Synaethesia at Juilliard
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Enrique Granados considered himself an artist who also happened to compose. His suite of piano pieces known as “Goyescas,” based on individual paintings of Goya, is a classic synaesthetic work, one in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. Granados recycled these vignettes into an opera of the same name, but this internal plagiarism cost him dearly: Returning to Spain from the Metropolitan Opera world premiere of the work in 1916, Granados died when the S.S. Sussex was torpedoed by a German submarine in the English Channel.
The first of Granados’s sound paintings was performed on Wednesday night by China’s Xiang Zou, one of two pianists featured in the Bachauer Competition Winners’ Recital at the Juilliard School. Mr. Zou, whose principal teacher at Juilliard is Jerome Lowenthal, presented “Los Requiebros.” After a confident start, he veered off in the direction of deconstruction, replacing the lyrical quality of the piece with a measured and, at least at the outset, thoughtful interpretation. It soon became apparent, however, that he would not be communicating any of the magical qualities of the original painting: no piercing eyes, no beautiful clothes, no sense of courtliness.
Much more satisfying and, in truth, very impressive was his traversal of “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues” from Frederic Rzweski’s “Four North American Ballads.” New Yorkers of a certain age may remember Mr. Rzweski as the frequent accompanist of the topless cellist Charlotte Moorman, but he is also a very inventive composer. This piece is evocative of the machine age and seems to be a leftover from the 1920s when works like “Pacific 231” and “The Steel Step” were in vogue.
Mr. Zou described this perpetuum mobile as “noisy,” and so it was, but in a good way. Here he exhibited raw, prodigious technical skill that was oddly missing from the Granados. His ability to emote at both ends of the keyboard made for a delicious sense of the pistons of the cotton-processing machinery. His slightly syncopated sense of the jazz chords that followed was heartfelt and transfixing.
Edward Robie, of Raleigh, N.C., also studies with Mr. Lowenthal, and he too tackled an important synaesthetic work on Wednesday night: Liszt’s “Sonnetto del Petrarca, No. 123” from the second book of “Annees de pelerinage.” Having just recently heard the entire second year of the “Annees de pelerinage” performed by the impressive Jeffrey Swann, my inner-ear standards for the “Sonnetto del Petrarca No. 123” are probably a bit high. But Mr. Robie is well on his way to being a poet at the piano, so rare a quality that it gave me pause to hear him this evening.
Most impressive in the Liszt was his sense of the shape of the sonnet itself, mirrored so expertly by the composer but often not communicated by so-called virtuosos. Each individual line was in meter, yet there was a slight sense of rubato, a glimmer of Liszt looking Heavenward while letting his long hair flow towards the floor.
Conventional wisdom teaches that the theme most often excerpted by other composers for variation is the 24th caprice of Paganini, but a case can be made for excerpts from Carmen (and the scale is definitely tipped if considering the pop arena as well). One of the most difficult of these spinoffs is the Sonatina No. 6 of Ferruccio Busoni, a pianist who reveled in writing pieces that only he had the delicate interpretive ability to play.
Mr. Robie was up to the task. Busoni’s emerging themes deliciously made their entrances in a soft glow of light, revealing their beauties as subtly as such familiar phrases can. What might have seemed like just another compendium of opera paraphrases in the style of Liszt turned into an object lesson in limpid communication. This was unexpectedly high-quality music making.
The evening, which was broadcast by WQXR as part of the McGraw-Hill Young Artists Showcase, ended with the two pianists playing some four hand Dvoryak.