By Robert Croan
Chamber Music at Lauderdale-by-the Sea is a valuable but underpublicized series presented by the FilAm Music Foundation, directed by Filipino-American pianist Victor Santiago Asunción, who funds it mostly with his own money but includes among his donors a few prominent performing artists as well as Filipino President Ferdinand “Bong Bong” Marcos Jr. and first lady Lisa Marcos.
On a shoestring budget, Asunción brings first-rate musicians to the town’s Community Church on Bougainvilla Drive.
This season’s final concert, on April 26, was to have featured a Filipino violinist with a small Baroque ensemble, but due to visa issues and funding difficulties, the original performers were unable to come. Rather than canceling, Asunción put together. on three days’ notice, a solo recital of his own: a marathon 90-minute non-stop compendium of what might be called the greatest hits of Frédéric Chopin. It was an extraordinary accomplishment and a musical experience that deserved a much larger audience than the 50-100 fortunate followers who gathered that Saturday evening in the small local church.
Simply stated, Asunción is a world-class pianist, even if his name may not be a household word. He has technique to burn (hardly a noticeable missed note, rare even for the famous and renowned). Not only in his deft finger work but also with a wide and varied coloristic palette, this artist took full advantage of the church’s bright-toned Baldwin grand piano. He could be loud without harshness, then switch to a gossamer pianissimo, or turn a phrase with a plethora of nuance.
Rendering from memory the standard piano repertory pieces he has no doubt been playing all his life, Asunción began with a group of the simpler (only by comparison) waltzes, then traversed a sampling of Chopin’s preludes, etudes, impromptus, nocturnes, a ballade he described as “epic,” and finally, two mighty scherzos and the familiar, overtly virtuosic Heroic Polonaise (in A-flat, Op. 53).
With his brief but cogent comments in between the groups, the evening was also a mini-seminar on this composer’s output. In a few terse sentences, Asunción pointed out, among other facts, that Chopin’s waltzes and polonaises, while based on dance rhythms, are not for dancing; that the scherzos, which in Beethoven had the element of a joke, were here massive and Byronic.
Most significantly, the pianist personalized each piece and made it his own with small ingratiating idiosyncrasies: a rubato here, an unexpected acceleration to compensate; a breath pause that might make a rest as important as the notes before or after; or a quasi-vocal rendition of ornaments that evoked the bel canto singers who inspired Chopin in the first place.
Highly accentuated rhythms dominated the opening set of three waltzes, with exquisite taperings of the sound in the C-sharp minor waltz (Op. 64, No. 2). The Raindrop Prélude (in D-flat, Op. 28, No. 15) brought more colors and rubati, as did the E major Étude (Op. 10, No. 3) that was the basis for the pop song, “No Other Love.” The Fantasy-Impromptu (Op. 66) that inspired another pop song — “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” — was notable for pearly even scale-work and sweet legato in the familiar tune.
There were lovely, even trills in the dreamy C-sharp minor Nocturne (Op. posth.), operatic drama in the G minor Ballade (Op. 23), its middle section akin to a soprano-baritone duet. And there was a seemingly endless store of power in the two Scherzos (in B minor, Op. 20, and in B-flat minor, Op. 31).
Then, perhaps the most recognizable among all Chopin works, the iconic and fiery polonaise that was used in the 1945 biopic, A Song to Remember, and transformed into still another immortal pop song, “Till the End of Time.” A rousing conclusion, but that was not all. Asunción returned to play an encore, Debussy’s wistful Clair de lune, to send us all out gently into that good night.