The concert was an enjoyable piece of popularizing of a challenging and difficult composer. In fact, for me, it seemed less about Bartók than about folk music, less about the Takács Quartet than about Muzsikás. The big point was that Bartók's strange harmonies and rhythms were not all that daring given their sources. And then compared with the actual field recordings, so disturbing and tragic in their haunting sound, the performances of the folk music itself, even at their wildest, seemed an act of taming.
Nothing tame about the Schumann recital Russell Sherman played at Emmanuel Church last month. Just three pieces he's played before. But I've never heard a more exciting performance of the C-major Arabesque (Opus 18) — improvisatory, full of eye-opening transitions, as if everything that could happen in the world were happening in this music. In Kreisleriana (Opus 16), we got the contrast — and the relationship — between the grotesque and the dreamy, a dazzling juggling act on the keyboard. And Sherman played the great C-major Fantasie (Opus 17) on the grandest possible scale: impetuous, passionate, expansive, yet deeply contemplative. The middle movement was almost Ivesian in its overlapping layers.
Sherman was greeted with ecstatic cheers. He said the only encores he felt would be right were pieces he couldn't play, so young Chinese pianist Xinan Yu, from Beijing, played a brilliant Schumann Toccata, and the even younger virtuoso George Li played the breathtaking "Aufschwung," the second of the Opus 12 Fantasiestücke. Both wonderful, neither one as wild or as daring as what the master did.
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