SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Chopin:   Murray Perahia, piano, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 16.10.2007 (BJ)

To judge from the response of a large audience, standing and cheering vociferously at various points in the evening, Murray Perahia is a favorite of the Seattle public. He has long been a favorite with me too. Now 60–and an honorary KBE of the British realm, no less–Perahia was a teenager when Peter Serkin introduced him to me as we were leaving Marlboro to drive back to New York, back in the mid-1960s, telling me he was a pianist to look out for. For some years after that, I watched with delight as the young man indeed developed into one of the great musicians of his time. Among many notable achievements, his recordings of the Mozart piano concertos still stand among the finest accounts of those challenging works ever put on disc.

But those recordings were made a long time ago, and the equally impressive live performances especially of Mozart and Schubert I heard from him also took place years and even decades back. In recent years, quite apart from some health problems that have interrupted his career, I began to note a disturbing change in the way he made music. Always a deep pianist, he seemed to have conceived a desire to be a Big Pianist, which is not merely not the same thing, but can actually be damaging to depth of musical insight.

It gives me no pleasure to detach myself from the enthusiasm of the audience around me, but I found further evidence of the trend in Perahia’s performances on this occasion. He has lately been playing a good deal of Bach, and the Fourth Partita, in D major, which opened the program, was given with a fair degree of stylistic appropriateness and an apt dynamic range. The rapid passages, on the other hand, emerged generally smudged, with the principal note in each group stressed to the detriment of the subsidiary ones. Both here and in Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Sonata, Opus 28 in D major, there was too much swelling and fading in the dynamics, and in the Beethoven particularly this inflated the music beyond its innate modesty of scale and undermined its charm.

Some of the evening’s best playing came after intermission, in the quieter sections of Brahms’s Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118, and of the Chopin group (two Études and the Third Ballade) that concluded the official program. And yet here too I felt a dismaying tendency toward excessively broad (and loud) effects–a general sort of romanticizing-up of both composers’ expression–as well as more of the cavalier articulation that bedeviled all of the program’s faster music.

Comparisons, I know, can be a distasteful game to play, but sometimes a critic needs to draw his readers’ attention to performers with whom they may be unacquainted, and whose work casts a different light on the musician under review. If you have heard Sergey Schepkin play the Bach partitas, you must surely have relished his performances’ clarity and elegance, and the magical way he makes the lines in the counterpoint propel each other athletically forward. And among many wonderful performances I have heard, live or on record, of Schubert’s Impromptu in E-flat major, Op. 90 No. 2, which was the first of Perahia’s two encores, one that stands out particularly in memory is the one recorded on the IMP Classics label back in 1990 by the Australian-born pianist Geoffrey Saba, with its sheer creative impulsiveness of rhythm in the central episode (or quasi-trio), and with a poise and lucidity in the figurations of the main section that Perahia came nowhere achieving on this disappointing evening. (If you want to hear how these two relatively little-known pianists play the music in question, you can find Schepkin’s recordings available through the Ongaku web site, www.ongaku-records.com, and Saba’s on his own site (www.geoffreysaba.com.)

There are still moments when Perahia’s stature peeps out again from behind the facade of excessive rhetoric that now disfigures his work. If he would only go back to first principles–to what made him so great to begin with–no one could be more delighted than I should be to greet the resurgence of a rare and treasurable talent.

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