Portugal Festival de Música dos Capuchos [1] – Time of Tribute 2: Stephen Kovacevich (piano). Convento dos Capuchos, Almada, 17.6.2023. (LV)
Berg – Piano Sonata, Op.1
Beethoven – Piano Sonatas, Op.109 and Op.110; 3 Bagatelles
Stephen Kovacevich has been playing Alban Berg’s iconic Piano Sonata Op.1 since he was a teenager at the University of California at Berkeley, where he performed in military uniform worn as part of his ROTC training. Three years later, the Berg was on the young American’s breakthrough Wigmore Hall debut beside three Bach Preludes and Fugues and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.
On Saturday night, Kovacevich celebrated 65 years of the Berg with an appreciative audience at the Convento des Capuchos in Almada, with its commanding view of Lisbon across the Tagus, and he added Beethoven and Bach (as an encore) to the mix. In fact, Bach would have been on the program even if the old lion, who had played as a young cub with Jacqueline du Pré and Martha Argerich, had not played a note. It was music making on a very high level of insight, illumination and intimacy.
Kovacevich played Berg’s Piano Sonata with a gentle, singing tone and wide dynamic range as he shaped the music’s tumble of tunes and harmonies in a performance that was shot through with emotion. He managed the music as if it were an obvious inheritor of the classical sonata form, as if he were training the ears of the audience to hear that its ebb and flow would be the perfect introduction and complement to the Beethoven to come. He invested the music with a sense of fluid movement which became a lilt at times, and you could hear Berg coming to grips with his own role in the twentieth century, with Kovacevich at the keyboard as the conduit for making it unfold. He stretched the ten minutes into an eternity and held the final resolution – the sonata’s first and only resolution – as if he never wanted it to end.
Unleashed after Berg, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.30, Op.109, seemed unnecessarily florid at first but then, as Kovacevich began searching, exploring and listening to the music while taking sheer physical pleasure from the instrument he was playing, the wealth of Beethoven’s imagination took over. The eternally young pianist came intrepidly to terms with the epigrams in the Prestissimo, a few times on the verge of letting the music get away. He laid down the sarabande-like theme in the Andante molto cantabile ed espressivo in Bachian terms, with such clarity and singing tone in the right hand that his own quiet singing, which arose at times of intensity and tenderness, was the perfect accompaniment.
Kovacevich found safe harbors in the variations, including deeply touching consolation in the rolling triplets of the fourth variation, and kept us aware of the music’s infinite vision even as it was approaching its finite end. The forthright attitude he gave to the fifth variation was similar to Bach’s use of a sturdy Quodlibet in his Goldberg Variations. Then, after chiseling the theme from the figurations in the concluding Tempo primo del tema, Kovacevich ended with such simplicity that it took a few seconds for the audience to let the silence go.
After intermission, Kovacevich introduced three late Bagatelles by admitting that ‘playing these gives me as great pleasure as any of his big works’. He explained that the first would illustrate ‘the tenderness that only occurs in late Beethoven’ and that the second had a moment William Blake had said encompassed the world. And – with a mischievous smile – he warned that the third would be ‘rude at the end’. He played the three almost as if they were one, focused on Blake’s moment with bittersweet feeling and was, as promised, delightedly rude at the end.
As Kovacevich unfolded Beethoven’s Sonata No.31, Op.110, he reveled in the music’s exuberance and joy while maintaining its underlying structure and poetry. He played the Trio’s evanescent theme like threading a needle, then segued with hardly a breath to an Adagio ma non troppo played with an infinite variety of shades, from shadows to radiant sunlight. He played the recitative’s repeated notes lovingly and carefully as if typing in code, descending to the depths the late Beethoven felt so comfortable in. The arioso was rich with the meanings and associations of lamentation and, after Kovacevich sounded the coda’s repeated chords likes fanfares for a new musical world, the Fugue came on like cool, running water, driven deliberately by the three beats of each bar. He was visibly moved as he rose from the piano.
For an encore Kovacevich allowed Bach, who had thrown his shadow over the concert, to take a bow on his own. It was the Sarabande from the Keyboard Partita No.4 and, as its more complex half came to an end, he and Kovacevich brought us even closer to Beethoven.
Laurence Vittes