Old friends get musical facelift

Music Review, By Andrew L. Pincus

Special to The Eagle

 

GREAT BARRINGTON — An interesting musician makes interesting music.

 

Duh? Of course. But pianist Frederic Chiu proved it via an unusual route over the weekend at Simon's Rock College: by playing a program of transcriptions of mostly familiar music and making it sound as fresh as sweet corn straight out of the garden.

 

This wasn't simply a matter of well-known orchestral and vocal works heard in a different dress. The music was filtered through a lively intelligence, one that went for the expressive heartbeat.

 

What could be more familiar than Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? Yet Beethoven in Liszt's transcription via Chiu's artistry was a different experience. Three intelligences combined as one.

 

The program helped to launch a multiyear project that the Chinese-American pianist has christened "The Symphonic Piano." He played Liszt transcriptions of the Beethoven symphony and four Schubert songs, and Busoni transcriptions of three excerpts from Bach. For good measure, there were Chiu's own takes on one of Bach's greatest arias and parts of Prokofiev's "Lieutenant Kije" Suite.

 

Some of the playing was simply spectacular, as it would have to be to meet Liszt's fiendish requirements. As Chiu pointed out in his program notes, for many years Liszt was the only pianist who could credibly play his transcriptions of the nine Beethoven symphonies in public. Purely as a feat of stamina, Chiu's Beethoven performance seemed to go from the mad to the impossible, culminating in a triumphant finale that had him looking and sounding like a man possessed.

 

Some transcriptions — of operatic arias, for example, and Strauss waltzes — exist purely for show; played as encores, they are guaranteed to yank audiences to their feet. But display was not what this program was about, though the audience jumped up as if on cue.

 

Chiu told the audience, which included a fair number of Simon's Rock students, that he hoped the transcriptions would provide a fresh perspective on familiar music. That they certainly did. Not only did you hear inner parts in the Beethoven Fifth that are inevitably obscured when played by 90 or 100 musicians; you also heard the transcriber's elaborations. In the first movement, the da-da-da-dum theme was hammered out again and again in places where Beethoven never put it. Extra rumbles and flourishes added to the boiling energy of the finale.

 

Still and all, the freshest perspective for this listener was to hear the music as it might have sounded in Liszt's legendary hands during the 19th century, when piano transcriptions were often the only way people could hear orchestral music. Liszt didn't have a huge Steinway grand such as Simon's Rock put at Chiu's disposal, but the visceral impact must have been something like this: huge.

 

The program contained only one false note: Liszt's transcription of Schubert's song "In der Ferne" ("Far Away"). The lover's lament, gussied up with racing scales and furious tremolos, raged like a Valkyrie in full cry.

 

Chiu's transcriptions held their own in their exalted company. "Erbarme dich" ("Have mercy"), an aria with violin obbligato from Bach's "St. Matthew Passion," carried the devout hush of the original, with suggestions of the violin part. Satire and an undercurrent of affection marked three excerpts from Prokofiev's score to a film about a nonexistent Russian army officer named Kije. The Bach-Busoni transcriptions, originally for organ, were most notable for the clear textures and calm dignity Chiu brought to the famous chorale "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" ("Awake, a voice calls unto us"). And if Chiu's fingers stumbled at times — most conspicuously during the wedding in his "Kije" scenes — who could blame him? Following in Liszt's footsteps, he was emulating one of the all-time greatest transcribers and piano virtuosos.

 

Who, too, could blame him for refusing an encore in response to the audience's cheers? Whew.