Yesterday was the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birthday, and a capacity audience turned out to celebrate the event at a concert presented by the Mozart Society of California featuring pianist Steven Lubin in a recital at All Saints Church in Carmel. Not surprisingly, the program featured a healthy portion of solo piano works by Mozart — the Sonata in A Minor, K.310, Sonata in D Major, K. 576, and the lovely variations on “Ah! Vous dirais-je Maman†(better known to us as “Twinkle, twinkle, little starâ€). To round out the program, Lubin also performed for us one of the greatest works by Chopin, the Sonata No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 58.
Lubin demonstrated during the evening’s concert that he is fine pianist and equal to any task pianistically. That is to say that his technique is on a high artistic level and there is obviously nothing that he can’t play. His approach to the keyboard works of Mozart, however, raised some disturbing questions.
The great pianists at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth performed relatively few of the Mozart’s keyboard sonatas and sets of variations. Rachmaninoff, Moisewitsch, Lhevinne, Rosenthal, Busoni, and others of this stature, found little that was attractive in these works and rarely programmed them. The first complete recording of Mozart’s keyboard works was by Walter Gieseking in the late 1940s. Gieseking was so poorly informed about Mozart’s keyboard style that he proudly stated in an interview that he sparingly used the damper pedal when playing Mozart since he had observed that early pianos owned by Mozart on display in a museum in Salzburg had no pedals at all. Actually, if Gieseking, a very tall man, had merely bent over and looked under the keyboard, he would have observed knee-operated pedal levers that were refined and very efficient. Gieseking’s lightly delicate and misinformed approach to Mozart playing (often referred to as the “Dresden Doll†style) influenced for a time a significant number of pianists and students. However, research into the performance practice of the early classic period during the second half of the twentieth century soon proved how misinformed this approach was. Thus, today we enjoy the benefit of more sophisticated artists like Perahia, Uchida, Peres and others who are playing Mozart with a full-bodied and richly stylistic approach full of elegance and refinement that has won many new friends for the solo and concerto repertoire of Mozart.
The essential elements of fine Mozart keyboard playing as revealed in letters from Mozart to his father are clarity, refinement, elegance and grace. Mozart ridiculed pianists who played his works as rapidly and loudly as possible, glossing over the delicious twists and turns of melodic passages and surprising harmonic progressions.
Unfortunately, Lubin tended to do precisely this, and accordingly the music suffered. His level of dynamics was consistently so loud that it not only obscured important musical detail but also produced some very ugly sounds. There were, however, some lovely moments in the slow movements of K.310 and K.576 that showed just how elegant a pianist Lubin can be when he wishes.
The Chopin Sonata that ended the program was possibly more suited to Lubin’s temperament and displayed on this occasion a “bull in the China shop†approach that threw caution to the winds and raced through the faster movements with a recklessness that was at turns exciting and disturbing. Not always under control, this performance could have benefited from some of the “clarity, refinement, elegance and grace†associated with fine Mozart playing.
Lubin played one encore, one of Mendelssohn’s “Songs without Words†in A Major, known as “The Hunting Song.†This was a lovely and exciting performance, so much so that I will be taking out the score tomorrow and restudying this piece. What greater compliment can you give an artist?
The Mozart Society of California treated members of the audience to a lovely champagne and chocolate reception.
