A review of the concert on February 24, 2008 by Gary Lemco.
Adding but one encore — Rachmaninov’s tender G Major Prelude, Op. 32, No. 5 — after a stupendous number of volatile notes already played, Jon Kimura Parker ended a spectacular recital at San Jose’s Le Petit Trianon Theatre, Sunday, February 24 under the aegis of the Steinway Society the Bay Area. Parker proffered but three works this evening: Scenes from a Jade Terrace by Alexina Louie (1988), Schumann’s familiar Carnaval, Op. 9, and Parker’s own solo piano arrangement of Stravinsky’s epic ballet Le Sacre du Printemps.
Canadian pianist Jon Kimura Parker commissioned Scenes from a Jade Terrace in 1988, calling upon fellow Vancouver musician Alexina Louie to compose a piece celebrating their common Asian heritage. In three sections, the suite proves quite aggressive in timbre and texture, especially in its outer sections. Arranged in a pattern perhaps indebted to Debussy’s Estampes, the opening section, “Warrior,” might have been written with actor Toshiro Mifune in mind, rife with martial block chords and glissandi scales, a hard patina and driving, asymmetrical agogic accents. The scene shifts to a more longing sensibility in “Memories in an Ancient Garden,” as Parker rached into the guts of the piano to dampen the strings, an effect we know from Cowell’s “The Banshee,” with its own eeriness. In the final section, “Southern Sky,” we had a musical counterpart to van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” a series of explosive, vibrating illuminations, occasionally recalling the haunted specters of the ghost film _Kwaidan_. In the outer movements, obsessive repeated notes, angry sforzati, and dissonant tone clusters rule; yet the music, likely through Parker’s detailed sincerity, achieved the kind of mesmeric fascination that would sweep s away in the Stravinsky.
That Parker transcribed the whole of Le Sacre du Printemps, improving on Stravinsky’s own piano — and two-piano — reduction, itself testifies to the musical tour de force we had in store. We might have been witnesses at the original piano rehearsals, so compelling were the familiar, colorful soli, scored orchestrally for bassoon, oboe, brass, and shrieking strings. Despite the absence of instrumental timbres and coloration, Parker’s piano soon assumed all the compulsions of the instrumental ensemble and its pounding, primal rhythms, its jarring energies. The innumerable three-hand effects, no less rife in Schumann, piled one chromatic line upon another, a blazing kaleidoscope or cornucopia of Nature’s primal impulses, culminating in the Sacrifice of the prima ballerina to the glories of Earth. “Consider this a forecast of your Russian Festival!” quipped Parker amidst the unabashed, thunderous applause that erupted after this devastating example of bravura and immaculate technique, all in the service of one of music’s enduringly original ballet scores.
Schumann’s anagrammatically conceived Carnaval provided the Romantic foil to much of the overt modernism of Parker’s program. After the savagely hard patina of the Louie pieces and the expectation of the Stravinsky, every moment that Parker realized legato became a moment to cherish. Taking the entire suite holistically, Parker presented more of Florestan than Eusebius, the composer’s aggressive, assertive campaign against Philistinism rampant in fleeting, alternately bouncing and laughing colors. Occasionally, as in “Aveu,” the dreamy side of Schumann emerged; “Chopin,” too, demanded one lovely nocturne in the midst of the various maerchen, the fairy-tale transformations of musical battalions gleaned from Italian Renaissance models as well as from Schumann’s own love-life. During the Valse allemande, Paganini raised his virtuosic mane in frenzied bariolage technique, Parker’s fingers a whirl of figurations, skittish, playful, enamored, at once. By the end of the final grand March of the Davids-Leaguers, we, too, felt as though we had been initiated into a select troupe of inspired players whose depths still call out to acolytes of the Romantic Age.
