Pavel Narsessian, Pianist - Summit Music Festival

[Donald Isler]

Pavel Narsessian, Pianist
Summit Music Festival at Manhattanville College
Purchase, New York
July 27th, 2014

Prokofiev: Four Piano Pieces, Op. 32
Tchaikovsky: Children’s Album
Liszt: Sonata in B Minor

The riches of quality summertime concerts in the New York City area are many. There is the just concluded International Keyboard Institute and Festival, and soon there will be the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. There is also the wonderful Summit Music Festival in Westchester County, which has been going on for 24 years, and offers impressive solo and chamber music concerts, plus lectures and master classes.

As the program stated that the first half of Pavel Narsessian’s program would consist of the Tchaikovsky Children’s Album, followed by the Prokofiev Pieces, the pianist explained that the printed order of the Tchaikovsky Pieces was the published order, but that he, like many other pianists would play them in a different order. He then read through the order he had planned, adding “But I’m going to play the Prokofiev first anyway!”

It can be fascinating to listen to the programming choices of a fine Russian musician, because, though a great deal of music by the great Russian composers is well-known to audiences here, they sometimes select music one hasn’t heard before. These Prokofiev Pieces were new to me, and I enjoyed them very much. There was the droll and witty Dance, the Minuet, with charm and humor, the Gavotte, with lovely, subtle shadings, and more substance than one would expect in a small-scale piece, and the moonlit, sensuous Waltz.

The Tchaikovsky Children’s Album consists of 24 Pieces, most of them quite easy to play, from a purely technical standpoint. I knew about half of them, and have taught several of them. But to hear them played by an artist put them on a totally different level of expressivity and depth. In addition to the “saga“ of the doll (the New Doll, the Sick Doll and the Doll’s Funeral), with music fitting the moods one would imagine from those titles, there was the hushed reverence of Morning Prayer, the rather cute March of the Wooden Soldiers, the swagger of the Mazurka, the German Song, with bells and yodeling, the Old French Song, the melody of which is strikingly similar to the Israel national anthem, and the gorgeous Sweet Dreams, which seems to me a distillation of the essence of Tchaikovsky’s romanticism in a work that can be grasped, and performed, by a child. All wonderfully played with great beauty of tone and thought by Mr. Narsessian.

By (great) contrast, the second half of the program consisted of one of the great warhorses of the repertoire, the Liszt B Minor Sonata. It showed Mr. Narsessian in clear command of the virtuosic and rhetorical demands of the work. Mr. Narsessian had a huge dynamic range, from a glorious, huge welter of sound, to heavenly, quiet moments. Terrific fingerwork one takes for granted from anyone who attempts to perform this Sonata (such as in the ambitiously fast, and mischievous fugato), but there were also some original touches. For instance, rather than play the opening motive cleanly he played it (except for the lowest note, before the scale reaches the lower octave) with lots of pedal, creating a threatening, unsettled mood. And, like the great Liszt player, Minoru Nojima, he didn’t linger on the last note, at the end, but played it staccato, releasing us from the drama we had just experienced.

Mr. Narsessian offered his enthusiastic audience two encores, the charming Musical Snuff Box of Liadov, and April, from the Seasons, by Tchaikovsky, which he played with great tenderness.


Donald Isler