A review of the concert on February 24, 2008 by Richard Scheinin.
Canadian-born pianist Jon Kimura Parker has performed as soloist with top-of-the-pack orchestras: New York, Cleveland and Philadelphia. He has also toured the Arctic, performing on electric keyboards for the locals. He has jammed with Bobby McFerrin. He has hosted Canadian television and radio series on classical music.
He is a communicator. Even better, when Parker sits down at the piano, he is a storyteller. An exhilarating performer, he did nothing but tell stories during his remarkable Sunday recital, part of the Steinway Society series at Le Petit Trianon.
It was a massive program: three taxing, programmatic works, which, in the hands of a lesser storyteller, might have veered out of control.
No such danger for Parker, who carried the audience through a three-part musical reminiscence of ancient China by Canadian composer Alexina Louie; proceeded through Robert Schumann’s “Carnaval,” with its masked-ball revelers; and wrapped up with his own adaptation of Igor Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”).
Louie’s “Scenes from a Jade Terrace,” composed for Parker 20 years ago, opens with a movement titled “Warrior” that is beyond rhythmically aggressive. It is meant to be “savage in nature,” as Parker pointed out in his introductory comments. Beneath his fingers, it was primal, pointing toward Stravinsky’s balletic death dances.
“Memories in an Ancient Garden,” the second movement, opened with gently crushedchords in the bass, releasing a flower-press of colors, landing on a pedal-point, with melodies floating above, like ghosts. Reaching inside the piano to brush his fingers across the strings, Parker played “as if intoxicated by the scent of a thousand blossoms,” as instructed by Louie, whose “Southern Sky,” the final movement, was celestial, in the refracted style of Messiaen.
Parker extended this dramatic flair through “Carnaval,” in which Schumann composed portraits of himself alongside Chopin, Paganini and well-known figures from the Commedia dell’arte.
One complaint: Parker was at times much too loud, apparently mistaking the tiny, reverberant Trianon for a 1,500-seat hall. Still, the performance was a dazzler. One by one, across the work’s 22 rapid-fire movements, he drew out all the characters with unflagging rhythmic vitality and waltzing abandon.
“Abandon” is what defined Parker’s “The Rite of Spring,” which he adapted from several sources, including Stravinsky’s own piano-duet version. This performance was at once precise and obsessive, revealing the great work’s modal mysteries, its craggy blocks of sound, its wild reiterative rhythms. With a left hand worthy of James P. Johnson, Parker slashed and burned his way to the Dionysian finish line.
As an encore, he surprised everyone with a feathery-soft Rachmaninoff prelude.
