THE LAST SONATA,
THE LONGEST OPUS
As the Piano Rules Ludwig's Roost
By Paul Hertelendy
artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music
and dance
Week of April 18-25, 2010
Vol. 12, No. 92
SAN JOSE---There
were some admirable
Promethean heights in Christopher O’Riley’s assault on late Beethoven
in his
April 17 piano recital here. Pairing Beethoven’s longest piano
piece---the monumental
“Diabelli” Variations---with the resonant last sonata (Op. 111) made a
powerful
statement echoing through the time-worn concert hall on
the San José State University
campus.
O’Riley is
best known for hosting the syndicated radio showcase for teen
musicians, “From
the Top,” which has done more to dissolve stereotypes of nerdy
classical
musicians than anything else since Leonard Bernstein’s music lectures
on early TV,
But he is also a concert pianist, doing both recitals and concertos
around the
country with panache.
What I really
liked about O’Riley was his dynamism and
passion in attacking the keyboard, which more than compensated for a
few wrong
notes and blurred velocity in the “Diabelli.” The “Diabelli” is a
unique piece,
using a threadbare C major theme given to Beethoven which set off a
flood of
ideas played out in 33 variations, running (here) 49 minutes of intense
performing
time, and running even longer is some rival recordings. Some of
Beethoven’s
variations are dripping with irony, others very serious high-velocity
exercises. Several are quite unusual: No. 20, later subtitled “The
Oracle,” is a
pensive reflection.No. 22 invokes the theme of Leperello’s aria opening
the Mozart
opera “Don Giovanni.” And the composer couldn’t bring himself to stop:
after the
“final” toccata-like ends a minuet, one of the most restless you’ll
ever encounter,
rushing off on even more trangents than---than---well, than Beethoven
uses in the
rest of “Diabelli.”
Overall, the
composer conscientiously used the extremes of the keyboard, as if to
take advantage
of the gradually expanding compass, which eventually swelled to 88
notes in the
modern grand.
My particular
favorites here, Nos. 28-30, all slow movements in C minor, all coming
straight from
the heart---like love songs, or late-night ruminations.
The Op. 111
sonata, Beethoven’s last, is masterful, blending what O’Riley calls the
quixotic
first movement with the aria and variations of the closing one. The
latter goes
on to an ever more climactic pace, roars through dotted rhythms that
seemingly invented boogie-woogie dances a century before their time,
then pushes toward an inexorable finale,
yet devoid
of the bluster of the first movement.
Enkindled by
the reception, O'Riley played a mammoth encore: The first movement of
the "Waldstein" Sonata, Op. 53, with all its thunderbolts.
The recital,
attended by a small but very enthusiastic crowd, was a benefit for the Ira F. Brilliant
Beethoven Center for archives and research
on the SJSU campus, which is hard hit by the statewide and
university-wide budget
reductions. O'Riley stayed on the next day for a
piano master class.
Christopher
O’Riley, piano, in all-Beethoven recital. Concert Hall, San
José State University,
April 17. For Beethoven Center info: Go online.
©Paul Hertelendy 2010
#
Paul Hertelendy has been
covering
the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with
relish
-- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never
weakly)
will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with
forays
into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local
artists as well.
#
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