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Associate professor of piano and chair of the keyboard studies division Jane Solose continued the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance’s Liszt 200 Series, celebrating the composer’s bicentennial with a full program of Liszt piano works. The centerpiece was the composer’s massive Sonata in B minor.

Opening her program with the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13 in A minor, Solose displayed sparkling technique and good energy in the latter half of the rhapsody, the Friska, though the brooding Lassan section which opened the concert felt stiff, lacked forward motion, and rhapsodic freedom.

Mary Jeanne van Appeldorn’s A Liszt Fantasie was the only non-Liszt piece on the program, if one could call a five-minute piece constructed from 14 Liszt fragments and themes non-Lisztian. I quite liked this piece’s tiny snippets of Liszt which were re-contextualized, harmonically as well as atmospherically (through use of the sostenuo pedal). The current, well-constructed piece had nice segues between the Hungarian Rhapsody in E-flat, the Faust Symphony, the Concerto, and the Sonata, just to name a few, while still staying true to the original materials.

The Appeldorn work itself segued unassumingly into the next selection, marking the beginning of a set with hardly a breath in between “Un sospiro” from Trois études de concert, Consolation No. 3 in D-flat major, and the Grande étude de Paganini No. 6 in A minor. The effect was initially jarring between the Appeldorn and “Un sospiro,” but maintained the sleepy mood from “Un sospiro” into the Consolation. Solose particularly excelled at Liszt’s emotive writing; the tone and shading in these two selections was especially well tempered.

Following the intermission Solose reappeared and introduced the Sonata. She alluded to the many programmatic theories surrounding the single-movement, 30-minute, transcendental piece before surmising, “We’ll just let the music itself take us on a journey and speak for itself.”

The opening displayed more clear technique and exuberant energy. The triumphant, reverent arrival in D major in the early “Grandioso” section showcased a lovely rich tone color. Later, the “Quasi Adagio” led to a lovely, wistful, hymn-like passage in the development, again an aspect of Liszt’s work Solose continually excelled at highlighting. There was liveliness throughout, with perhaps the exception of the dry, repeating, bass F-sharp motive near the beginning of the recap. Too starkly executed for my taste, the piece lost some momentum for me here and it took several minutes to regain my attention. The piece finished strongly in a true fortissimo climax which evaporated into a transcendental pianissimo epilogue.

Solose’s opening comment was quite approriate. The Sonata is a massive journey: fervent religiosity here and diabolical sentiment there with sinuous sensuality over there. Solose brought all these across in an impressive interpretation. The whole program saw only a modicum of mistakes, made more impressive by the difficulty and breadth of the material at hand.

Solose bookended her program with an encore of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp minor . It was another impressive display, though I will never be able to detach it from the first “pianist” I saw perform it, a certain cartoon cat named Tom. 

REVIEW
UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance
Liszt 200 Series
Jane Solose, Piano
In Celebration of Liszt’s Bicentenary
Sunday, October 9, 2011
White Recital Hall, James C. Olson Performing Arts Center
UMKC Campus
4949 Cherry St, Kansas City, MO
For more information, visit http://conservatory.umkc.edu

By Topher Levin

Classical Editor and Contributor

Christopher (Topher) Levin is a composer, pianist, music theorist, and music blogger based in Kansas City, MO. His compositions have been performed at music festivals across the US and in Europe. He has spent two summers in Paris, France studying music at the Ecole Normale de Musique through the EAMA program. His trio for clarinet, piano, and percussion is published in the SCI Journal of Scores.

Topher holds degrees from the University of Missouri-Kansas City (M.M.) in music theory and (M.M.) in composition and from James Madison University in Virginia (B.M.) in composition. Primary composition teachers have included John S. Hilliard, Paul Rudy, Zhou Long, James Mobberley, Chen Yi, Claude Baker, Narcis Bonet, Michel Merlet, and João Pedro Oliveira. His piano teachers have included Patricia Brady and Karen Kushner. Topher maintains a piano studio of 22 students.

Having recently completed a Master's thesis on the beautiful complexities of Chinary Ung's trio, Spiral I, Topher turned his writing attention to the more informal blogging medium. He has taken to it quite well, sharing posts on strange and wonderful music and art found across the web with a modest but growing number of blog followers. He looks forward to writing for KCM and sharing with its readers the stories of all the amazing musicians performing in Kansas City.