A review of the concert on November 16, 2003 by David Beech.
The pianist Robert Schwartz, a native of Sacramento who studied in Indiana and New York and is now a San Francisco resident, gave an excellent and unusual recital on Sunday, November 16, at Le Petit Trianon, San Jose for the Steinway Society The Bay Area. What was unusual was firstly that the program consisted entirely of French music, for which Schwartz has strong credentials, having won the Ravel Prize in Paris in 1975; and secondly that an audience is rarely treated to so many opportunities to enjoy the singing tone of the piano. Rather than offering a dominating display, Schwartz invited the audience to join him in his obvious delight in the wide range of color, mood, and invention that the composers had put into the works he chose.
A successful innovation was that, in place of printed program notes, Schwartz began with a verbal introduction, which was both informative and humorous, and established a level of intimacy with the audience to which the elegant setting of Le Petit Trianon lends itself well.
The three pieces of Debussy’s Images Book 2 provided an attractive opening, with the first two being quiet and reflective, and giving the pianist an opportunity to fine-tune his sensitivity to touch and acoustics. Cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells through the leaves) begins with slow five-finger exercises on the whole-tone scale, and these evolve into a more rapid accompaniment (the rustling leaves) to some wider intervals (gentle bells), with a central climax and a slow fading. Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (And the moon descends over the temple that was) is quiet throughout, with angular chordal progressions holding the attention and working their spell in much the same way as those in Debussy’s prelude La Cathédrale Engloutie (The submerged cathedral). This all sets the stage for the brilliance of the third piece, Poissons d’or (Goldfish), with its sonorous tremolos and iridescent flashes as the fish glide through the water, leading to a surprisingly tumultuous storm in a goldfish bowl. Schwartz reveled in the tasteful virtuosity that Debussy calls for here, at times inclining his left ear towards the strings and raising his right eyebrow towards the audience in appreciation of the composer’s genius.
César Franck’s Prélude, Choral et Fugue then made a welcome appearance. Although Franck was primarily an organist (and Schwartz joked that it would be nice to play some of his piano music with the aid of the feet), he was a gifted romantic composer and wrote beautifully for the piano, as witness the Symphonic Variations with orchestra, and the piano part of his magnificent violin sonata. Although chronologically Franck precedes Debussy, the order of the program made sense in leading from the often gossamer textures of Debussy to the cathedral organ scale of the Franck. The Prélude is melancholy and improvisatory, and Schwartz phrased perfectly the delicious falling chromatic chords, much like the opening of the Symphonic Variations — irresistible romanticism. The Choral came across in all its grandeur, with the whole keyboard fully employed thanks to the left hand crossing over to play the chorale melody at the top. The Fugue had a broad romantic sweep to it, far from the austere intricacy of a Bach fugue, but effective in leading to a cadenza and the reintroduction of themes from the first two movements to complete the cyclic form. This was a fine performance of a work heard too rarely.
An even less familiar work, Poulenc’s Les Soirées de Nazelles, completed the program. In Schwartz’s hands, this witty and sentimental and sometimes serious set of twelve short pieces was elevated to the stature of a masterpiece of its genre. The opening Préambule is a much jollier version of Moussorgsky’s Promenade in Pictures from an Exhibition. Already in this movement, Schwartz produced the warm tone and exemplary pedaling that distinguished his Poulenc style, giving unusual substance to the work, achieving clarity without sounding brittle. The Cadence or cadenza that follows was delightfully played in the style of a Bach Fantasia, and between this and the penultimate Cadence, a more modern fantasia with trills, spread chords and arpeggios, we heard several different styles of waltz — with hesitation, swooping sentiment, or strongly dotted rhythm — and burlesques, and one longer serious movement which provided a beautiful heart to the work. The Final is on the grand scale, and brought the performance to a rousing conclusion.
