A review of the concert on January 20, 2001 by Dr. Thomas Wendel.
Leave it to the Steinway Society to sponsor yet another intriguing program. Scholar/composer/pianist Leanne Rees has made a specialty of finding and performing works of women composers. As she explained during her informal talks that punctuated her performances, she has scoured music archives from Berlin to Juilliard in making her discoveries and finding readable scores. Rees furthermore modelled an extremely innovative program for the evening, alternating compositions of women and those of the men in their lives. The program had also an intelligent overall chronology beginning with Marianne Martinez (1744-1812) and her teacher Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1806) and ending with her own work and that of her composer friend Ralph Graves of the University of Virginia Department of Music.
Marianne Martinez, Rees informed us, was an extremely prolific composer of some 200 works for varied instruments and instrumental combinations. Rees played Martinez’s Sonata No 3 in A Major which turned out to sound like Haydn manqué. The Sonata begins with an attractive theme which closes clumsily with a dull downward scale in the bass. Like the Haydn Sonata to follow, Martinez’s Adagio had a Baroque sarabande feel to it; this slow movement contained some of the Sonata’s finest ideas.
The companion Haydn piece was the ever-popular Sonata #50 in D Major with its marvelously puckish onward rush of notes. In point of invention, wit,compositional technique, the master put his lady student into the shade.
The next coupling featured the two Mendelssohns, sister Fanny and brother Felix. The Fanny Mendelssohn one-movement E minor Sonata was a revelation: gorgeous, imaginative music. Indeed, Fanny Mendelssohn’s harmonic palette suggested the later Wagner. Felix was represented by the brilliant concert piece, the Rondo Capriccioso, which revels in lovely melody followed by the typically skittish, virtuosic, wispy scherzo music of which Felix Mendelssohn was a master.
Then came Schumann — Clara Schumann — and her close friend and musical partner, Johannes Brahms. For a lifetime, these two — both composer/pianists — with periodic rifts between them, were true soul mates. To represent the music of Clara Schumann, Rees chose, at least to these ears, a most disappointing work entitled Notturno. Over a rolling bass, not much happened. The Notturno sounded like Chopin on an off day. But the companion piece, Brahms’s magnificent Second Rhapsody in G Minor is of course one of the great works for piano. Indeed, it was the musical highlight of the evening.
The interesting program ended with a short quite lovely Etude for Piano by Ralph Graves companioned by the pianist’s own Funky Tango. Rees explained that she composed the Tango to be utilized as an encore, but the piece took on a life of its own. It is indeed too long for an encore, and perhaps in some ways, just plain too long. In rondo form, the return of the tango rhythm becomes in the end a bit much.
The work is discursive, and in the end virtuosic and amusing as the player uses herforearm, á la Henry Cowell, to smash out an exciting cluster ending.
The Tango, originally designed as an encore, was graciously followed by a piece indeed more encore-suitable, not to say theme-suitable, the Polish composer/pianist Maria Szymanowska’s Etude in D minor of 1820. Rees executed the difficult whiplash phrases with charm and elegance.
Which brings us to the performance of these works, all of which Rees played without score. It has to be said that there were several memory slips, and that at times the music lacked nuance, breath. But these are carpings; there were also sparkling moments of thrilling virtuosity. Rees brought to the Petite Trianon a stimulating and thought-provoking evening of music-making to which the audience enthusiastically responded.
