A review of the concert on November 10, 2001 by Lyn Bronson.
Well, he didn’t leap tall buildings in a single bound, and he didn’t stop any speeding bullets, but he did just about everything else. I am talking about Van Cliburn silver medalist Antonio Pompa-Baldi who stepped out on stage at Le Petit Trianon in San Jose to play a piano recital for the Steinway Society of the San Francisco Bay Area and blew us away with his musical sensitivity and his ultra controlled virtuosity.
Virtuosity has come to be a dirty word in some quarters and it sometimes conjures up an image of a pianist flailing away and showing off how fast and loud he can play. Pompa-Baldi’s virtuosity is a horse of a different color. To borrow the words of our President, make no mistake about it, Pompa-Baldi can play as fast and loud as anyone else, but never did we hear extreme speed or loudness that didn’t serve an intelligent musical purpose.
In the opening work, the Mozart Sonata in F Major, K.332, we heard the most exquisitely refined, scaled down and stylistic playing you could ever hope to hear in a Mozart Sonata. There was no precious porcelain doll approach here, but rather a full blooded and expressive performance that relished every nuance and every turn of phrase. The slow movement contained many colors in its infinite variety of dynamics that made it a subtle (it had the subtlety of a Chopin Nocturne) and moving experience. The last movement, Allegro assai, was played Prestissimo, which initially sounded like a distortion and almost like one of the faster Scarlatti sonatas. However, the elegance and refinement of the passagework was so authoritative that after the initial shock wore off, the finale at this fleet tempo was entirely convincing. Mozart always said that his passages should flow like oil and they certainly did here (low viscosity oil, of course).
After the Mozart came a riveting performance of the Chopin B-flat Minor Sonata. It had all the power and expressive emotion you would expect from an artist of Pompa-Baldi’s stature, but there was much more. The funeral march slow movement had a lovely sustained quality and powerful tension that was temporarily relieved by the truly lovely middle section in D-flat major where we heard exquisitely limpid cantabile playing. This movement was mesmerizing. The Wind over the Graves last movement was a whisper of undulating notes (with occasional fragments of melodic motives appearing and disappearing) that wreaked its own brand of powerful magic.
After intermission we heard a work composed for the Eleventh Van Cliburn Piano Competition, Three Impromptus by Lowell Liebermann. Pompa-Baldi won a special award at the Van Cliburn Competition for his performance of this work, and it was easy to see why. Delicate pianissimos and massive sonorities exist side by side in this powerful work, but the overriding effect was always musical, not simply pianistic.
Another one of his Van Cliburn repertoire works also appearing on the program was Poulenc’s Caprice italien which after a bombastic introduction has some beguiling melodies in which Pompa-Baldi spun some more tonal magic.
Ending the program was the Rachmaninoff Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 36. The first movement was a powerful statement of post romantic passion tempered with fin de sicle Russian angst. Never have I heard before such a lovely drawn out pianissimo ending to this movement. It was a lovely setup to the beautiful slow movement, which really tore at the heartstrings. The last movement was a powerful romp to its climax that brought the audience to its feet for a rousing standing ovation.
Mr. Pompa-Baldi played two encores for us. The first was Moszkowskis Etude in F Major that was incredibly fast, but oh so quiet and incredibly clear (it was better than Horowitz’s recorded performance), and the second was June Barcarolle from Tchaikowsky’s The Seasons. You will never hear this piece played more lovingly.
The piano used in this performance, a Steinway B owned by provided by Keith Watt and the Le Petit Trianon is a very fine instrument. However, this seven-foot Steinway is like an Oldsmobile, and Mr. Pompa-Baldi really needed a nine-foot concert grand, which is more similar to a Cadillac. Like a fine Fleetwood Cadillac, the more luxurious appointments in a concert grand are the bass strings which are two feet longer and give a more powerful fundamental to the lowest bass notes. Many times in this concert we heard a dull thunk in the lowest octaves where there would have been deep satisfying sonorities from a concert grand.
The good news is that Dave Dumont and Mr. Keith Watt, board members of Steinway Society, the Bay Area, have also come to the conclusion that a Steinway concert grand is needed, and if the budget permits, it may be in place by March 2002, perhaps in time for Van Cliburn gold medal winner Olga Kern on March 17. Lets keep our fingers crossed.
