A review of the concert on January 8, 2005 by Richard Scheinin.
San Jose’s Jon Nakamatsu has a way of mixing the tried and true with the truly unusual. For a couple years now, the pianist has performed
stirring and almost entirely forgotten music by Josef Wölfl, the Austrian composer who was a friendly rival of Beethoven’s in their day. Now Nakamatsu has found another worthy candidate for stardom: Loris Tjeknavorian, the living, Iranian-born composer of Armenian descent whose piano music is drenched with ethnic rhythms and alluring melodies — and is pretty much never performed in this country.
Saturday night at Le Petit Trianon in San Jose, Nakamatsu offered a bracing recital — his first here in a year — in which wild card Tjeknavorian sat comfortably amid the tried and true.
There was Chopin, whose 19th-century mazurkas and polonaises opened the gates to Tjeknavorian-style ethnicity in modern music. There was Liszt, who built on Chopin’s bejeweled harmonic world. And there was Rachmaninoff, who flew off in all sorts of crazy new harmonic directions. His “Variations on a Theme by Corelli,” the best part of Nakamatsu’s program, runs a Spanish folk melody through 20 outrageous turnarounds.
The recital, part of the Steinway Society’s ongoing series, began with yet another famous incorporator of folk music: Scarlatti. The Italian loved Spanish song, rhythm and guitars, blending them into his nearly 600 Baroque-period keyboard sonatas, many technically bold. Nakamatsu chose four for the program, which repeated Sunday. He performed them with an idiomatic clarity that captured the trilling metallic brilliance of the harpsichord, Scarlatti’s instrument.
Next came the Rachmaninoff, which elaborates on the Corelli theme known as “La Folia.” Rachmaninoff took this Baroque borrowing of a Spanish folk melody and ran it through his visionary blender. And Nakamatsu — voicing each chord just so, infusing the music with crisp rhythms — stamped each variation with personality: marching or galumphing, pouncing like a panther or lolling about like an elephant. Poor “La Folia” seemed to have wandered into a strange harmonic universe, pointing to jazz, Sondheim, even a Beatles ballad or two.
Chopin followed: First, a liquid nocturne, then a steely scherzo with daunting double-octave sequences and clashing rhythms.
After intermission, came Tjeknavorian. It turns out there’s a story behind Nakamatsu’s interest in this music: His lifelong teacher, Marina Derryberry, attended conservatory in Tehran with Tjeknavorian. In 2001, Tjeknavorian conducted at the San Francisco Opera where, for the first time in decades, he and Derryberry met. Nakamatsu attended the reunion and soon came under the composer’s spell.
Saturday, he played five of seven dances from Tjeknavorian’s “Danses Fantastiques,” all evoking, Nakamatsu said, a “sense of heritage — the spirit of Armenian music.”
The first three dances were understated. There were swirling figures over a virile, ostinato bass line. There was a haunting modal melody set to chorded accompaniment. It sounded like a mother’s hummed song to a child and had an unresolved ending; perhaps the child fell asleep.
One dance kept three serpentine lines moving: the ostinato, the melody, and a descending chromatic sequence. The music was at times trance-like, then grew flashier, full of rippling pools of ultra-Romantic melody, á la Liszt.
And it was with Liszt that Nakamatsu closed the program. Truth be told, midway through the Mephisto Waltz No. 1, a brutally taxing piece for any pianist, I began thinking that unceasing virtuosity isn’t always exciting. I would have preferred to hear a couple more dances by Tjeknavorian. Maybe next time.
