There are musicians
it is a pleasure to listen to so long as they
are performing music you love. Then there
is the rarer breed of interpreter, the man
or woman who can change your entire opinion
of a previously undervalued composer. I used
to have snobbish prejudices about Chopin and
Rachmaninoff. It took a recital some years
ago by the great Ivan Moravec to cure me of
my Chopin-blindness (or deafness). And more
recently Santiago Rodriguez taught me that,
apart from the passion, brilliance, and color
I had always associated with Rachmaninoff,
his music also possesses a surpassing elegance,
and in the process transferred him to my own
personal pantheon of true masters.
All those qualities
were in evidence in the stunning recital Rodriguez
gave on March 30 as part of the Tuesday Evening
Concert Series in the University of Virginia’s
850-seat Cabell Hall Auditorium in Charlottesville.
The pianist, born in Cuba but resident since
childhood in the United States and a respected
teacher at the University of Maryland, had
put together an ingeniously designed program
that featured several pieces surely unfamiliar
to most of the audience but utterly beguiling
in character. The outer panels exemplified
Rodriguez’s Hispanic heritage, while, before
and after intermission, the Russian music
in which he also excels was represented by
Stravinsky’s solo-piano arrangement of three
movements from his Petrushka and by
a prelude and two étude-tableaux by
Rachmaninoff.
The dazzling execution
of the Petrushka dances already had
the capacity audience on its feet even before
intermission. But no less remarkable was Rodriguez’s
blend of lyricism and technical brilliance
in his treatment of three Falla pieces (including
a wonderfully atmospheric performance of the
Neighbors’ Dance from The Three-Cornered
Hat), Granados’s Valses poeticos,
two pieces by Albéniz, Moszkowski’s
Capriccio espagnole, and two fascinating
dances by the Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona,
whose music is enjoying a well-deserved revival
of interest these days. For encore, Rodriguez
offered two of the three Danzas Argentinas
by Ginastera, one all subtle poetry and grace,
the other a jamboree of dynamic rhythms that
justly brought the house down once again.
Inaugurated in 1948,
and managed with unfailing discernment for
the last 13 years by Karen Pellón,
the series has this season provided the Charlottesville
audience – liberally sprinkled with academics
from the city’s university – with the opportunity
to hear, in its own acoustically and architecturally
excellent hall, nicely varied performers including
Gil Shaham, Colin Carr, the Talich and Emerson
string quartets, the Windscape Wind Quintet,
and up-and-coming pianist Jeremy Denk. Next
season the schedule is no less intriguing,
spanning as it does a range from such period-instrument
groups as the Europa Galante Chamber Orchestra
and the Smithsonian Castle Trio to pianists
Nikolai Demidenko and Piotr Anderszewski,
mezzo-soprano Katarina Karneus, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson
Trio, and the Miami and Vermeer quartets.
Meanwhile, since 1995,
in an endeavor to spread the word about concert
music to a younger generation, an additional
event in the shape of a children’s concert
has been added as a next-morning follow-up
to several of the Tuesday recitals. On this
particular occasion, Rodriguez spent an hour
playing for and talking with a sizeable youthful
audience; he is particularly good at communicating
with listeners of all ages and backgrounds,
and was rewarded with unmistakably warm applause
and some good questions. The only problem,
apparently, is that many of the schools invited
to send their students to these free performances
decide, for whatever reason, not to participate.
They obviously do not realize how much pleasure
and stimulation they are denying the young
people in their charge.
Bernard Jacobson
Return to:
Music on the Web