Sean Chen, pianist
"About Dance" Makes a Pleasant Surprise: Sean Chen, piano
By Gary Lemco
SUBSTITUTING for a suddenly indisposed Vadym Kholodenko, rising keyboard star SEAN CHEN made a stellar impression on his delighted audience at the Steinway Society the Bay Area recital, Saturday, September 14 at the Visual & Performing Arts Center, De Anza College in Cupertino. Sean Chen had won Third Prize at the Fourteenth Van Cliburn Competition, thus becoming the first American to have reached the finals since 1997. Under the rubric “About Dance,” Chen devoted this evening to the music of Bach, Scriabin, and Ravel, followed by an assortment of encores, two of which celebrated Chopin in Chen’s unique manner.
Chen began the extended concert with Bach’s familiar 1723 French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816, whose “amiable character” Chen commended in his spoken preview. The dance elements remain decidedly Italianate despite the “French” appellation, and Chen imbued the seven-movement suite with a gracious, lilting manner. Clean articulation, the long line, and a breathed, liquid sense of phrase marked the Bach – and indeed all of the evening’s offerings – which Chen kept intimate in dynamics and resonant power, a decided salon effect. Chen constantly added ornaments and turns ad libitum, which increased the inner tension and illuminated the improvisatory character of his efforts. The Courante, an old country dance marked by jumping motions, enjoyed a light, forward propulsion. The originally Mexican Sarabande achieved a rapt concentration, often reminiscent of the suspended ethos Glenn Gould could evoke in these measures. The charming Gavotte, with its two upbeats, assumed a staid gait we might have attributed to Lully. The Loure, the old term for the bagpipe, once more conveyed poised intimacy, only to yield to the irrepressible Gigue, lithe, elastic, and rife with Chen’s added grace notes.
“The dance” does not necessarily invoke the name of Alexander Scriabin as a prime exponent of happy spirits, his sensibility rather involved in rapture, demonism, and eroticism. Scriabin’s pretty Valse in A-flat Major, Op. 38 began the set. Impulsive, ethereal, and nodding to Liszt in its askew eroticism, the piece displayed a distinct charm as Chen unfolded it. Having remarked on Scriabin’s professed synesthesia, Chen proceeded to make sound colors. Chen proffered the 1903 Fourth Sonata in F-sharp Major, Op. 30 directly before the Fifth Sonata, Op. 53. These “middle period” Scriabin works reveals his innately iconoclastic temperament, especially in the Fourth’s poetic counterpart, in which a superman pursues a distant, guiding star. Rife with markings of “volando,” Scriabin wants his persona – usually realized as an interval of a rising fourth - to achieve the kind of flight we have Wagner’s in Tannhauser , whose hero must escape earthly, sensual bonds. In two movements, the second of which Chen characterized as “Russia’s first jazz piece,” the music did manage a spectacular effect, basically a single, climactic trajectory.
The Fifth Sonata of Scriabin, Op. 53 follows the Liszt example of a cosmos compressed into an evolving, single entity. Even more so, the Liszt Dante Sonata provides a justification for the use of the tritone as a unifying device, despite its diabolus in music stigma. Taking its cue from the Symphony No. 4 “The Poem of Ecstasy,” the Sonata ‘speaks’ to the idea that, to the “timid embryos of life, I offer you Audacity!” Convulsive and obsessive at once, the piece brought out the bravura and demonic talents of our young Mr. Chen, who found this music entirely suited to his passionate taste. When we consider how awe-struck tonight’s audience became by the performance, it’s sobering to recall that when Rachmaninoff first heard it, he lamented, “I felt I had been beaten with sticks.”
The music of Maurice Ravel comprised the remainder of the recital, so we knew that La Valse would prove inevitable. The set of seven Valses nobles et sentimentales opened the Ravel group. Though in homage to Schubert, the pieces remain French in spirit and dry humor. If one occasionally sounded like Faure, others had a hint of Chabrier. Then Chen surprised with a pastiche of Ravel of his own concoction: Prelude (1914), Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn, and Menuet antique. The first was to have provided a test-piece in sight reading at a contemporary competition, and Chen made a case for its brief loveliness. The Haydn was composed by Ravel for the Haydn centenary , and it adds a touch of the French boulevard to the Austrian master. There is another irony in trying to spell out Haydn’s name in musical anagrams, and Chen presented a sense of Ravel’s dry wit. The Menuet antique (1895) concluded the “nostalgic” triptych, insofar as Ravel preserves, rather than explodes, the modes of classicism he echoes in gentle parody.
La Valse, however, proved Chen’s tour de force, with his having added any number of Lisztian embellishments to his performance, since he had been overwhelmed as a youth by the orchestral treatment. Deeply resonant bass tones, extra tremolos, wild glissandos, monster cascades of arpeggios – the full “kitchen sink” of bravura techniques – defined this extravaganza. “It’s not the accuracy but the effect that counts,” explained Chen. When the landslide ended, Ravel’s having demolished he dance floor of ghostly admirers of Johann Strauss, the San Jose audience had claimed Chen as one of their own, no longer mourning the absent Kholodenko. Two of the three encores – the last unnamed for its fourteen bars of music – nodded to Chopin: the first, a night-club improvisation on Chopin riffs, and the second a “straight” performance f the Impromptu No. 1, Op. 29.
The young Mr. Chen (he’s 24) has it all: power, nuance, character, poetry. He was off to Washington, D.C. to make records for the Steinway Society label. I’d say San Jose has already reserved future copies of anything he inscribes. ♫
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Dr. Gary R. Lemco regularly contributes to
Classical Music Guide. He lives in California.