A Fresh Take on Familiar Work
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On Sunday afternoon at Town Hall, the Brazilian pianist Arnaldo Cohen presented Frédéric Chopin’s 24 Preludes, demonstrating just how much the Bach originals influenced the young Pole. Bach died in 1750, but his watershed Well-Tempered Clavier was not published until 1801, which made it cutting-edge contemporary music when studied by Chopin as a child. Chopin, like many of us, revered Bach and Mozart above all others.
Chopin orders his two dozen somewhat differently than Bach, using the circle of fifths as his natural road map. He never had any intention of performing the entire grouping as a set, but modern convention seems to inevitably join all 24 by their respective hips. Listening to Mr. Cohen’s traversal, certain sequential and architectural details emerge, as though they had been lying dormant in their composer’s subconscious.
Mr. Cohen’s deliberate approach emphasized the cohesiveness of the preludes as a macrocosmic unit. He took most of the pieces at a very relaxed tempo, slow enough for the most pensive among us. This penchant paid big dividends in such ruminative, circuitous works as the D Major or the G Major, but seemed to unnaturally elongate many of the other, sprightlier essays.
Mr. Cohen also made his case by eliminating the pauses between the miniatures, sometimes waiting less than one beat before commencing the next in sequence. This daisy chain pointed out the close overtonal relationships between the pieces, due to their positions on the key chart (the tonic of one is the dominant of the next). Although this idea made sense mathematically, it also made the effort more tedious. Other pianists who present the set as a whole in recital, such as the Czech master Ivan Moravec, leave considerable space between each individual romantic utterance.
And, speaking of emotion, Mr. Cohen lacked a sense of the dramatic, of the passionate. He is a competent technician, but no more. He was remarkably accurate throughout, but had little sense of chiaroscuro, and his sound was maddeningly monochromatic. He possesses not so much lighter and weightier touches as simply softer and louder ones. And dynamically, he seemed determined to occupy the middle range. Even in such showy pieces as the D minor, he did not take full advantage of Chopin’s cataclysmic plunge into the nether regions of the left hand geography, opting instead for a decidedly matter-of-fact enunciation.
Of course, some of the preludes are very, very familiar and it was those that proved the least satisfying. A common encore piece like the D Flat Major was tossed off with little sense of its delicate nature. Performing it so declaratively made Mr. Cohen a prosaic tourist in the land of poetry. Forget Horowitz and Rubinstein — in recent years, New Yorkers have had the opportunity to hear this “cycle” presented live by such experts as Mr. Moravec, Garrick Ohlsson, Mitsuko Uchida, Andras Schiff, and, more idiosyncratically, Maurizio Pollini. Arnaldo Cohen just doesn’t measure up.
After intermission, Mr. Cohen began with a very satisfying rendition of Chopin’s Scherzo in B minor, allowing his unbuttoned style to unfold organically. Since there is apparently a city ordinance in New York that one cannot present one scherzo without the other three (or one ballade for that matter), he followed with a rather sloppy B Flat minor during which he ran many notes together. The other two were then dutifully presented as well. Here there is even less of a case for encyclopedic completeness, as the four works were written at totally different times and do not necessarily mesh harmonically. Only their sheer numbers allow the waltzes, mazurkas, and nocturnes to escape this same fate.
Charles Rosen, in his The Romantic Generation, wrote, “I think that we must accept that the Preludes are conceived only paradoxically as a whole, and yet that modern performances of the entire set bring out aspects of the work certainly present in, and even integral to, its conception, but which Chopin did not consider essential to its realization in sound.” Performance history changes music, and that is a good thing. But to make the argument for completeness, one had best be master of the detail as well.