Pianos forte!

Harvard celebrates the restoration of Sanders

by Lloyd Schwartz

"One never knows," in the immortal words of the immortal Fats Waller, "do one?" "Playing for Keeps: The Great Sanders Theatre Restoration Recital" could easily have been one of those official "gala" events in which artistic considerations take a back seat to self-congratulation -- which is what happened last year at the New England Conservatory's opening of the "restored" Jordan Hall, a concert that exposed the limitations of the performers and the disastrous effect of the renovation on the hall's legendary acoustics. "This is a restoration, not a renovation," said Myra Mayman, director of Harvard's Office for the Arts. "We are here to celebrate the fact that the arts are at the center of Harvard life."

What we got was an imaginative and substantial musical program, in which even the lightest of the pieces, Harvard composer Ivan Tcherepnin's 1977 Valse Perpetuelle "The 45 RPM," was no throwaway (striking that the earliest of the contemporary works presented was by the youngest of the contemporary composers), and the selections, emphasizing music of the last two decades, revealed not merely surface glitter but the depth of talent in Harvard's ability to produce composers, performers, and teachers.

Five amazing pianists and a celebrity harpsichordist, all Harvard faculty or alums, were astonishing not only for their ability but in their temperamental and stylistic differences from one another. Stephen Drury (class of '77), who specializes in advanced 20th-century music, wore his trademark black (silk shirt and leather pants) and played the delicious ragtimy Tcherepnin, Ravel's chillingly difficult Scarbo (from 1908, suggested by Aloysius Bertrand's Freudian nightmare poem about a sinister dwarf), and two -- if anything -- even more difficult Ligeti etudes (L'escalier du Diable and Automne à Varsovie). Drury played them nonstop, which made it hard to tell exactly where the first Ligeti etude ended and the second began except that suddenly the cadences were falling (like autumn leaves) rather than rising (like steps). But these breathless transitions suggested the scintillating palette, daredevil syncopations, and razor-edge of irony that ran through all these pieces.

(A few night's earlier at BU, Virginia Eskin had played Ravel's complete Gaspard de la nuit, with actor William Lacey reading the Bertrand poems, in which the way she made every fiendish note audible added an element of unearthly, crepuscular delicacy to the evil dwarf, with his nails "grating on the bed-curtains.")

The less theatrical Randall Hodgkinson (currently a nonresident Harvard tutor) was the perfect choice for Leon Kirchner's highly charged, rhapsodic Interlude (1989), in which outpourings of heartfelt passion alternate with brief moments of more open, indrawn delicacy.

The first half of the program ended with the emotional high point, Schubert's noncommittally titled but heavenly Eight Variations on an Original Theme in A-flat Major, performed with four-hand bravura but also with the profoundest tenderness and sympathy by Robert Levin ('68), the evening's artistic director, and the Harvard Music Department's beloved professor emerita and former chairperson, Luise Vosgerchian. The two slow variations -- elegiac yet consoling arias that look back to the funeral march of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and prefigure the great slow movements of Schubert's last sonatas -- are among Schubert's most exquisite, and the performance deserved the universal sigh of pleasure that greeted it.

Levin is always brilliant and brainy, but his third "B" can sometimes be "brittle" -- which was not in evidence here. Harvard's new Steinway D has a round, warm tone that reflected the gallons of lemon oil that must have gone into polishing Sanders's suddenly gleaming interior, which has always reminded me of the inside of a huge rolltop desk. The stage has been extended, the aisles of the floor widened to permit greater wheelchair access and a more comfortable space for entrance, exit, and intermission gathering. In all, a hundred seats have been lost (capacity is down to 1100), but at least as far as keyboards are concerned, nothing seemed to be lost acoustically.

The harpsichord of Igor Kipnis (class of '52), in the marvelous Rameau Suite in E minor, which includes a movement of twittering birds ("Le rappel des oiseaux") and ends with the exhilaratingly percussive "Tambourin," had remarkable clarity and presence. Then Van Cliburn finalist Christopher Taylor ('92) threw himself, elbows and all, into three vigorous movements from William Bolcom's Twelve New Etudes (1986).

The closing number was a literal blast: James Yannatos conducted 16 impressive, prize-winning Harvard undergraduates and graduate students (not all of them music majors) in Carl Czerny's eight-piano, 32-hand arrangement of Rossini's Semiramide Overture (the music Rex Harrison is conducting while he imagines murdering Linda Darnell in Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours). The stage looked like a Busby Berkeley number (Gold Diggers of 1996) or The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, the eight pianos firing volleys of supersaturated, true stereo sound into the hall. It was hilarious, but also an extraordinary feat of musical virtuosity. The last section had to repeated (what are the chances we'll ever hear it again?). "This is our largest classroom," announced Harvard dean Jeremy Knowles. Even while we were having fun, we were learning things.

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The gathering of significant artists doesn't always work so well. For example, Wellesley College presented two sold-out performances (free to members of the college) of the New England premiere of Wellesley composer Martin Brody's music/dance/theater piece Earth Studies: Three Mythic Landscapes, at the Emerson Majestic, a piece that had its world premiere last January at the Duncan Theater in Lake Worth, Florida, which commissioned it (with grants from the MacArthur Foundation among others). Three superb singers -- baritone James Maddalena, tenor William Hite (who revealed an elegant falsetto), and mezzo-soprano Janice Felty -- sang all the roles (and non-roles) superbly. Mary Forcade was the no-nonsense narrator, who delivered the Gilgamesh lines with the right sadness. Dennis Miller designed an eerie electronic ambiance, and the classy on-stage trio of the Core Ensemble -- pianist Hugh Hinton, cellist Andrew Mark, and percussionist Michael Parola -- played Brody's score with zeal. Wellesley artist Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz, who designed the memorable sets for Peter Sellars's productions of Handel's Orlando and Julius Caesar, invented a colorful and witty maze of platforms, ladders, and slides that filled but didn't crowd the small stage, and a breathtaking scrim with writhing branches. Director Nicholas Deutsch kept the action fluid.

The three parts use for texts are a Japanese kyogen comedy, The Crab (about a self-important high priest and his porter who are put in their place by a giant crab), translated with bits of current American slang by Carolyn Morley; a Pindaric ode about the myth of Apollo's rape of Cyrene, translated with lofty rhetoric and mixed metaphors by Carol Dougherty; and a powerful section of David Ferry's stunning translation of the Gilgamesh epic (all the translators are affiliated with Wellesley). Each plot brings a human being into contact and conflict with the nonhuman, the spirit world, or nature. So the work is a series of quasi-allegories of "colonization" of the rain forest, environmental destruction -- or something.

Despite some beautiful writing for both voice and instruments, the work as a whole feels disconnected, stilted, and inert -- and takes itself way too seriously. The comedy in The Crab ought to be vulgar, raucous, and silly; instead it emerges as self-conscious and apologetic. There's not a trace of humor -- or humanity -- anywhere else. I found the lyrical Cyrene section impossible to follow, though it's retold twice (in oratorio and dance) and has Brody's most attractive music. The Gilgamesh is melodrama (vocalise, instrumentals, and dance with spoken text), which means that at least the words comes through. But the music adds little, and the choreography is an active detriment, a turgid mixture of ballet and midcentury Modern with a touch of breakdancing (the program notes describe Florida choreographer Demetrius Klein as being "in the enviable position at the edge of post-modern dance"). About as avant-garde as it gets is the appealing image of Scott Putman (Chiron in Cyrene) suspended in a harness and swinging from an arched slide. Klein (who gives himself the most revealing costume) and Putman were joined here by dancers of widely varying sizes, shapes, and abilities from the Boston Conservatory Dance Theatre.

Despite the range of instrumental color, Brody's music falls into a certain monotony. His palette is narrow and repetitive. There are no surprises. And even at their prettiest, the vocal lines seem shapeless because melody has been limited to recitative. But the larger failure is in a genre -- Art as Self-Righteous Moral Message -- that looks and sounds like real art except that life itself never intrudes, as it does -- as it must -- with such force in Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, and Gilgamesh. In the 90 minutes it takes to sit through Earth Studies you could read Gilgamesh. In one you feel shaken, enthralled, horrified; in the other bored and dutiful. Guess which.