A review of the concert on November 16, 2003 by Gary Lemco.
Pianist Robert Schwartz graced the Bay Area Steinway Society’s second recital of the season with an all-French program, Sunday November 16 at Le Petit Trianon Theatre. Three composers provided enough passionate and sonorous contrast to maintain our dramatic interest and to display Schwartz’s digital prowess: Debussy, Franck, and Poulenc. The emotional palette ranged from the deeply meditative to the blatantly irreverent, from the cathedral to the circus, all rendered with enough flair and finesse to mesmerize a captivated audience.
Robert Schwartz is an Indiana University graduate who won the 1975 Ravel Prize at the Marguerite Long Competition. Mr. Schwartz has a natural penchant for the French taste, which he cultivates with a strong, clear pulse that is at once sober, refined and poised without ever becoming anemic. In fact, Mr. Schwartz’s control and intellectualism is such that, occasionally, we wish he would “cut the cord,” to paraphrase Kazanzakis’ Zorba. Schwartz opened with his obvious favorite, Debussy, in point of fact, the _Three Images_, Book II. These are all highly atmospheric landscape (or “moonscape”) and water pieces, the musical equivalent of Watteau and Turner, which testify to the composer’s aesthetic mysticism achieved through the focus on nature. Pedal tones, shimmering tremolandi and ostinato figures, pentatonic and whole-tone scales, all combine in Debussy to produce a static effect of poised, nature frozen in an attitude one finds in a Chinese porcelain or Japanese lacquers. We felt as though we had crept into Nature’s shrine and briefly glimpsed Eternity.
Cesar Franck’s most successful piano piece, his _Prelude, Chorale and Fugue_, ensued: this chromatic and often sensuous work is a cross of Bach polyphony and Lisztian harmony, with more than a touch of late Chopin — Schwartz seemed to recall the latter’s Polonaise-Fantasy in his application of stretti and rolling chords. This piece has had its proponents as disparate as Malcuzynski, Rubinstein, Moravec, and Bolet. Schwartz reminds me of Alfred Brendel, in his intellectual sobriety, but his sense of vibrant colors is richer than is Brendel, who eschews French music. Alternately meditative and passioante romantic, the piece sometimes achieved a metronomic detachment, then it would gather up its former motor and melodic impulses in cyclic fury. This was a fervent, rapt reading whose innate poetry was never less than spellbinding.
The recital ended with a rare hearing of Francis Poulenc’s 12-part suite, _Les Soirees de Nazelles_ (Nasal Musical Evenings), the title of which is pure Satie, and whose musical debts vary from Massenet to the French musical hall and cabaret, to the circus, the boulevard, and the gutter. We could irreverent homages to Moussorgsky (especially the Tuilleries of his _Pictures_), Chopin waltzes, and the burlesque capers we associate with Charlie Chaplin. Every once in a while, however, the tender Romantic sang out, a moment of lyrical sincerity amidst all the defensive mechanisms of a wry wit. The audacious Final threw in some chords that smacked of Mozart’s C Minor Fantasy, perhaps a bit of youthful ardor that has survived the ravages of our stultifying cosmopolitanism. One encore, Debussy’s _Bruyeres_, from the second book of Preludes, bestowed on us that breath of life, the touch of English heather, that countered any suggestions of the Decadent Mr. Schwartz had explored in his grateful, Gallic survey.
