Hans Boepple surprised us in his annual faculty recital last night at Santa Clara University. What we have come to expect from him are solid and masterful performances of the great masterpieces of the standard piano repertoire. Well, last night he came out with guns blazing and delivered a knockout performance of the Barber Piano Sonata, one of the most important piano sonatas written in the 20th century, and not a piece that we would expect to appeal to his more conservative tastes. Of course there is the possibility we may have misjudged him and are merely seeing another aspect of his artistry. What next ─ Karl-Heinz Stockhausen or the Boulez sonatas?
In any event, Boepple delivered the goods and managed to hold the audience in the palm of his hand through 30 minutes of expressive and highly intense playing that brought the audience to its feet in a storm of bravos at its conclusion. We don’t hear this sonata anywhere often enough, and in retrospect, after hearing it in performance, we tend to remember mostly the great fugue that comprises its final movement. However, in this performance Boepple made a powerful impression in all four movements. Not only had I forgotten how interesting the second movement, Allegro vivace e leggero, can be in the right hands, but I was unprepared for the lovely effect of the gorgeous slow movement.
Another solid and effective performance on this program was the Klavierstücke, Op. 119 of Brahms. In the opening Intermezzo in B minor, we heard beautifully controlled cantabile, elegant shaping of phrases and a hushed drawn out pianissimo ending that had me holding my breath, not wanting it to be over. Especially lovely was its D major section that achieved a surprising poignancy. Boepple found new beauties and meanings in the following two intermezzi and concluded the set with a large-scaled performance of the Rhapsody in E-flat Major that was rich in detail and eminently satisfying.
I have to confess that although I carry a lot of opus numbers in my memory, I never been very good at remembering the “D†numbering system that has replaced the out-of –sequence opus numbers of the Schubert sonatas. Therefore as Mr. Boepple sat down to play the second work on the program, Schubert’s Sonata in A Minor, D.537, I was expecting to hear the “other†Sonata in A Minor, and it was quite a shock to my expectations ─ rather like being on a cruise ship expecting to disembark on Fiji and finding yourself at Staten Island instead. Subsequently, our tour guide, Mr. Boepple, gave us a solid and expressive performance that almost managed to make me to like this sonata as much as the one I was expecting (I still like Fiji better).
The opening work on the evening’s program, Bach’s Concerto in the Italian Style, turned out to be something of a disappointment, and part of the problem was the superb acoustics in SCU’s Recital Hall. The first time I heard a performance in this hall, I noticed that although fifty feet away from the stage, it sounded as though I was on stage two feet away from the piano. Rarely do we ever such encounter such fine acoustics. However, this means that it is very easy to overplay a work in this venue, and this is what happened on this occasion. The Italian Concerto, unlike the Schubert Sonata, the Brahms Klavierstücke or the Barber Sonata, needs a certain transparency so that its articulated passages can be focused and clear to an audience, and in this performance, because so many passages were a bit too loud they tended to lose their focus.
Mr. Boepple received so many bouquets of flowers from his adoring fans at the end of the recital, that he had some difficulty carrying them offstage. He rewarded the faithful with one encore, “June, Barcarolle†from Tchaikovsky’s “The Seasons.†This was a magnificent performance that was played with a lovely tenderness and a variety of tonal colors that would be the envy of any pianist in the world.
