One of the better TV commercials of the past twenty years featured an irate older woman (obviously from one of the four boroughs of New York City) confronting the manager of a fast food chain and complaining about the quality of her hamburger with the great one liner, "Where's the beef?" I felt a certain kinship with that lady as we listened to pianist Vladimir Feltsman on Monday evening in a recital at Sunset Center in Carmel presented by the Carmel Music Society, except that I wanted to ask, "Where's the music?"
From the moment Mr. Feltsman sat down at the Hamburg Steinway and slammed into the opening measures of Bach's C Minor Partita to his windup in the finale of Schumann's Carnaval, it was obvious that we were witnessing a virtuoso flexing his pianistic muscle at the expense of musical values. We were impressed with his excellent technical equipment, but the music often didn't have an opportunity to speak for itself.
It was also the shortest piano recital I have ever heard - each half lasted a meager 25 minutes - we were treated to a kind of student program consisting of Bach's C Minor Partita, Mozart's Sonata in C Major, K.330, and Schumann's Carnaval. Perhaps you are thinking that he played a short program in order to serve up a bunch of encores. No, there was only one, the short Prelude in B Minor from J.S. Bach's
Clavier-Büchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach in the arrangement by Alexander Siloti.
Although this is the first time Mr. Feltsman has performed for Monterey Peninsula audiences, his reputation has preceded him, for he has had an interesting recording career. His early recordings starting in the 1970s were pretty much standard fare for a budding virtuoso and included the well-known concertos of Tchaikowsky, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. But, more recently he has begun to concentrate in the keyboard works of J.S. Bach, and his most recent CDs feature three keyboard concertos, the Goldberg Variations and Book II of the Well Tempered Clavier. In fact, advance publicity for the event described Mr. Feltsman as a specialist in the keyboard works of Bach.
So, how was his playing in the C Minor Partita? Was it likely to win the hearts of young students in the audience and send them scurrying to the nearest sheet music outlet to purchase the score and start learning it themselves? My guess is that his Bach playing, as we heard it on this occasion, will win few new friends. In the C Minor Partita, his playing was loud, heavily accented, and overly staccato. While most of it was brutally aggressive, there were a few moments of quiet (all too few, alas) that demonstrated how Mr. Feltsman could play if he so chose.
The new buzzword these days among early music specialists is "historically informed performance" (sometimes abbreviated with the unfortunate acronym "HIP") meaning to strip away the distortions of the 19th and early 20th century and restore a more nearly stylistically correct performance. I suspect that HIP is very much on Mr. Feltsman's mind, but the heavy-handed approach of Mr. Feltsman, the virtuoso, tends to neutralize any attempt at HIP by Mr. Feltsman, the musician.
The Mozart Sonata in C Major, K.330, fared better, although it also was overplayed in its louder sections. There were some lovely moments in the slow movement that once again showed how sensitive Mr. Feltsman can be when he is not trying to show off. The finale was played at a breakneck speed that tended to compromise significant musical details.
After intermission, the major work of the evening, Schumann's Carnaval, was played not as a collection of exquisite miniatures, but as a suite of epic proportions in which Mr. Feltsman's exaggerations of dynamics and speed threatened to make Carnaval sound like Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition."
The Carmel Music Society's new Hamburg Steinway concert grand sounds beautiful when played softly and moderately loud, but extremely loud passages tend to reveal an unpleasant harshness that approaches the ugly. We have heard other artists using this instrument succeed better that Mr. Feltsman in controlling its foibles.
The Carmel Music Society's next event will be violinist Cho-Liang Lin on February 1.
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