United States Aspen Music Festival (14): Nikolai Lugansky (piano), Susanna Phillips (soprano), Eric Owens (bass baritone), Robert Spano (piano), Harris Hall, Aspen, Colorado. 12-13.8.2014 (HS)
Recital, August 12
Nikolai Lugansky, piano
Franck/Bauer: Prélude, fugue et variation
Chopin: Nocturne in D-flat major, op. 27 no. 2
Prokofiev: Piano Sonata No. 4 in C minor
Rachmaninoff: 13 Preludes, op. 32
Recital, August 13
Susanna Phillips, soprano
Eric Owens, bass baritone
Robert Spano, piano
Duparc: L’invitation au voyage
Duparc: La vague et la cloche
Barber: Hermit Songs
Ravel: Don Quichotte à Dulcinée
Robert Spano: Hölderlein Songs
Wagner: Les deux grenadiers
Purcell: Music for While
Mozart: “La ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni
Aspen Music Festival audiences got a big dose of virtuosity in recitals this week in Harris Hall. Pianist Nikolai Lugansky applied his impeccable taste and seemingly endless reserves of power to a program that included great pieces by Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff. Soprano Susanna Phillips and bass-baritone Eric Owens put their luscious operatic voices to work on some less familiar art songs.
Lugansky, who triumphed on Sunday with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, on Tuesday evening started gently and gained momentum over a 90-minute program. With simplicity and directness, he homed in on the essence of each piece. Again and again he revved up the intensity and, just when you thought he had peaked, found extra oomph to take things up another notch. He never banged, just coaxed richer and richer sound from the Steinway grand.
He mined contrasts and found beautiful colors in the opening work, Franck’s Prélude, fugue et variation (written for organ and transcribed for two pianos by the composer, then arranged artfully for one piano by Harold Bauer). The first measures, a series of richly voiced chords, are followed by a silk-scarf flutter of soft runs. The stately fugue always maintained its aloofness, showing restraint through its variations.
Where many pianists look for ways to elaborate on Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat, Lugansky simply aimed at the music’s heart. Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 4 in C minor, not a showy piece, fit snugly with this forthright approach. Teasing us with the restraint of the lyrical opening movement and the Andante assai, the pianist pulled back just as they threatened to expand into a showy climax, instead relishing subtle shifts of color and rhythm. The finale, with its exuberant cadences and zippy tunes, was like opening a door to unexpected sunlight.
Rachmaninoff published 24 piano preludes, each in a different key, just as Bach and other composers had done before him, but in groups of one, 10 and 13 over the course of a decade. 13 Preludes, op. 32, written in a kaleidoscope of virtuosic styles, was catnip for Lugansky. The more difficult the music, the more he wrapped his arms (or more accurately, his fingers) around it, presenting it with panache and no excessiveness.
The more introspective ones, such as the sweet and simple No. 5 in G minor, the plaintive No. 9 in A major and the wistful No. 11 in B major, seemed to flow from some other place through the piano into fresh existence. There was no strain in the more expansive ones, not even the extravagantly chordal No. 4 in E minor, the finger-busting dexterity of the fleet No. 8 in A minor and the magnificent edifice of the final No. 13 in D-flat major. No. 10 in B minor was especially compelling, starting off gently and seamlessly, ever-so-gradually expanded into a huge climax, never breaking stride or tipping over into clangor, receding into a wistful finish, rich in color.
The encore, Grieg’s Arietta, op. 12 no. 1, often played by youthful beginners, brought what just might have been the season’s greatest recital to a intimate and charming close.
in their shared recital, a traversal of less-traveled ground in songs by composers more famous for other vocal works, Phillips and Owens found a sensitive and eloquent piano collaborator in festival music director Robert Spano. For her part, Phillips brought gorgeous sound, thorough understanding of the text and an opera singer’s theatricality to sets by Barber and Spano. Owens complemented a sonorous bass range with a thrilling top.
Phillips invested Spano’s Hölderlin Songs with sheer beauty of tone that could melt any heart. The texts deal with approaching death with no regrets, in some ways echoing Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs, but with a more direct musical line. Sketched in 1990 and finished only last year, they echo Strauss in the way they celebrate the soaring possibilities of the soprano voice.
Her delivery and sound, both full of personality, did full justice to the texts of Barber’s Hermit Songs (sung in their 1953 debut by Leontyne Price), English translations of poetic and vernacular marginal jottings by Irish monks of a millennium ago. They somehow feel modern and Barber’s music plays off of their humor and earthy observation. The melodic line keeps mostly conversational, but occasionally reaches for heavenly imagery.
In the confines of Harris Hall, Owens’ cavernous voice, which can fill the 4,000-seat Metropolitan Opera, could seem unwieldy when it boomed through dramatic songs such as Duparc’s L’invitation au voyage but mesmerizing when he reined it in. A voice that had blown us against the back wall minutes earlier turned to restrained beauty with intensity of expression to make pure magic of the gorgeously sustained and quiet lines of Purcell’s Music for While.
Known for his Wagner roles, Owens’ one Wagner selection, “Les deux grenadiers,” an existential tale of two prisoners or war returning to a Napoleon-less France, thrilling as it was, wasn’t as captivating as his deft and often touchingly funny Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, Ravel’s set of three songs about Cervantes’ knight of the woeful countenance.
A slyly staged “La ci darem la mano,” Mozart’s timeless duet of Don Giovanni’s seduction of the not-quite-reluctant-enough Zerlina, functioned as a delightful programmed encore.
Harvey Steiman
Attn: Misprint in the program at the beginning of the article lists Jennifer Rivera and not Susanna Phillips, as soprano. Oops!
And oops on my part, Jessica, not Jennifer.
Barbara, thanks for noticing the error. I even checked with the festival when its flyer listed Rivera in error—and then I neglected to make the correction in the text before I sent it. Susanna Phillips was marvelous.
This correction has been made.
Stan