Concert Review—

Brilliant Work By A Young Pianist Shows Promise

For Another Full Season Of ‘Exquisite Music, Superbly Performed’

By Wendy Wipprecht

Newtown Friends of Music began its 32nd second season of sponsored events with a performance by the Russian born pianist Daria Rabotkina on October 18.

In addition to presenting “exquisite music, superbly performed,” the organization also remains committed to its teaching mission, sponsoring workshops in the public schools and admitting students under 18 free (with ticket-holding adults) to its events. The wisdom of this policy, and of the school system’s support of music education, was apparent in the lobby of Edmond Town Hall last Sunday afternoon, where members of the Newtown High School Chamber Ensemble, along with Michelle Hiscavich, director of music for the schools, performed just before the concert began.

Ms Rabotkina began her program with a deceptively simple-sounding work, J. S. Bach’s Ricercar a 3, or three-voice fugue. Bach was invited to visit Frederick the Great at Potsdam in 1747, where his son Carl Philipp Emanuel was a court musician; Frederick also wanted to show Bach his collection of pianos, then newly invented. To challenge the visiting composer, the king gave him a long and complex musical figure upon which to improvise a three-voice fugue, which Bach promptly did. He later expanded this fugue and added other canonic and fugal parts to form A Musical Offering.

Ms Rabotkina’s rendering was just right, opening in a slow, meditative manner, as if she were thinking about each note but never becoming fussy or labored. She brought out all the voices clearly, and with a natural ease.

Some performers overdramatize familiar Baroque works; Rabotkina chose a more elegant, understated approach that only half-concealed her technical prowess.

The next two pieces were transcriptions of J. S. Bach works for solo piano, both written by Busoni. Transcriptions were much more common, and very important, before the advent of recording technology. If you wanted to hear the latest arias, instead of rushing out to buy a CD, you bought a transcription for piano or small ensemble and performed it at home. In addition, the development of the modern piano and the rise of the touring piano virtuoso created a demand for piano transcriptions of orchestral works, the more technically demanding and flashier the better.

Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) transcribed so many works by Bach that some people thought Bach-Busoni was the composer’s real name. Two of these transcriptions were next of the program, the first being Busoni’s arrangement of the Chorale Prelude “Nun komm der Heiden Heiland,” an older Lutheran chorale Bach expanded into an ornamented chorale prelude for organ in 1723. Busoni’s piano transcription captures the original’s stateliness and calm, and Rabotkina’s playing was admirable in its grace and clarity.

The second Bach-Busoni work was Chaconne in D minor, a work based on the last movement of Bach’s Partita No. 2 for Unaccompanied Violin. Here Daria Rabotkina addressed the audience for the first time, touching briefly on the nature of transcription, the chaconne, and the way Busoni tried to get the sound of various instruments into his arrangement.

Chaconne in D minor is very different from the restrained Chorale Prelude: it is recognizably a late 19th Century work, with more orchestral color, full use of the piano’s tonal potential, and, of course, more drama.

Ms Rabotkina seemed able to produce the big sound some sections demanded almost without effort, and pulled off dazzling runs, quiet sections, and crashing chords as if there were nothing to it. 

Next came one of Busoni’s own compositions, Variations and Fugue on Chopin’s Prelude in C minor, Op. 22. Ms Rabotkina mentioned that Busoni had composed a thirty-minute version of this work when he was 18, and returned to it 38 years later, revising and cutting it down to a mere ten minutes. In this later version, she added, you can hear the influence of Franck, Chopin and Liszt, but the piece is still Busoni’s own.

At the center of the work is Chopin’s famous Funeral March, and the variations can be solemn, lighter and more melodic, nervous, flowing, and grand and loud. It is a very demanding work, calling upon the full range of the pianist’s abilities — after all, Busoni composed this piece to demonstrate his own virtuosity — and Rabotkina moved seamlessly from intense expressivity to dancelike gracefulness and on to sheer power, especially at the close of the piece. Several involuntary cries of “Wow!” preceded the enthusiastic applause.

The second half of Ms Rabotkina’s ambitious program was given over to works by Sergei Prokofiev, who wrote the Four Études for Piano, Op. 2 at the age of 18 as a showcase for his virtuosity.

Ms Rabotkina performed two of the études, those in D minor and E minor. The études are immediately recognizable as works by Prokofiev, and are marked by the sardonic humor and the drive of his mature work. The D minor etude is brilliant in color and thematic invention, and possessed of a wild, shimmering energy. The E minor etude is very different: its rippling, agitated piano part seems always on the verge of a violent outburst. These pieces, which express Prokofiev’s rebelliousness as well as his youthful cockiness, delight in their own difficulty.

Having proven her mastery of these early works, Ms Rabotkina moved on to a later and far more ambitious work, Prokofiev’s Ten Pieces for Piano from “Romeo and Juliet,” Op. 75. This suite was based on his orchestral ballet, but was intended as a distinct solo piano work, not a mere transcription.

Ms Rabotkina explained that this version of Shakespeare’s play is not a tragedy because it leaves us with “the possibility of hope.” The last of the ten pieces is “Romeo and Juliet before Parting,” which avoids the whole issue of the play’s tragic conclusion. (It also avoids the ballet’s happy ending, in which Romeo arrives just in time to save Juliet. “Living people can dance,” said Prokofiev. “The dying cannot.”)

The suite displays Prokofiev’s full range of character writing and tonal color, from the cheerful and sprightly “Folk Dance” to the very short, lively section called “Scene: The Street Awakens,” which sets the festive mood for the next section, “Minuet: The Arrival of the Guests.” The work also moves to eerie and foreboding with “Maskers” and of course touches upon passion and romance toward its conclusion with “Romeo and Juliet before Parting.”

Such a narrative, and such a range of emotion and musical styles, really tests a performer, and not only in the area of technique. A musician friend once called a certain rising pianist, a man widely praised for his technical skills, a sewing machine. It’s a wonderful image: the pianist goes clack-clacking along, always correct, always getting the job done, but lacking anything resembling soul or warmth.

Ms Rabotkina is a brilliant technician with the courage to play a program of works by two virtuosi who were out to display the full extent of their prodigious gifts. She also has the warmth of spirit necessary to breathe life into these difficult works, to convey their human and musical richness.

Her playing shows power and sweetness, and also considerable charm. Her encore was a brilliant, subtly and daringly syncopated rag by the African American composer Charles Luckyeth (Luckey) Roberts, whose name has as many variants as Shakespeare’s has spellings. Rabotkina played “Pork and Beans” with blinding speed and élan, bringing Roberts into the company of virtuoso pianists and composers and delighting her audience as well.