Gustavo Romero
by
Lyn Bronson
Last night at All Saints Church in
Carmel, pianist Gustavo Romero presented a recital program built around two of
the greatest masterpieces of the nineteenth-century piano repertoire — the long
and profound Schubert Sonata in B-flat Major D.960 and Schumann’s tortured work,
the Symphonic Etudes that preoccupied him for 18 years and went through several
revisions, nine title changes and two published versions. I mention length,
because a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony takes approximately 30-32
minutes, whereas the Schubert Sonata we heard last night was 39 minutes long and
the Symphonic Etudes’ duration was 37 minutes.
It is not easy to hold the
attention of an audience through such an extended work as the Schubert B-flat
Major Sonata, for in truth, Schubert lacked the editing gene that was so much a
part of Beethoven’s compositional makeup. As living proof of how Beethoven
agonized over every aspect of his works, the manuscript of his Fifth Symphony
reveals an extraordinary number of examples of trial and error, of passages
deleted, of passages changed, and new ideas inserted, until he finally came as
close as he possibly could to the ideal in his mind. Unfortunately, Schubert,
although polished and concise in his shorter keyboard works and in his songs,
was self indulgent in some of his more extended compositions, and certainly the
B-flat Major Sonata, D.960, is a good example. There is so much beauty in this
work, but the extended length is so mind numbing that we lost a few members of
our audience last night at the conclusion of Romero’s performance.
Romero faced the same challenge
troubling all pianists preparing this work for public performance — how to
perform a work that is intensely personal (and more absorbing for the performer
than for an audience) and to hold our attention throughout.
It has to be said that for most of us in the audience last night, Romero
overcame the perils of Schubert’s “heavenly lengths” and gave us a very
successful performance. Although he almost lost us in the ten-minute slow
movement in which we would hear the ambient sound of people restlessly shuffling
their feet or shifting position, the final two movements were full of energy and
charm and carried the work to a glorious conclusion.
Romero’s performance of the
Schumann Symphonic Etudes was, however, problematic. First of all, although it
has become the fashion these days to re-insert five supplementary etudes that
Schumann discarded (although there is no general agreement where they should be
inserted), there are those who feel that the Schumann was right after all — that
by deleting these additional etudes the effectiveness of the work was greatly
enhanced. But, the real problem in Romero’s performance was his larger than life
performance that distorted the music by overplaying and pounding out climatic
passages that produced some ugly banging and loud pedal thumping. Perhaps it
wasn’t quite the “Arnold Schwarzenegger School of Piano Playing” (I am going to
pound your piano into submission! Have a nice Day!), but it often headed in that
direction. There were some lovely moments, but they were few and far between.
Opening the program was a soulful
performance of Mozart’s Adagio in B Minor, and an exciting, but rushed
performance of Handel’s Chaconne in G Major. However, the most spectacular
playing of the evening was observed in his encores,
Preludio by Mompou and a gorgeous
performance of the “Little Prelude for Wilhelm Friedman Bach” arranged by Siloti.
This performance of the Bach-Siloti was the greatest I have ever heard and even
surpassed that of Emil Gilels, who frequently played it as an encore.
