Chamber Music Sedona doubled down on the piano for its Feb. 16 concert at the Sedona Performing Arts Center, hosting husband-and-wife piano duo Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung to stroke the Steinway for a bit of piano four-hands, a performance approach that makes a more lavish use of the possibilities of the instrument, and one that is traditionally well-suited to lovers.
The big idea for the first half of the afternoon was Hungarian folk music, beginning with the rather unusual choice of two pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach as adapted by Gyorgy Kurtag, himself a performer of four-handed piano works with his wife. The first movement of the Organ Sonata No. 1, BWV 525, as filtered through a Hungarian lens, was absolutely un-Bach-like, full of gay pastels, with the composer’s own idiom hardly showing up in the middle section of the work. It had the effect of lifting the listener into a summer garden party through Chung’s especially jaunty playing. The following sonatina from Bach’s cantata “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit” set a completely different mood, but one just as dissimilar to 18th-century Leipzig, Germany. It tone-painted a slow-motion ballet in the cold halls of a monastery, with Chung’s fingers poised above the keys, stepping with care. Although the music remained contemplative, Kurtag had successfully succeeded in excising Bach’s depression from it.
Bax and Chung then made a more venturesome jump into the work of Gyorgy Ligeti, one of the 20th century’s clever boys whose normal approach to composition was to substitute novelty for inspiration, with his “Five Pieces for Piano Four-Hands.” These opened with a jokey march that grew progressively more elaborate, with repeated jerky halts for effect, before moving on to something that Ligeti had described as a “polyphonic etude.” “Everything comes from the wrong key until you can’t take it anymore,” Bax said of the etude, and, indeed, the composer’s showing off resulted in a blatant exhibition of dissonance completely out of place amid the rest of the work.
Just how far off course and how unnecessarily artful Ligeti had been in writing the etude was underscored by the third piece, “Three Wedding Dances,” which in turn consisted of three brief movements. “The Cart is at the Gate” bustled with the gleam of an automating postwar America; the “Quickly Come Here, Pretty” was neither quick nor pretty but rather along the lines of young Lochinvar’s last gasp; and the “Circling Dance” was a delightful catchy swirl that left the audience wanting a lot more of it. Indeed, the first and third of these dances betrayed a brilliant sense of color and movement as well as talent — which is the sort of thing that leads the student of music to ask why anyone with the ability to write good music would bother to stoop to the sort of empty modernism represented by the etude. The answer, of course, is the same as that to the question of why a novelist would imitate the style of James Joyce: It gets one patted on the head by the artificial hothouse flowers of the literati.
The rest of Ligeti’s quintet for two consisted of a sonatina that began with a sense of confidence and anticipation rooted in a repeated brash theme that shouted “Hurry up!” before it refuted itself with a quietly confident andante. Chung’s playing lightened Bax’s and created a palpably-hushed mood in the auditorium that was broken by the rich tonal coloring of the vivace section, which returned to the pushing attitude of the opening tempo, albeit taking it more seriously. Last and least came a brief, jesting allegro that finished with a flourish almost before it began.
Considered one of Franz Schubert’s best works by some, the “Fantasia in F Minor,” D. 940, introduced itself with a flowing melancholy periodically interrupted by Schubert’s inability to be low-spirited for very long. The initial sadness would build into a frenzy, but then return again and again to the same delicately-stated and despairing motif that Bax plucked out lightly, mostly with his right hand. This pattern was interrupted by a scherzo that kept turning cartwheels on itself before the fantasia looped back to restate the opening theme with a more intense and defiant kind of grief that preceded Schubert’s dramatic amalgamation of all his previous ideas. The fantasia came across as if the composer had been writing to cheer himself up and had mostly succeeded by the end of the piece — but wasn’t quite sure of it. Chung distinguished herself with a firm downward thrust in her playing; Bax favored a more frisking, flatter, painterly stroke — what the Germans would call fingerspitzengefuhl.
For the second half of the afternoon, the duo slipped over from the Danube watershed to the fleshpots of Paris and Madrid to play three selections each from Claude Debussy and Astor Piazzolla. Bax entered with tripping finesse in the “Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune,” an odd composition in comparison to the work of many other Romanticists in that it does not alternate joy and sorrow in separate movements but presents them simultaneously, in direct refutation of one another, with gleaming golden notes of hope sparkling among the shadows. Bax was able to show off his playing style in particular here, demonstrating expertise in handling the dense flurries of notes, while force and fury emanated from Chung at the lower end of the instrument, the two in effect dancing the music with their fingers and making it obvious that they were playing a dance. They ended it in tenderness, expecting the promise of a better tomorrow.
The remaining Debussy sections were less striking. “La fille aux cheveuz de lin” was a very brief, unassuming idyll with a single burst of radiance; “La plus qui lente,” “the more than slow,” was in no hurry to get anywhere, giving the impression of a jaded, ironic boulevardier reflecting cynically upon life. It did, however, end with a decidedly odd final chord that made the audience giggle.
As an expression of the personality of their collaboration, Bax and Chung finished off the evening with their own improvisations on Piazzolla’s tangoes, which they only perform with one another. “We hope we finish at the same time,” Chung laughed. In the “Lo que vendra,” they did in fact finish at the same time in spite of a last-moment slash at the keyboard by Bax; that one alternated between an insistent, traditionally-styled tango rhythm and a more formal classicism. “Milonga del angel” could be described as a sort of breakup tango, in which future resolution could be seen through present clouds even as those clouds built up into thunderheads and raced past the observer, the tangoists hurling themselves about in a contradance with the lightnings. As for the “Libertango,” that one kicked off with a blistering challenge from Chung and a reply from Bax as they poured on the display to produce an athletically- as well as musically-stylish rendition that brought the crowd to its feet.
Chamber Music Sedona will host its next concert on Sunday, March 23, featuring the appearance of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center guest artists Sterling Elliott — returning to SPAC after a performance with the Sedona Symphony last season — Anthony Manzo, Paul Neubauer, Julian Rhee, Arnaud Sussmann and Wu Han.
