On Friday, Nov. 5, pianist Donald Berman ’84 performed at Crowell Concert Hall as part of the Chopin @ 200 concert series celebrating the Polish composer’s bicentennial. Berman, one of the “chief exponents of new works by living composers and overlooked music by 20th century masters,” according to the event’s program, plays concerts that often feature pieces linking classical and modern repertoires to show the connection between eras often thought to be unrelated. In his concert last week, Berman divided the program into segments of related pieces.
The first of these segments featured four pieces: Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in A, K.208; Gabriel Fauré’s “Barcarolle No. 1 in A minor Op. 26;” Luciano Berio’s “Wasserklavier;” and Chopin’s “Barcarolle Op. 60.” The barcarolle is a piece composed in the style of the folk songs of Venetian gondoliers. This segment of the program traced the origins of Chopin’s barcarolle back to Domenico Scarlatti, an Italian composer who lived in the 18th century. It then showed the influence of Chopin’s barcarolle on Gabriel Fauré, who was born four years before Chopin’s death in 1849, and on Luciano Berio, an Italian composer who lived from 1925 to 2003. With the pieces played in succession with only brief pauses between them, it was easy to hear their similarities.
The first half ended with Chopin’s variations on “Là ci darem la mano” Op. 2, arranged by Wesleyan professor Neely Bruce for string quartet and piano. Berman was accompanied by the West End String Quartet. The strings added another dimension to the music. Berman and the quartet had clearly rehearsed extensively, and they communicated successfully throughout the entire piece.
The second half of the concert began with Robert Schumann’s “Variations on the Name ‘Abegg.’” When composing the piece, Schumann began with the name “Abegg” and used those notes—A, B, E, G, and G—to begin his theme, varying the rhythm and order of the five notes before breaking away from the restrictions entirely to establish the theme that he would vary extensively throughout the piece.
The next three pieces were Charles Ives’s “Emerson Transcription #1,” a piece inspired by the writings of the Transcendentalist essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson; Chopin’s Nocturne in F minor Op. 55; and Ives’s “Waltz Rondo.” While Ives, with his polytonality, polyrhythm, and crunchy chords, seems to be the opposite of Chopin, a composer from the Romantic period who wrote strictly tonal music, Berman drew attention to the similarities between the two. They both felt very attached to the countries they lived in—the United States and France, respectively—and sometimes used patriotic melodies or elements of them in their writing. It was easy to understand such comparison. The Ives pieces selected certainly used some of the compositional ideas that Chopin’s nocturne demonstrated.
The last cluster of pieces featured Ives’s Study No. 6, built off the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee;” a piece by modern composer Eric Moe called “Where Branched Thoughts Murmur in the Wind,” and Ives’s Study No. 23, built off the tune “Hello, My Baby!” It was quite a bit easier to see how these three pieces related, as Eric Moe’s piece used many of the musical concepts that Ives had pioneered.
Berman played Chopin’s Mazurka No. 15 in C, Op. 24/2 as an encore. The cleanness and fluidity with which he played the piece was amazing. The piece sounded effortless, and his pushing and pulling of the tempo with the dynamics helped to give the piece the motion necessary to maintain excitement; that same excitement made this concert a stellar keystone to the five-part Chopin series.
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