Mitsuko Uchida at the Perelman

Mitsuko Uchida's April 27 piano recital had been sold out for months in advance, and the date, spelled out in pulsating marquee lights in my imagination, had been marked on my calendar since last September.

Uchida's program promised an evening in paradise: Mozart's A minor Rondo, K. 511 and Beethoven's A major Piano Sonata, Op. 101 sandwiching the Alban Berg Piano Sonata before the intermission; and the entire second half devoted to Robert Schumann's Fantasie in C major, Op. 17.

I know few pieces as intimately as the Mozart A minor Rondo. For a pianist like me— an amateur whose modest technical skills fail to match my musical aspirations— K. 511 is tantalizing: It sounds relatively easy, and indeed none of it is so brilliant as to be simply unplayable; but it demands such calm finesse over a span of about ten minutes that its essence remains out of reach for all save the same pianists who can play Mozart's most flashy music"“ in short, for all but the Mitsuko Uchidas of this world.

Thinking heretical thoughts

Uchida has recorded K. 511 (and the Berg Sonata), and her performance on this occasion hewed"“ almost eerily so"“ to every interpretive idea from her recording: a slow, sensuous tempo at the beginning; faster tempos in the intermediate sections; a big ritardando before the last return of the melody; an idiosyncratic habit of backing off from the decisive downbeats on crucial phrases. (These examples are taken from Uchida's Steinway Legends album, available on iTunes.)

Or perhaps I should say her intention was to stay true to these ideas, for in point of fact, as I listened to her concert performance, I found myself thinking heretical thoughts: the ornamented lines"“ the very soul of this piece"“ weren't perfectly clean; the tempos tended to get just a little bit out of control. It was a very unsettling experience, one I simply didn't want to acknowledge to myself.

A special affinity for Berg

I also harbor special associations with Berg's Piano Sonata: As a teenager, I listened to my brother (the real musical talent in my family) practice it for weeks and weeks. It's not played very often, and I don't believe I'd ever heard it in concert as an adult. (Oddly enough, it will be played twice at Chamber Music Society concerts next season.)

Uchida, who displays a special affinity for the pre-serial music of Schoenberg and Berg (an affinity that wasn't fully revealed until much later in the evening), gave us a beautiful, clearly organized reading of this lush single-movement sonata-form movement.

Stiff competition

In tackling Beethoven's Op. 101"“ the work that's the gateway to the weird realm of Beethoven's late period"“ Uchida was up against stiff competition. In my mind, the French pianist Helene Grimaud's recording of this sonata is the gold standard; moreover, Simone Dinnerstein set the bar for performances of late Beethoven almost impossibly high last fall with her reading of the last sonata, Op. 111, at the Art Museum.

From unease to genuine distress

By the intermission, the unease I had felt after the Mozart Rondo had become genuine distress. Uchida didn't play Op. 101 all that badly"“ but she didn't play it very convincingly either. By her exalted standards, she made something of a mess of the last movement.

For me and for many others, Uchida is an almost supernatural musical figure, a kind of goddess, and it is not easy to report that on this occasion she did not play like one. As I write this, there is part of me that expects to be struck down at any moment by a bolt from the heavens. But Uchida is, after all, only human, and I take some comfort in learning that when she played the same program in England at the beginning of April, Uchida's rendition of Op. 101 elicited a similar critical response from Rian Evans of Classicalsource.com.

This is all very disturbing. The question is inevitable: Could something be wrong with Uchida, one of the greatest and most beloved musicians of her generation?

On this evening, at least, the story had the happiest of endings.

A critic's confession

A few months ago on this site, my BSR colleague Tom Purdom, apparently without any sense of shame, admitted to not knowing the late Schubert piano sonatas. Man, I thought when I read that, you're not going to catch me making that sort of confession publicly. What would people think if, for example, they found out I had never heard a major work like the Schumann C Major Fantasie? Yes, it's true, somehow I had gotten through life never having heard this staple of the Romantic piano repertory until Uchida played it this week. At my age, it's a rare treat to hear a masterpiece for the first time.

The long meditative slow movement that ends the Fantasie struck me as an homage to Schubert's Ave Maria (although I haven't come across anyone else who's reacted this way). And as Uchida played it, I was reminded of Schumann's famous "heavenly length" characterization of the slow movement of Schubert's Ninth Symphony. The music and her playing were both so simple and beautiful that I actually did conceive the childlike wish that this movement would last forever.

My doubts dispelled

If, after this quarter-hour of musical ecstasy, I felt any lingering discomfort about Uchida's playing, what happened next dispelled it entirely. Let me try to recreate it for you.

The last few moments of the Schumann resonated into silence. (On this excerpt, the pianist is Sviatoslav Richter.) After a decent interval of applause and bows, Uchida sat down at the keyboard, smiled, and held up her fingers in a gesture that said "Just a tiny little piece!"… and played this music.

A few words about Schoenberg

When she was done, she spoke for a few moments in her distinctive Japanese-accented British English. The folks to my immediate left and my wife to my right couldn't hear a word she said, but"“ perhaps because Uchida had just played one of my favorite pieces"“ I understood everything. What she said, more or less, was: "That was a work by Arnold Schoenberg, from his Opus 19 Piano Pieces"“ umm, Number Two, I think. It was a hundred years ago that Schoenberg abandoned tonality in this work— 1909, exactly 100 years! You may not agree"“ but he did it! I didn't play more because I thought you wouldn't like it."

Some laughter ensued, but Uchida raised her right hand over the keyboard, and in the ensuing silence, she sent us off into evening with a romantic"“ one might say Schumannesque— performance of a quiet Domenico Scarlatti sonata: technically perfect, played with the Zen-like calm that has made Mitsuko Uchida such a legend. â—†