Pianist Hyojin Ahn.
By Greg Stepanich
Although it was billed as a solo recital, pianist Hyojin Ahn’s concert Wednesday afternoon at the Duncan Theatre’s Stage West also featured a violinist in a major modernist work from the 1920s, and that piece as much as anything else Ahn did helped make this musical event a memorable one.
Ahn, 32, a South Korea-born musician who is a piano fellow at Miami Beach’s New World Symphony, appeared earlier this season in the Stage West series as accompanist to New World alumna Yuki Numata, a Canadian-born violinist. She distinguished herself then as an able, flexible accompanist, and she showed the same kind of range and skill by herself Wednesday.
Ahn opened the recital with Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs, long a milestone of the 20th-century piano repertoire for its difficulty and expressive power. It takes a strong technician to play the five pieces of this suite, and Ahn is certainly that, rattling off the repeated notes in the Alborada del Gracioso with snap and enviable finger-switching accuracy, and demonstrating a formidable left hand in the pitch and roll of Une barque sur l’océan.
She also has a fine grasp of Ravel’s variety of mood as exhibited in this work. The moths of Noctuelles flittered attractively under Ahn’s light, precise approach, and she gave the landscape of Oiseaux tristes a tightly controlled sense of space and desolation by keeping the back-and-forth chord progressions down to a murmur and then marking the bird calls crisply. In the closing La vallée des cloches, too, Ahn worked hard, and successfully, to give the music its sound of distant blurring.
What was missing here, though, was a sense of suavity and a fuller palette of color. Ahn’s ability to play all those notes and rhythms brilliantly was apparent and very impressive, but a piece like the Alborada also needs a sharper feeling of wit and style; that main theme is almost smirky, and it needs to come across that way, not just with clarity. And much of this music can sound quite similar from piece to piece if the all the shades of which the piano is capable are not brought into play, and here the two slower pieces (Oiseaux tristes and La vallée des cloches) could have used more distinction from one another.
I would hazard a guess that Ahn has only recently added Miroirs to her recital programming, and that now that she has mastered the notes, some more interpretive depth will follow as she continues to play it.
The second half of the program opened with the Moritz Moszkowski arrangement of the Liebestod scene from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. This differs from the more frequently encountered Liszt version in that Moszkowski begins 20 bars or so of music from the opera’s prelude, which Ahn said in remarks to the audience that she thought made a good transition to the Liebestod, and indeed it does.
This transcription’s closing pages, while hugely virtuosic, are also less relentlessly bombastic than Liszt’s, which made it easier to hear how surely Wagner’s music builds to its plateau. Here again, Ahn had full command of the technical mastery needed to bring this off (a missed note at the top of one of the run-ups at the end notwithstanding), and her steady progress from the first notes of the Mild une leise to the end had a satisfying narrative strength. But the Prelude section was rather dry, partly a consequence of this music’s need for its orchestral garb, but also for Ahn’s need to figure out a richer way to play it; this, after all, is some of the most influential, important music in the whole Romantic repertoire, and fervid color is part of its DNA.
The concert ended with an appearance by violinist Ko Sugiyama, also a New World player, who joined Ahn for the three-part Mythes (Op. 30), written in 1921 by the great Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. These are extraordinary pieces, and Sugiyama and Ahn gave them a wonderful reading.
Both instruments in this near-decadent late Romantic work have monstrously difficult parts to play, and Sugiyama and Ahn appeared to bring out the best in each other as they made their way through the piece. The piano part is often quite similar to the Ravel in its figurations, though more astringent harmonically, while the violin part is showy and aggressive, with double and triple stop glissandos, long stretches of harmonics, and straining, striving music at the very top of the instrument’s register.
Sugiyama proved to be a marvelous player, completely capable of tackling Szymanowski’s virtuosic layout and the possessor of a highly communicative, intense tone that worked beautifully for the composer’s most ecstatic pages.
All three movements received excellent performances, of which the best perhaps was the second, Narcisse, which is unified by a four-note barcarolle-style motif that appear throughout, and which Ahn and Sugiyama used to build the climactic sections of the movement to powerful examples of musical partnership in the service of exceptionally demonstrative writing.