, made what seemed to me the best possible case for it, and there was a prevailing sense of order about the serenely paced progression of polished orchestral sonorities he drew from the Seattle Symphony. Ending the program, Debussy’s La Mer came as welcome breath of fresh (sea) air. Volkov reveled in its mastery, and presented it in its true character, which is that of a seascape without figures. In this work above all others, Debussy avoided any too personal mode of expression, fashioning instead a truly elemental masterpiece of unromanticism. This was by far the finest half-hour of the evening, with Volkov and his players giving full value to the more mercurial passages, and evoking a genuinely awesome breadth and dignity in the closing moments of the outer movements. (Has anyone noticed, by the way, how vividly Walton must have been remembering the last measures of Debussy’s opening movement when he set the words “Praise ye the God of Gold” in Belshazzar’s Feast?)

 

Bernard Jacobson