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Last Saturday evening’s Master Pianists Series presentation by The Friends of Chamber Music was originally set to be one of five final appearances by renowned Czech pianist, Ivan Moravec, on his farewell tour. Unfortunately, illness forced Mr. Moravec to cancel his tour several weeks prior to his appearance. The Friends did not disappoint, however, scheduling instead yet another excellent pianist for the date, the young, buzz-worthy pianist Gilles Vonsattel.  

I was looking forward to Mr. Vonsattel’s program of all-French, early twentieth-century repertoire. The program felt like stepping to a Parisian La Belle Époque salon concert, with all the repertoire, save the Poulenc, having been composed in the decade prior to World War One. The evening’s major works, Debussy’s Images and Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, were complimented by attractive selections from Poulenc and Honegger, Les soirées de nazelles and Hommage à Ravel, respectively. Along with the Honegger, Ravel’s lesser-known Sonatine also served as an appetizer for Gaspard.   

Presented as a complete set, it was Debussy’s two books of Images which were the highlight of the evening. From the opening of “Reflets dans l’eau,” Vonsattel’s playing illuminated the underlying structure of large expanses of the music by linking and ordering smaller surface phrases with careful use of dynamics and phrasing. The entire Images set had a forward motion and cohesiveness I cannot easily recall hearing in other interpretations.

Vonsattel fanned out the textures of the Debussy into a lovely array of tone colors, giving each layer of melody and harmony its own nuanced touch. In “Cloches à travers les feuilles” (“bells [heard] through the leaves”) and elsewhere in the Debussy, he evoked a luxuriant palette of colors. The “feuilles” (“leaves”) texture was delicate and diffused, bringing to mind a canopy of paper-thin, translucent leaves. The “cloches” (“bell tones”) were clear, even though faint and distant-sounding. However, in the “Hommage à Rameau,” I wished for more color variation in the mid-treble melodic stretches of the central part of the movement. The richness of the outer sections left the interior of the movement feeling uncharacteristically sparse.

With a relaxed and friendly stage presence, Mr. Vonsattel emcee’d his own recital with oral program notes due to his late booking. The Friends of Chamber Music President Cynthia Siebert had provided a microphone for the purpose onstage, however, the pianist preferred to address the audience without it, explaining he liked to feel free to move around a bit more. It was a pleasure hearing Vonsattel talk about his program in his own words. His remarks were insightful—pointing out Debussy’s subtle allusions to Celtic folk music in “Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fût”—as well as occasionally humorous. The pianist’s anecdote about a concert series mistranslating one of Poulenc’s sectional titles, “L’alert vieillesse,” in its program as “look out for old people” was one of the evening’s biggest laughs.

The pianist’s interpretation of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit was impassioned if a bit idiosyncratic. The first of the set, “Ondine,” kept the thirty-second-note ostinato near the top of the texture, with Ondine’s siren-like melody ever so slightly louder. The lower harmonies were faint and vapor-like, as had been the case in the Sonatine. The crest of the “Ondine” movement was actually the pianist’s first use of a fortissimo volume in the recital, his overall dynamic palette favoring a range of impressively subdued volumes. I appreciated Vonsattel’s wonderfully slow and still interpretation of “Le gibet.” Ravel asks for a stark, unchanging impression of the gallows scene depicted in Aloysius Bertrand’s poem, yet many recordings of the piece shave off one to two minutes of Ravel’s desired duration of seven and a half minutes. I wished “Scarbo” had been played with a wider palette of tone colors like the Debussy or the first two movements of Gaspard. While a dazzling technical display, I found Vonsattel’s interpretation to be like a chiaroscuro painting, creating bright melodic textures while making almost everything else obscured by an incredibly light touch and more pedal than I would have liked. This was certainly part of his interpretation and not lack of technique though, as it would have been markedly easier to play the background louder. The audience enjoyed this impassioned and virtuosic presentation, rewarding the pianist with an enthusiastic ovation. 

For an encore, Vonsattel challenged the audience with Elis: Three Nocturnes for Piano, a modern composition by noted oboist Heinz Holliger. These were lovely brooding miniatures inspired by poetry of Georg Trakl depicting the Swedish legend of Elis Froebom. There were several moments of extended techniques, including string harmonics and Vonsattel’s strumming of the strings, which garnered a bemused reaction from the audience. I thought this quite a savvy programming idea, serving the audience a well-portioned dessert of modern music after an evening of vibrant Impressionism.

REVIEW:
The Friends of Chamber Music's Master Pianists Series
Gilles Vonsattel, Piano
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Folly Theater
300 W 12th St, Kansas City, MO
For more information visit http://www.chambermusic.org/

Top Photo by Jean-Claude Capt

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.