The Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero has carved out a useful niche for herself as a musician who recalls an earlier tradition of performers who improvised in concert.
Her recital Thursday night during the fifth Festival of the Arts Boca ended with four of her improvisations, but it was the rest of her program that provided the highest interest from a purely musical point of view.
Most of Montero’s recital at the Cultural Arts Center in Mizner Park contained music of Latin America, including a major sonata by Alberto Ginastera. She opened the evening, however, with two of the four Ballades of Frederic Chopin.
In both of the Ballades – No. 1 in G minor (Op. 23) and No. 4 in F minor (Op. 52) – Montero established herself as a pianist of the poetic persuasion. Tempos were loose, melodies were front and center, and she made the most of unexpected moments such as the sudden series of soft C-major chords before the coda in the Fourth Ballade, or the descending octaves in the first agitato section of the First Ballade, which she held on to as long as feasible before cranking up the G minor motor.
She demonstrated also a large and impressive, if not immaculate, technique, but she was able to bring off the showier moments of both pieces in generally admirable fashion. But while her playing of the First Ballade made a strong impact, the climactic A major repeat of the second theme was pounded rather than played with majesty, and the performance as a whole was missing a level of polish and command that would have made the contrasting sections stand out more and the piece overall communicate more effectively.
Montero was better in the Fourth Ballade, where the pages of angry triplets in the last pages were nice and clean, and the opening bars were hushed and almost motionless, for a very pretty effect. Best of all was the short quasi-canon passage before the recap, for which the tempo slowed and each hand played its lines with Bachian purity, creating a moody, ruminative feel that set up the return of the initial music beautifully.
A set of four pieces by the Cuban pianist-composer Ernesto Lecuona came next. Lecuona’s work is greatly admired in some circles, but this is music of scant merit, in which commonplace tunes are presented through a scrim of tattered Liszt. Still, Montero played all four – Malagueña, La Cumparsa, Cordoba, and Gitanerias – with style and panache, and a heightened sense of rhythm and color. The high point came in the second strain of Cordoba, which Montero performed with surpassing delicacy and gentleness.
The program listed the Danzas Criollas of Ginastera next, but Montero skipped it, and my notes indicate she next played Brejeiro, a well-known tango by the Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth. This got a sunny, straightforward reading, and the first half closed with Joropo, by the Venezuelan composer Moisés Moleiro (1904-1979).
Based on a folk dance in which colorful skirts play an important role (as Montero explained in remarks to the half-full house), this is an exciting, well-written piece with a vivid sense of movement and color, and Montero gave it plenty of fire.
The sole programmed work on the second half was the Sonata No. 1 of Ginastera, which Montero called “a titanic work” that’s now getting its due. She played it very well, and with relative restraint considering how often Ginastera’s compositional aesthetic gives performers the green light to play with as much force and volume as possible.
In the finale, for example, the rapidly shifting rhythm was clearly and precisely marked, not hammered, and that helped the clustered chords that appear later in the movement sound logical rather than yet another element of aggressive tone-painting. The first movement, too, had this same quality of tensile clarity, while let the chief falling-scale theme speak with different colors each time it appeared.
The slow third movement expressed desolation, just as Montero promised it would, and her deliberate, quiet reading of this music gave the audience a glimpse into another part of Montero’s art.
Montero takes audience suggestions for themes to improvise upon, and insists that the themes be familiar to all the listeners. The crowd was very enthusiastic, and divided between “Latins and non-Latins,” as Montero said, which at one point led her to veto two tunes suggested by the Latin partisans, including Caballo Viejo, on grounds of general unfamiliarity.
The first theme, suggested by festival founder Charlie Siemon, was Harold Arlen’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow, for which Montero used the first eight bars, and gave it a J.S. Bach-Ferruccio Busoni treatment, its snappy ornamentations augmented by big Romantic octaves in the bass.
Billy Joel’s Piano Man came next, first played like a Chopin waltz, then transformed into the minor for a Lecuona-like habanera. Another habanera, the one by Sebastián Iradier that Georges Bizet appropriated for Carmen, followed, and this also received a Chopinesque setting, with some Liszt added to the mix.
The final theme was Consuelito Velazquez’s 1940s standard Bésame Mucho, and this returned Montero to Bach-Busoni territory, ending in a similar fashion to the Arlen song, with a proud tower of descending motifs built on a triumphant tonic major-key triad at the close.
The musical vocabulary that Montero is able to access at a moment’s notice is impressive, and there’s no gainsaying her overall level of ease and comfort at the keyboard. But it’s worth noting that these improvisations are basically clever evocations of well-known styles in which any tune at all could be dropped and still work.
That’s not to say it’s not entertaining, and it’s a much-needed revival of a 19th-century fashion of concertizing that put a greater premium on audience connection and performer spontaneity. I just wonder what would happen if Montero improvised at a more demanding level: Could she make something as bleak as the third movement of the Ginastera sonata out of Piano Man if she took the notes and let them wander where they will?
Questions of entertainment, of course, are paramount, but I think Montero could do it. The difficulty for her is that what she does now comes so easily to her that she may shrink from stretching herself in the belief that her audience won’t follow her. But we will, and it’d be exciting to hear her try.
The Festival of the Arts Boca continues tonight with a screening of The Wizard of Oz, with live accompaniment from the Boca Raton Symphonia conducted by Constantine Kitsopoulos. The movie begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Count de Hoernle Amphitheater in Mizner Park, Boca Raton. For more information, call 866-571-2787.