Seen and Heard International Recital Review
György Ligeti: The
Complete Piano Etudes: Christopher Taylor, Piano, Miller Theatre, Columbia University, New
York City, 29.10.2005 (BH)
Book 3 (1995- )
Book 2 (1988-94)
Book 1 (1985)
“I’m surprised he
didn’t bust a vein,” said a friend at intermission, after Christopher
Taylor had just demolished No. 14, Coloana
infinità, the gasp-inducing finale of the second book of piano etudes by György Ligeti. But this towering cycle has more than its share
of moments courting vascular stress, and to hear all eighteen etudes in one sitting is to find oneself in the
presence of one of the world’s great bodies of literature for
the instrument. Although
individually, many of these have found their way into encore
status, the group as a whole is a veritable Everest, requiring
superhuman technique and stamina. Fortunately there are a few pianists around
with the grappling hooks, ropes, pitons, down sleeping bag,
tent and freeze-dried rations to do the job, and Mr. Taylor
can now be considered an esteemed member of a cozy club of which
Pierre Laurent-Aimard is the unofficial
president.
The additional challenge of these masterpieces is
how to locate their peculiar expressivity, sometimes elusive
in the midst of almost hilariously daunting challenges.
This is music for machines, not for human beings, or
so it might seem watching a pianist dive into their relentless
runs, obsessive trills, and sprawling tributaries of notes.
One of the distinctions of Mr. Taylor’s dazzling achievement
is the amount of color, delicacy and emotion that he managed
to wrest from music that some might find soulless.
Melding virtuosity with profundity, he found soul to
spare.
Taylor began with the four newest
that make Book III, followed by the eight in Book
II, and then after the interval raced through the six from
the diabolical Book I. Etude No. 15, White on White, whose title
comes from the focus on the white keyboard notes, begins as
simply as a nursery rhyme, but soon begins displaying the fiendish
thrills of its cousins. Written
three years later, A bout de souffle
(Out of breath) is light and almost of a different world
entirely, with the left hand following the right just an eighth-note
apart, in a canon that Mr. Taylor accurately describes as “bewildering.”
The set ends with Canon (2001) in which the hands
are now a quarter-note apart, racing with frighteningly relentless
speed. In between is
Pour Irina (1997), pieced together
with fragments of minor scales.
If the four from Book III seem more like each
other than like those of their predecessors, it is probably
because I’m a trifle dazed after my first encounter with this
group. (It’s two days
later, and I’m still reeling.)
In any case, it is not misleading to mention Ligeti and
Conlon Nancarrow in the same breath,
since both inhabit the territory where human ability is pushed
to its extreme.
The eight that form Book
II begin with the Indonesian-spiced Galam
borong, followed by Fém
(Hungarian for “metal”), the aural equivalent of watching a
blacksmith’s hammer striking an anvil, leaving showers of sparks
falling to the floor, or in this case sweat, from this particular
blacksmith’s stunning technique.
During the dizzy cascades of Vertige,
which true to its title is devised from vertiginous groups of
notes creating a flood of almost unbearable tension, some of
the fun comes from watching the performer and waiting to see
if he simply “makes it.” Der Zauberlehrling
(The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) casts its spell through the
obsessive repetition of a single note for a few seconds of each
phrase, before veering off into other magical explorations.
En suspens evokes Scriabin
more than any of the set with delicate chord progressions, unusual
in that many of these etudes are not about “chords” as such,
and Entrelacs has a shimmer
that Debussy might have admired.
And then we arrive at L’escalier du diable
(The Devil’s Staircase and surely not coincidentally,
Etude No. 13), with its torrent of chromatic scales, capped
by satanic church bells.
After intermission, the tireless
Mr. Taylor plunged into Désorde,
one long mad prestissimo
dispatched as if without a breath, followed by the languid
Cordes à vide, a comparatively gentle study
in fifths. The energy
returns in Touches bloquées
(Blocked keys) with one of Ligeti’s signature effects: one hand silently depresses a
group of notes, while the other hand plays over them, or perhaps
more accurately, through them, so that some notes of
a passage just drop out, creating an odd stuttering rhythm,
in this case sounding very much like jazz.
After a scant break, Fanfares rockets the listener
off into space in a relentless rush of upward motion, before
Arc-en-ciel offers a bit of
graceful nostalgia and a relatively quiet ending, as it tiptoes
off the far right end of the keyboard.
And finally the extraordinary Automne à Varsovie (Autumn in Warsaw) with its tortured, angst-ridden
flame – perhaps it was the title that made me think of Chopin,
but Ligeti’s intensity takes Chopin and nails him to the wall. As soon as Taylor’s hands left the keyboard,
the audience could hardly hold back its reserves of “bravo,”
as if a dam had burst.
If there are any similarities in the group, it might
be in their obsession with the far extremes of the keyboard;
often an exploration of the lower end will suddenly shift to
a brittle blizzard using four or five notes at the far right.
Several of these shower attention solely on the white
or black keys, or have vastly different demands placed on the
left and right hands. Like Nancarrow, the
rhythmic demands are relentless; in many of these, once the
pianist gets going the result is like some perpetual motion
machine that once started, cannot be stopped or turned off.
It would be easy to dismiss some of them as “robotic,”
but the sheer pleasure they provide is anything but cold and
perfunctory. The audience sat in quiet reverence throughout the evening,
although some astonished exclamations did peep out after Fanfares
and Arc-en-ciel, but with audience enthusiasm bottled up as tightly
as this, one can hardly blame anyone for wanting to congratulate
Mr. Taylor as quickly and effusively as possible.
There are those who discuss
the monuments of piano literature – the sonatas of Beethoven
or Scriabin, or any of Bach’s cycles
– as if nothing will ever come along to equal them. But greatness happens everywhere occasionally,
so odds are good that something great will happen during our
lifetime, and these pieces, hatched in a sixteen-year span during
the 1980s and 1990s, are certain to remain one of the touchstones
of the art of the piano in the twentieth century.
If I had to pick a favorite I have no idea which one
I’d choose. The intrigue
only increases with each hearing. My prediction is that as the years go by, they
will be performed increasingly often, as virtuosic pianists
of every stripe wrestle with Ligeti’s
challenges. And the Herculean Mr. Taylor will be recalled
as one of the first on that frontier.
Bruce
Hodges
