Music Review | Peter Serkin: Bird Song, Modernism And Brahms Take Flight

The pianist Peter Serkin does not like being described as a champion of contemporary music. As he has said, his excitement for new music is a natural extension of his excitement for all music. He enjoys presenting programs that intriguingly juxtapose the old and the new, as his recital on Saturday night at the 92nd Street Y excitingly demonstrated.

Peter Serkin performing at the 92nd Street Y on Saturday.

He began with a Renaissance vocal motet by Josquin, “Ave Christe,” reset for piano in 1988 by the composer Charles Wuorinen. This austerely beautiful piece is thick with slow-moving contrapuntal lines. Yet every detail came through in Mr. Serkin’s calmly assured performance. At times Josquin’s wide-spaced harmonies seemed like premonitions of mystical passages from the late Beethoven piano sonatas.

Mr. Serkin’s performance had the effect of inviting the audience into a contemplative state, a mood sustained throughout the next work, Messiaen’s “Petites Esquisses d’Oiseaux,” though the music could not have been more different. Messiaen’s lifelong fascination with bird song is captured in this 15-minute suite from 1985, a fantastical portrait of a robin, blackbird, song thrush and skylark. The exuberant and rippling music is full of literal transcriptions of skittish bird calls, punctuated by outbursts of keyboard-spanning arpeggios and pungent chords that sound like depictions of flocks of birds taking frenzied flight.

After this Mr. Serkin took the audience back into a pensive state with Brahms’s Theme and Variations in D minor, his transcription of the slow movement from his early Sextet for Strings in B flat. In its contrapuntal severity the music looked back to Bach, but in its wayward harmonies it hinted at the path-breaking Brahms to come in later years.

Somehow these pieces set the ideal mood for the premiere of Mr. Wuorinen’s Scherzo for Piano, a 92nd Street Y commission. After the intensity of the Josquin and Brahms the audience needed to let loose, and Mr. Serkin’s exhilarating performance of this dazzling, 10-minute tour de force gave listeners the chance to do so. Mr. Wuorinen is a formidably complex composer. But like many of his scores, this one crackles with viscerally exciting activity.

After the stern opening, when a six-note motive is bluntly stated, the piece becomes a frenetic, perpetual-motion fantasy. Yet, amid the spiraling flights and blasts of jerky chords, a halting thematic line threads through the textures. Mr. Serkin played the piece with uncanny clarity and wondrous colorings. When the composer took the stage for a bow, he was greeted more by whoops than bravos, which seemed right.

After intermission Mr. Serkin gave an unusually thoughtful account of Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel in B flat, a virtuosic work often milked for showiness. He emphasized the contrasts in the variations, as Brahms turns Handel’s fussily ornamented Baroque tune into a Gypsy dance, a rigorous canon, a siciliano and whatnot. During the ethereal variation in G minor Mr. Serkin played as if channeling the music from another realm. Yet the propulsive variations were jolted with steely fortissimo chords. The fugue built inexorably to a cascade of octaves and chords in its triumphant final moments.

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?