NEW YORK — Some 174 years of accumulated pianistic wisdom unfolded over two July 13 recitals at Brooklyn’s Bargemusic: Jerome Lowenthal, 93, played Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons and Ursula Oppens, 81, played Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated in ways that reminded a near-full audience that music knows no retirement age. As long as the performing mechanisms remain in good working order, one can listen gratefully at the feet of these pianists, who bring their lifetimes of social and personal histories to the notes they play.
What can accumulated wisdom sound like? Lowenthal — who studied under legends (William Kapell, Alfred Cortot, and Eduard Steuermann) and has a repertoire of 63 concertos — took the liberty of departing from the previously announced program to begin his recital with his own unlikely fusion: a short section of Mozart’s unfinished Fantasia No. 3 in D minor, K. 397, and two movements of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (also in D minor).
How that worked with worlds-apart composers: Young Prokofiev did have a classical streak, flashes of which were revealed to attentive ears, while one also appreciated anew how the Russian composer burst from Mozart’s compositional boundaries with purposeful animation and humor in this infrequently heard sonata.
Tchaikovsky’s suite The Seasons, a charming collection of piano miniatures, will be the second half of Lowenthal’s program this week in Guangzhou, China. These 12 short pieces, each named for a month of the year, form a counterpart of sorts to Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words collection, even though Tchaikovsky didn’t think in miniature as naturally as Mendelssohn.
Wired for expansive Russian lyricism with a dark undertow, Tchaikovsky also tapped into an aristocratic manner that would make this music welcome in the parlors of St. Petersburg. Revelations weren’t especially forthcoming, though Lowenthal’s phrase-shaping clearly benefited from his history with all three Tchaikovsky piano concertos. The pianist’s accumulated wisdom was also evident in certain details, such as the brooding bass lines in the otherwise cheerful “April” movement, the sense of mystery within the wistful “June” barcarolle, and the elegiac final notes in the glistening conclusion to the “October” movement.
Bargemusic’s lovely new location upstairs at the Boat House in Brooklyn Bridge Park, with a dramatic cityscape view of Manhattan across the river, now offers chamber-music concerts free of charge, a benevolent gesture except when a family of five made a noisy entrance in mid-concert and stayed for 15 minutes before noisily exiting. To a random parkgoer, the sight of a 93-year-old man at the keyboard announcing each piece by its subtitle must have been a curious discovery indeed. It’s a testament to Lowenthal’s concentration that the only audible ill-effects were occasional rhythmic lapses and phrases that were cut off a nanosecond too soon.
The venue’s Steinway grand piano was signed by Eugene Istomin (1925-2003), who called the instrument “a piano worthy of Rachmaninoff,” though neither Istomin nor Rachmaninoff foresaw the kind of workout required by Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated, the single, hour-long work in Oppens’ recital. A series of variations on the tough, march-like Chilean song from which the composer took his title, the 1975 piece was premiered by Oppens, who has championed it ever since.
Now that The People United has been taken up by Igor Levit and Marc-André Hamelin, Rzewski is celebrated for his American maverick status rather than being ignored. But Oppens, a longtime modern-music champion whose repertoire of new music includes nearly every significant composer of our time, remains the Rzewski oracle.
The composer (1938-2021) created a mad cross-section of 20th-century music, as heard in Oppens’ recording for Cedille made a decade ago. There are quirky nods to Rachmaninoff, Weill, Schoenberg, Webern, and Boulez, sometimes juxtaposed into wildly inventive collages that eloquently collapse under their own weight. It’s almost a series of portraits like Elgar’s Enigma Variations but with strong social conscience in place of affection.
Yet when Oppens blazed — yes, blazed — through the piece, the music seemed more integrated, revealing its own reckless personality rather than those of its antecedents. If the piece resembled anything in this performance, it was Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Also notable: The variations that have repeated rhythmic patterns became increasingly loud, like malevolent forces advancing into the foreground. A sign of our times? Oppens will reportedly play The People United again at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Dec. 13. The event might be historic.
