A review of the concert on March 25, 2007 by Richard Scheinin.
Those lucky Bostonians. They get to hear Jonathan Bass all the time. Fortunately for us, the folks who run the Bay Area’s Steinway Society know about Bass, a Massachusetts-based pianist who taught years ago at San Jose State University. Sunday night, they brought him to Le Petit Trianon for a recital and voila! His performance was one of remarkable range and imagination, not to mention thoughtfulness and soul. How often do you hear a pianist move from Bach to Chopin to Barber and Scriabin over the course of an evening? Not often enough. But Bass handled just about all of it — from baroque dances to Polish mazurkas to Barber’s blues and Scriabin’s mystical jazziness — with keen understanding during his nearly two-hour performance at the intimate concert hall in downtown San Jose.
Bass, who chairs the keyboard department at Boston University and is active on the Boston chamber music scene, began with Bach’s Partita No. 2 in C minor, BWV 826. It had it all: clear lyricism in the Allemande; uncoiling energy in the Courante. Frankly, he out-Bached a number of bigger names who have rolled through the Bay Area in recent months.
Next, Chopin. For all of Bass’ prodigious technical feats in the Ballade No. 2 in F major, Opus 38, there was some muddiness in the stormy passages. But then came the mazurkas! You had to wonder if Bass has been involved in some sort of on-site study of this lively folk dance in triple meter; he was at home with it and its heel-clicking leaps in a rare way. He played the four Opus 24 mazurkas. Aside from his rhythmic acumen (such clear, comfortable tempos) and acute note-by-note and chord-by-chord definition, there was, again, lyricism and rich feeling, and yet a restraint. There was no milking the music, just loving it. He segued from the final mazurka to the Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Opus 52, which he delivered with tender muscularity. Most pianists would finish a program with this kind of grand, emotionally charged and technically challenging work, but Bass was only halfway done.
The recital’s second half began with Samuel Barber’s “Excursions.” Poor Barber: All anyone remembers him for is his enormously sad “Adagio for Strings,” yet he wrote so much more. Dating to 1944, “Excursions” is a four-movement work that pays tribute, in sequence, to four American folk and pop-roots forms: boogie-woogie (though Barber handles the left-hand riffs, oddly, without syncopation), blues, cowboy song and the hoedown. Bass, interestingly, seemed not quite as home with it as he was with the Polish mazurkas. Still, his blues, in the second movement, was steady and languorous. The variations on “Streets of Laredo,” in the third, were gossamer-elegant, then crisp, then wistful and regal. Best was the last movement, a pointillist hoedown, with hand-over-hand choreography up and down the keyboard and an evaporating, fairy-dust fillip to wrap it up.
All of this was building toward Scriabin. And why is the Russian’s piano music not played more often? Looking back across the last century, Scriabin’s richly varied and innovative textures and atmospherics stand as worthy partners to Ravel. They also seep through the decades into jazz (from Bill Evans to Cecil Taylor) and the artsy side of musical theater. One reason his music may not be played as much as it should be is this: It’s hard. Even the slowly unfolding etudes that Bass played with such luxurious confidence (the B-flat minor, Opus 8, No. 11, and the F-sharp major, Opus 42, No. 4) are far more difficult than they sound. They are peppered with cross-rhythms as well as inner voices that the composer wants to coax from the pianist’s fingers in the most unexpected ways; an average player could take years perfecting a 30-second snippet of this stuff. Tackling the Sonata No. 4 in F-sharp major or the Sonata No. 5, Opus 53, as Bass also did, is even more difficult. The fourth sonata begins in a Bill Evans-at-twilight mood, deeply reflective, then turns percussive with crabbed, sculpted phrases (the Cecil Taylor dimension) flying about. Bass made it all a drama, so stealthily calibrated that the incremental cranking up of the work’s inner urgency was hard to notice.
In the fifth sonata, Scriabin plays with tonality, making it tantalizingly ambiguous so that the music hangs suspended or floats toward mystical regions. The fifth also has a great, upward-scrolling song at its center; some pianists make this sound joyful and innocent, like a prelude to “The Fantasticks.” Not Bass, whose fifth was more initiation than celebration, more secretive and even threatening than high-spirited. He played it with percussive precision — even those dense successions of chords, each one different than the last — and toured his listeners through maelstroms and inner chambers and then high up into a tower of holy bells.
