Peter Serkin at Perelman

An antidote to keyboard showboats

ROBERT ZALLER

A Peter Serkin recital is not your usual outing: a dab of Mozart, a touch of Chopin, a bit of Beethoven. Serkin, a tall man with a scholarly mien and an ascetic presence, is a thoughtful programmer who wants to show stylistic and temporal affinities in the works he performs, eclectic as the choice may seem. His December 12 appearance in the Perelman Theater was a case in point. The program ranged from the 16th to the present century. The composers represented hailed from three continents. The work of a 19-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach followed that of a 97-year-old Elliott Carter.

All of that occupied the first half of the program. The second was devoted solely to Beethoven’s Op. 106, the Hammerklavier Sonata. This work does not invite comparison; it beggars it. It is one of the summits of the piano literature, indeed of all music. It took Liszt to show that it could be performed at all, 50 years after its composition. It is still not to be approached without trepidation today, even by the most formidable technique. Yet, like a jewel unexpectedly set off by lesser stones, it reflected back on the works preceding it, as they reflected on it.

Much of this effect came from the programming itself, of course, but also from Serkin’s dry and austere style, which harks back to the generation of Maurizio Pollini and others who disavowed the Romantic style that persisted well into the 20th Century, including that of Rudolf Serkin, whose underlying discipline can nonetheless be seen in his son’s playing.

A taste of Joyce and Proust

All of this is not only to acknowledge the pedagogy in Serkin fils, but a certain sameness as well. The Ave Christe that began the program, and which may or may not have been composed by Josquin Des Prez (in a redaction by Charles Wuorinen), contained a touch of Bach, as the two short pieces by Toru Takemitsu did of Debussy. Elliott Carter’s Intermittences (2005), with its sharp attacks and sudden withdrawals, breathed a cold, clear air whose ultimate provenance seemed Bachian too, although refracted, as the fistic chords of the Hammerklavier showed, through late Beethoven.

There was literary byplay in all this as well, as one of the Takemitsu pieces referenced Finnegan’s Wake and the Carter piece Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past, the two signature meditations of modern literature on temporality and mortality. The Bach Capriccio on the Departure of the Beloved Brother that closed the first half of the program might be read as a similar allusion to anxious leave-taking— and, indeed, though its five descriptive movements allude to the bustle and adventure as well as the hazards of a journey, Serkin played it as an elegy.

Passages that failed to bloom

And the Hammerklavier? Yes, it can be played as a kind of uber-Bach, especially with the triple-voiced fugue that dominates its massive finale. But there are achingly lyrical passages in the introductory Allegro that simply did not bloom under Serkin’s fingers, and a fantasy that escaped him in the brief Scherzo. The great Adagio seemed as though it might present similar difficulties, but Serkin worked himself into it as he went, and produced an ultimately convincing account.

This is no small feat. The Hammerklavier Adagio is the self-communing of a towering intellect that takes itself for its object, rather as Hegel might have supposed his Reason to do, given melancholy access to its own riches. It is music that reaches toward the ineffable, and the bridge passages that lead toward the eruption of trills heralding the finale are one of the great challenges of music. That met, one is hurled into the fury of the fugue. Bach’s Inventions, and his own use of the fugue, are suddenly illuminated, even as they are being wrenched, almost demonically, into new and unprecedented forms: the very image of tradition transformed in the fire of a new and master creation.

Serkin brought us round full circle with this moment, and his playing, a little doubtful in the earlier movements, rose to the self-posited challenge. He is not, perhaps, a pianist for all seasons, or all tastes. At its best, however, his recital was a master class at the highest level. The showboating pianism of our moment would do well to attend.



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