SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT REVIEW
 

Olympic Music Festival - Debussy, Schumann, Mozart, and Grieg:  Paul Hersh, piano; Olympic Music Festival, Quilcene, WA, 3.7.2010 (BJ)

 

The sun finally came out, and with an absorbing recital built around the idea of “remembrances,” Paul Hersh set the 2010 Olympic Music Festival delectably on its way.

In a program that included Debussy’s Suite bergamasque, Mozart’s B-minor Adagio, and a selection from Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, Träumerei, that popular movement in Schumann’s Kinderscenen (Scenes of Childhood), received perhaps the most revealing performance. If ever a piece demanded intimacy–Schumann’s characteristic Innigkeit–it is this modest little evocation of a child’s dreams. Yet when Lang Lang played it as an encore at a Seattle Symphony concert a few years ago, he inflated it into a sort of grandiose public oration.

There is scant justice in the world of music. How many people have heard of Lang Lang? How many people have heard of Paul Hersh? The former is commonly billed as a “superstar,” whatever that tawdry term may mean. The latter is merely a great musician. His Träumerei–his entire recital, for that matter–was a marvel, not of assertion, but of delicate suggestion.

Hersh does not so much address his listeners as commune with them, and thus illuminate for them his chosen composers’ innermost feelings and imaginings. He understands, and thus we understood, the subtle difference between the understated inwardness of Schumann’s music and the more sharply etched inwardness of Grieg’s. The final chord of each Schumann piece was poised in such a way as to point forward to the beginning of the next one. The masterful coherence of some of Grieg’s finest music was realized to such purpose that the Lyric Pieces could follow a powerfully concentrated reading of Mozart’s profound Adagio with no sense of anticlimax.

Especially viewed in the context of inwardness, Schumann offered an ironic juxtaposition with Debussy. Translating one of the instructions in a certain Schumann work, the closest the Frenchman could come to the German score’s Innig was expressif–which, if you think about it, means pretty well exactly the opposite.

Debussy’s four pieces are indeed scenes from the outer world of observation rather than the inner world of self-searching. Hersh was no less convincing here. There is nothing exaggeratedly flexible about his phrasing, but nothing mechanical either: a pause here, a momentary forward impulse there, never feels imposed on the music from outside, but follows with seeming inevitability from the weight of a chord or the shape of a phrase.

For a few hundred fortunate listeners, Hersh achieved that mysterious paradox in the art of music, which exists only in time: he made time stop.

Bernard Jacobson

NB: part of this review appeared also in the Seattle Times.

Back to Top                                                 Cumulative Index Page