It cannot
often happen that the recital given by a student
in pursuit of his master’s degree provokes
a seasoned critic to write a review for international
dissemination. But at Boyer College of Music
in Philadelphia’s Temple University on April
19, I witnessed a performance that demanded
recognition on that level. The graduand was
a young man named Brian Ciach (pronounced,
I’m told, "Sigh-ack"), and I assure
you that it is a name you will be hearing
much of in the not too distant future.
A Philadelphia
resident, Ciach studies piano with Charles
Abramovic in the excellent keyboard department
headed by Harvey Wedeen, and he also studies
composition. Something of his artistic seriousness
was apparent, even before he had played a
note, from the extraordinarily taxing program
he had selected for the occasion: Schoenberg’s
Suite, Op. 25, Bach’s Partita No. 6 in G Major,
and Wernick’s First Piano Sonata. But it was
the standard of the actual playing that at
first surprised and then, with unfailing certainty
of touch and of interpretation, beguiled his
audience. The Schoenberg, to start with, was
made to sound like real music, which is not
always the case when this knotty, sometimes
arid, yet curiously charming creation is realized
in performance. The Bach partita drew a reading
that combined stylistic acumen with beautifully
graded tone-colors and tigerish rhythmic attack.
These
qualities came even more emphatically into
play in the Wernick sonata. Born in Boston
in 1934, Richard Wernick retired a few years
ago from a professorship of composition at
the University of Pennsylvania. He is a much-honored
composer–a Pulitzer Prize-winner, and the
only man to have won the Friedheim Awards
of Washington’s Kennedy Center twice–and his
music amply shows why. His First Piano Sonata,
completed in 1982 and subtitled Reflections
of a Dark Light, is, at something like
40 minutes, his longest work. It is also a
work that offers rich rewards to the listener
in its poetic richness and majestically controlled
formal structure. Laid out at times on four
staves, the music makes formidable demands
on the performer, but these demands are at
least as much in the realm of extremely soft
dynamics and sudden expressive contrast as
in that of mere technical wizardry. The composer,
who was present and who received a warm ovation
at the end of the performance, was astonished
to see Ciach come on stage to play his piece
without any sign of a score in evidence–"Surely
he’s not going to play it from memory!",
he exclaimed. That, however, is exactly what
Ciach did–triumphantly, for though I have
heard the sonata played superbly both by Lambert
Orkis (another Temple faculty member), for
whom it and Wernick’s recent Second Sonata
were written, and by the Australian-born Geoffrey
Douglas Madge, I found Ciach’s realization
fully worthy to stand on equal terms with
those two eminent pianists’ readings.
Brian
Ciach is not a master merely in the sense
of academic certification, but a pianist,
and a musician, you will want to get to know.
Wernick’s sonata, too, should be experienced
by all those interested in contemporary music
that breaks new ground while devoting full
attention to communication, logic, and sheer
beauty. It was especially fascinating to hear
it just six days after the local premiere
of the composer’s Horn Quintet, brilliantly
played under the auspices of the Philadelphia
Chamber Music Society by William Purvis and
the Juilliard String Quartet, who had given
the world premiere in New York a day earlier.
The
difference in character between the frequent
ppp passages in the sonata and the
equally soft dynamics of the quintet’s ravishing
slow movement put me in mind of a distinction
Carlo Maria Giulini described to me in an
interview many years ago: "There are
pianissimos that are real pianissimos,"
he said, "and then there is the kind
of pianissimo that has a fortissimo buried
inside it." Perhaps it is a measure of
Wernick’s maturation–dare I say "mellowing"?–over
the past two decades that he can now write
a sustained pianissimo of the first kind,
in contrast to the explosive undertone often
to be felt beneath even the quietest moments
in the sonata. But do not misunderstand me:
both works are absolutely valid and cogent
expressions of one of today’s most acute and
powerful musical intellects. Given the strange
shortage, moreover, of pieces for horn and
standard string quartet–Mozart’s Horn Quintet
is sui generis, using as it does two
violas rather than two violins–Wernick’s new
piece will surely be of interest to every
horn-player with a claim to solo status.
Bernard Jacobson
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