Festival of the Sound: The Whole is Greater

The Festival of the Sound launched its third annual pre-season series with a powerful performance of the final three Beethoven piano sonatas by pianist Leopoldo Erice.

Even among the many fine performances Erice has given at the Festival through the years, this concert in the small studio concert room at the Festival office stood out for its power, musicality, and for the sheer intensity of the experience.

The final sonatas, like so much of Beethoven's late-period music, are intense.  To perform all three in a single concert is gripping enough.  To play these works, as Erice did last night, in a single continuous flow of music with no discernible pause between them raises the intensity right through the roof.  In this concentrated format, the whole becomes far, far greater than just the sum of its parts.  In effect, Erice presented these three challenging and involving works as a single, continuous whole, a mighty symphony for the piano. 

This is not idle metaphor.  It's not just a question of a hot-shot virtuoso slapping the three pieces together in a row.  The entire performance was plainly the product of deep study and thought.  The magisterial quality of Erice's readings stemmed fully as much from his immersion in the music as from the near-superhuman technique needed to surmount these Olympian scores.

It's almost impossible to detach single moments as highlights in this continuous stream of music, but a few moments spring to mind.  The individual variations in the finales of the Sonata in E Major, Op. 109 and the Sonata in C Minor, Op. 111 were all vividly characterized without impairing the overall flow of the music.  The polyphonic lines in the fugue passage of the finale of Sonata in A-Flat Major, Op. 110, could be clearly distinguished -- as again in the inversion fugue which follows soon after.  The oft-repeated direction of espressivo showed itself in playing which foreshadowed the even more monumental sonatas by Schubert and Liszt that would arrive later in the nineteenth century.  

Above all, I was deeply moved by the restrained intensity filling the hymn-like coda at the culmination of Op. 111, the long, slow buildup to the thunderous climax a fitting completion to the entire massive "symphony."

I can best measure the extraordinary force of this performance by mentioning that, after Erice had taken his bows and left the stage, the room remained quiet as all of us in the audience needed some time to absorb what we had just lived through.

 My one complaint has nothing to do with the music, but rather with the venue.  The studio space is small, and has a high percentage of hard surfaces.  Played like this on a modern grand piano, the music can become uncomfortably congested in such a room.  

Leopoldo Erice is going to be repeating this concert in at least one other venue, as well as repeating the three sonatas (spread across two concerts) on the Festival mainstage this summer.  I hope to have another opportunity to hear this powerful, deeply-felt performance in a more musically advantageous, larger hall.