United States Various – ‘The Art of the Touch’: Sandra Miller (flute), Masayuki Maki (clavichord), Chaeyoung Park (piano), Avi Stein (harpsichord), American Classical Orchestra. The Salmagundi Club, New York, 6.12.2024. (RP)
Couperin – Prelude No.4 in D major and Prelude No.8 in E minor from Pièces de clavecin
J. S. Bach – Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV903; Sonata for Flauto and Continuo in E major, BWV1035
C. P. E. Bach – Allegretto No.1 from Sechs Clavier-Sonaten für Kenner und Liebhaber, lst Collection, Wq.55; Sonata in D major for Flauto and Obbligato Clavichord, Wq.83
Messiaen – ‘Le baiser de l’Enfant-Jésus’, No.15 from Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus
Ligeti – Étude No.10, ‘Der Zauberlehrling’
Ana Sokolović – Danse No.5 from Danses et Interludes (encore)
The American Classical Orchestra is celebrating forty years of presenting works by composers of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It leapt into the twenty-first century with Art of the Touch, a salon concert featuring the technological developments of keyboard instruments over the centuries and composers who embraced such innovation.
The concert was at The Salmagundi Club in Greenwich Village. Founded in 1871 to encourage the advancement of art of all kinds, the club moved to its present home in a historic brownstone mansion in 1917. There was as much visual as aural stimulation during the concert – the walls were hung with paintings from the 127th annual juried exhibition of the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club. Its founder was one of New York’s great philanthropists, noted for her commitment to the arts and to women artists.
The clavichord was the earliest of the three keyboard instruments heard in the concert. It is a rectangular instrument commonly used in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. As the clavichord wasn’t loud enough for public performance, it was used mainly for personal entertainment, practice and composition.
Masayuki Maki owns a particularly large clavichord, which he purchased from the Antwerp-based builder Robert van Brandt. In introducing the instrument, Maki said it was the most difficult to play of all the instruments he tested in the builder’s workshop, and that he sought to master it. And so he did, as evidenced by his performance of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Allegretto No.1 from the first collection of the composer’s Sechs Clavier-Sonaten für Kenner und Liebhaber.
In this short solo piece, Maki’s technical mastery of the instrument and its elegant, pristine sound were captivating. The clavichord’s sound ideally complemented that of Sandra Miller playing a historical reproduction of a baroque flute in the same composer’s Sonata in D major for Flauto and Obbligato Clavichord. The artists’ virtuosity and their attention to nuance and balance were apparent.
The harpsichord was developed in Italy in the sixteenth century, about a hundred years after the clavichord. It worked by plucking strings with a plectrum attached to a long stick of wood, which produced a sound that could compete with that of other instruments either in solos or as part of an ensemble. Avi Stein performed on a 1980 reproduction of a harpsichord made by American builder William Hyman and played pieces by François Couperin and Johann Sebastian Bach. The French composer wrote more than 220 works for solo harpsichord between 1713 and 1730, which he published in four volumes entitled Pièces de clavecin. Stein performed Preludes No.4 in D major and No.8 in E minor with grace and authority, showcasing not only the composer’s imagination but also the elegance and poetry of the music.
J. S. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, which Bach began in 1720 but returned to several times in succeeding years, gained popularity beyond Germany in his lifetime. Even with the limited dynamics available on the harpsichord, Stein instilled the piece with subtle variations in sound and mood. His articulation of the extremely chromatic fugal writing, from which the work takes its name, was a model of clarity and precision.
There was historical symmetry in pairing J. S. Bach’s Sonata for Flauto and Continuo in E major with that of C. P. E. Bach, his son. The elder Bach composed the last of his three flute sonatas shortly before a visit to his son at the court of Frederick the Great in 1741. Likely, the Emperor, who was an accomplished flutist, and C. P. E. Bach gave the first performance of the sonata during J. S. Bach’s visit. As was the norm for the time, Bach composed only the solo flute part and the bass lines for the keyboard instrument. It was Stein’s job to flesh out the harmonies, which he did with taste and imagination. Miller’s playing was again a model of style and elegance, particularly her sensitive phrasings and discrete ornamentation. The final movement is a fast Siciliano, which provided Miller and Stein to impress with their pristine trills and fast fingering.
Grand pianos have evolved little since the end of the nineteenth century, but the pieces that Chaeyoung Park played tilted toward the modern and experimental. Her instrument was a Shigeru Kawai grand piano, a handcrafted luxury brand name from the renowned Japanese builder. The first work was Ana Sokolović’s Danse No.5 from Danses et Interludes, composed in 2003. The Quebec-based composer’s inspiration for the suite of six dances and three interludes came from traditional Balkan dances with rhythms derived from the Serbian language. In Danse No.5, these sounds were captured in fragments of melody, bell-like sounds from the upper ranges of the piano and a percussive effect that required Park to employ some fascinating thumb technique.
Olivier Messiaen composed Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jésus, a twenty-minute meditation on the infancy of Jesus Christ, during the final days of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. The two-hour work is seldom heard in its entirety, and Park performed only ‘Le baiser de l’Enfant-Jésus’, the fifteenth movement. She enchanted with the sublime sounds and emotion she drew from the seemingly simple procession of chords and lighter-than-air trills
The final work in the program was György Ligeti’s Étude No.10, ‘Der Zauberlehrling’, one of a cycle of eighteen Etudes for solo piano between written between 1985 and 2001. Park dazzled in the Etude’s rapid-fire repetition of notes and pinpoint staccatos that capture the supernatural phenomena of the tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice which inspired Ligeti to such flights of virtuosic fancy.
Rick Perdian