On Sunday afternoon, October 1, Palo Alto pianist Barbara Wilkens played a solo recital for a warmly appreciative audience in the Cabrillo College Theater in Aptos. This recital is one in a continuing series of benefit concerts for the Carole Holdaway Grand Piano Fund. This fund will enable Cabrillo's Visual & Performing Arts Division to purchase a new Steinway concert grand for its new Performing Arts Center that will be completed by the fall of 2003.
In the event that you haven't visited the Cabrillo Campus recently, you will be amazed at the number of buildings under construction, for the College, after a successful bond issue, has a massive building program now under way. Everywhere you look there are scaffolds, partially completed buildings, cleared land for new building sites and roads being diverted into new traffic patterns for the reorganized campus. To see such healthy signs of growth in a college campus is indeed a welcome sight, and then to realize that a performing arts center is a part of the master plan (rather than exclusively classrooms, gymnasiums and playing fields) is even more welcome news.
Clearly, Cabrillo needs this new performing arts center. Ms. Wilkens performed on this occasion in a theater designed not for the performance of music, but for theatrical productions. A nice-sounding Steinway concert grand seemed dwarfed on the large stage in this theater. There was no acoustical shell behind the piano, so that the sound, rather than projecting forward to the audience, tends to gets lost in the vast wings of the huge stage. Although I was sitting in the front row of the theater, not twelve feet from the artist, if I closed my eyes, the sound seemed distant as though I had been sitting in the rear of the hall.
Despite these less than favorable conditions, Ms. Wilkens (incidentally she was donating her services
pro bono for this benefit concert) played a most interesting program consisting of the Bach-Busoni
Chaconne, Haydn's Sonata in C Major (Hob.XVI/50), Brahms' Rhapsody in B Minor, Schumann's
Papillons, the Liszt-Verdi
Rigoletto Paraphrase and three short works by Rachmaninoff.
Ms. Wilkens is one of several distinguished central California pianists who combine a career of teaching with an active performing schedule. Her playing is characterized by many sterling qualities, among them refinement, elegance and a thorough knowledge of the stylistic requirements of the music she performs. In other words, she is a true musician from the tips of her fingers to the tips of her toes.
When a pianist sits down to play a recital, you can tell in the first ten seconds whether that artist's attitude is "I am a virtuoso and am going to amaze you with my technique" or "I love this music, and I want to share it with you." Ms. Wilkens's attitude is very much the latter. She acted like a tour guide for the lovely music she played, and, like a good tour guide, she never got in the way of the view.
Ms. Wilkens in speaking from the stage as she presented the single encore at the end of the concert apologized for playing a Liszt transcription of a Schumann song (
Widmung) and commented that only recently has it become acceptable to perform transcriptions on a serious concert program. Actually, I thought that with the Romantic revival of the 1970s, we had already won that battle a long time ago. Although the purists turn up their nose at transcriptions, we have to acknowledge that Johann Sebastian Bach was in every sense of the word a master transcriber, and like Liszt, enhanced any score he transcribed.
In any case, Ms. Wilkens had no need to make any apologies for the three transcriptions she played during the afternoon's program --- the Bach-Busoni
Chaconne, the Liszt-Verdi
Rigoletto Paraphrase, and the Liszt-Schumann
Widmung. They are all in their own way legitimate masterpieces, and in fact, the Bach-Busoni
Chaconne belongs on my list of the top ten greatest masterpieces in the solo piano repertoire.
And, what a sensitive and compelling performance of the
Chaconne she gave us. It was slightly understated (perhaps this was the effect of the dead acoustics in the hall), but it made so much sense musically, and her windup at the end was beautifully effective. This is a complicated and difficult work, but she made it look easy, and it seemed shorter than its actual 15 minutes.
The Haydn Sonata in C Major was another compelling performance. The difficult passages were tossed off with a neatness and precision that constantly served to underscore the structural details and make them perfectly clear. This was lovely, stylish playing that was always musicianly and totally without affectation. As was characteristic during this recital, Ms. Wilkens took no repeats, so the Haydn performance had a lean quality about it, and no section outstayed its welcome.
The Brahms Rhapsody in B Minor, Op. 79, No. 1, closed the first half of the recital, and this was another richly satisfying performance. One detail was puzzling. Measures 30-38, marked
pianissimo were not played
sotto voce but with a full
cantabile so that when the
forte chords entered in measure 39, they didn't have the rude shock value that Brahms surely intended. But overall it was a splendid performance. Ms. Wilkens achieved a lovely mood in the central B Major section, and the hushed coda on the last page was exquisite.
After intermission Ms. Wilkens played Schumann's
Papillons. Although the hall's soggy acoustics absorbed some of the subtle dynamic details, the performance achieved considerable interest in its brief duration. The Liszt Rigoletto Paraphrase that followed really blew us away in its final three pages, especially the rapidly repeated octaves. This was done effortlessly, and you won't hear it any better, not even by artists like Arrau and Bolet on CD.
Three Rachmaninoff pieces closed the program, two Preludes from Op. 32, and the great E-flat Minor Etude-Tableau, Op. 39, No. 5. This programming was again characteristic of Ms. Wilkens attitude toward performing. Rather than a razzle-dazzle, barnstorming, "take no prisoners" kind of virtuoso warhorse to end the program, her final group had a quiet and reflective ending. This was entirely consistent with her stage presence, which was quiet and self-effacing, as though to tell us that it was the music that was really important. In an era when some pianists have egos as big as the Ritz (and
their egos are exceeded by those of singers and conductors), it is indeed refreshing to encounter a musician with a lovely modesty who nonetheless achieves music making of the highest order.
Future piano concerts in the Carole Holdaway Grand Piano Fund Series at Cabrillo College will be Hans Boepple on October 8, Rebecca Bogart on February 3 and Eric Brelsford on March 10.
End
