Last Thursday night I was at Herbst Theater for the first of three concerts pianist Jonathan Biss is giving for San Francisco Performances. The series is titled Echoes of Schubert & pairs a new work with pieces by, obviously, Schubert.
The program book said the first piece would be the new one, . . . Expansions of Light, for piano by Tyson Gholston Davis, followed by Schubert's Impromptu #1, but the order was switched without announcement, leading some members of the audience to be gratified at how melodically Schubertian the new piece was. I couldn't really blame them, as the idea of the series is that the new pieces will play off Schubert's. When Biss came out after a brief pause following the Impromptu, he explained that Gholston Davis's piece was actually conceived separately from the Schubert series, though it did seem appropriate as its creation was encouraged by San Francisco Performances, which has a long track record of encouraging new music & new creators. Biss mentioned that the more he studied & played the piece, the more he was impressed by its architecture & the meaning behind each choice of a note.
Gholston Davis wrote the program note for his piece. Instead of describing the music directly, he described the Helen Frankenthaler painting that inspired it, Winter Light. (There was no reproduction of the painting on stage or in the program book, but you can find one here.) His description of the washes of color & how they interacted with each other & with him proved to be just as, if not more, effective than the usual musical descriptions of sweeping first themes & playful rondos. He doesn't explicitly link his approach to or name it as synesthesia, though Biss did in his remarks, saying that composers & performers often use the word color metaphorically but in Gholston Davis's case it is more literal. Of course we can bring our own associations & memories to the colors we see or the sound-colors we hear. Both color & sound manifest meanings that ultimately are only found separately in separate individuals.
Expansions is a triptych, with the first & third movements titled Arietta 1 & Arietta 2, in reference to Beethoven's use of that operatic term in his later piano sonatas; the middle movement was titled Interlude in the program but the composer referred to it in his note as Caprice. Something of Frankenthaler's wintery light entered into the framing movements; there was a lot of space around the notes, & their reverberations dying into paleness fit with the frosty light of winter. Caprice is a better title for the middle movement, as it did swirl around in a more playful way than the other more crystalline movements. This piece is one of a series that the composer is writing inspired by Frankenthaler's works, & I hope we'll get to hear all of them.
After the intermission Biss performed Schubert's Sonata in C Minor, one of the three piano sonatas Schubert composed just months before his early death. In the program note he wrote for the booklet, Biss pointed out that Schubert, unlike another prodigy with an early demise, Mozart, was always haunted by thoughts of death (Biss specifically cited Schubert's first great song, the still-celebrated Erlkönig), & the final three piano sonatas explore different approaches to & feelings about the end. He felt the C Minor sonata is an expression of terror at the relentless approach of death. The performance was dramatic & poetic, like some Elizabethan tragedy. There was one encore, the Schubert Impromptu #3, which came on us like balm after the sonata. The audience was collectively swooning.
There are two more concerts in this series, on 14 March & on 2 May.
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