Conquering the Devilishly Difficult

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The New York Sun

Jeffrey Swann attained his 15 minutes of fame when he had the temerity as a young man from Fort Worth to win the international Van Cliburn competition in his own hometown. Since then he has pursued a career primarily in Europe, even though he now calls New York home. Not shy about tackling the biggest pianistic problems head-on, this season he is concentrating on the devilishly difficult music of Franz Liszt, and this weekend he extended his series at Brooklyn’s Bargemusic to include a program titled “Liszt: The Man of Culture.”


How does one communicate the totality of this subject? Mr. Swann’s way is to preface each piece with a bit of commentary, not a lecture per se but rather some seemingly off-the-cuff and yet pithy remarks that place each work into historical context. The talk before “Annees de pelerinage – annee 2: Italie” was unassuming enough to put me off my guard, and the spectacular performance that followed was totally unexpected.


Mr. Swann possesses an extremely strong right hand, and he uses its power for clarion clarity. He mentioned Liszt’s attraction to the sound of bells and, in this small performing space, Mr. Swann left us with their ringing embedded in our ears. Some of the interpretive touches that I especially enjoyed were the transition from “Il Penseroso” to the “Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa”; the short dramatic pause immediately preceding the final high phrase of “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca”; and the poetic contemplation of the Sonetto 47.


This set of six pieces is but the preliminary bout to the main event: the “Dante” Sonata, a clangorous immersion into the jaws of Tartary itself in Mr. Swann’s capable and steady hands. By emphasizing both the drama of the narrative and its recollection in tranquility, this masterful pianist reached the heart of this novelistic piece’s emotional understanding.


Liszt was above the fray in the Brahms-Wagner feud, but certainly he would have been on the side of his son-in-law. Unfortunately he did not live long enough to heed the advice of that prominent Wagnerian, George Bernard Shaw, who established the two rules for the writing of a fugue – Rule 1: Study the correct methods and Rule 2: Don’t. His “Fantasy and Fugue on B.A.C.H.” is the type of piece that Liszt haters point to as devoid of beauty and melodic content, unabashed virtuosity for its own sake. I suppose a survey course in Liszt needs to include a vapid exercise like this. At least Mr. Swann traversed it with superhuman dexterity and made us forget its hollow center.


More satisfying were the two Schubert songs, “Wasserflut” and “Der Lindenbaum,” from “Winterreise.” Mr. Swann referred in his comments to the many popular opera transcriptions of Liszt, but thankfully left them off of the musical program. He chose instead works of high quality that the leonine headliner, part genius and part circus performer, used to make the ladies swoon during his scandalous evenings combining the highest and lowest of contemporary cultures. In fact, Liszt transcribed more than 140 songs of Schubert and served immeasurably to popularize his previously little-known music.


In the 1830s it would have been debatable whether the works of Hector Berlioz belonged to the exalted or defiled end of that cultural spectrum. The young Liszt, lacking the refinement of his later years, produced a piano transcription of the “Symphonie fantastique” that is notable for its unplayability and what Mr. Swann called its “young, brutal Liszt pianism.”


The work that kept coming to mind during Mr. Swann’s performance of the first movement of this leviathan of the keyboard was, somewhat surprisingly, “Le Sacre du printemps.” Not only were the savage touches exposed into raw nerve endings of black and white keys, but Berlioz shared with Stravinsky the compositional habit of never employing the piano during the creative process.


Mr. Swann jumped in with both feet but soon found himself drowning. There are simply too many embellishments to call this effort a piano reduction; rather, it is more of an expansion, and seems to be written for four hands. It is hard to fathom that even the fabled Liszt could have pulled it off.


Finally, Mr. Swann presented one of the most profound of the Liszt transcriptions, the overture to “Tannhauser.” As if he needed to establish the degree of difficulty of the piece after performing the Berlioz, Mr. Swann pointed out that even the transcriptionist occasionally had to stop mid-course during its live performance, citing his own advancing age. But Mr. Swann counter argued that he himself had achieved that same age, so full speed ahead and the devil take the hindmost.


The resulting rendition was jaw-droppingly impressive. The recital ended on waves of arpeggiated sound that dwarfed the movements of the water beneath our feet. Come to think of it, had Liszt, the consummate showman, been at this recital, he might have gone home to Weimar and installed a wave-making machine under his own audience.


The New York Sun

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