A review of the concert on January 26, 2003 by Gary Lemco.
Pianist Rebecca Penneys made an indelible impression Sunday, January 26 at the Le Petit Trianon, playing music by Chopin, Debussy, Grieg, Liszt, Mozart and Gershwin, composer-virtuosos all. Sponsored by the Steinway Society, the concert displayed Penneys’ considerable keyboard prowess and range of color, tutored under the likes of Rosina Lhevinne and Artur Rubinstein, that have made Penneys a natural Debussy player par excellence.
Penneys opened with Chopin’s formidable G Minor Ballade, Op. 23, the composer’s Neapolitan equivalent for Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata, with it brooding passages and tempestuous polyphony. Curiously, this was the least successful piece of the evening, Penneys’ being undecided whether to play it for speed and fluency or for spacious drama. Her tempos were extremely brisk sometimes smearing the colors, an approach that worked wonderfully well when she came to the Debussy Book of Images later on.
What followed the Chopin, however, were a group of five of the Lyric Pieces of Edvard Grieg, a cross between Mendelssohn’s homely miniatures and Schumann’s character sketches, fertilized by Nordic and forward looking harmonies. “While “Arietta” and “Butterfly” passed breezily enough, Penneys really sang out in the middle section of Heimweh (“Homesickness”), where her ability to create music box textures simply dazzled. She effected the same delicate sensibility in her rendition of Mozart’s A Major Sonata, famed for its Rondo alla Turca.
In her brief verbal introduction to Mozart, Penneys expressed her desire to rekindle the period’s fascination with the performer’s improvising and adding embellishment between the notes. So no wonder we could enjoy ornaments — turns, mordents, trills — especially in repeated passages, totally in the Mozart style. Penneys’ Mozart, moreover, had the romantics’ influence, the added rubato and rhythmic license that stamped her own personality on this brilliant music. The real find, however, had been her set of Images, Debussy’s three section suite whose outer movements suggest the impressionism popularly granted Debussy, but whose middle section, Hommage a Rameau, is a kind of plaint for the more innocent age of the French Clavecinists. Rarely has this quasi-parlando piece received such loving allure as Penneys lavished upon it. The final section, Mouvement, basked in the swirls of color and dervish legedermain Penneys conjured from her chromatic palette.
Penneys’ penultimate offering was a selection from Liszt’s “Years of Pilgrimage,” his Vallee d’Obermann, a stentorian, moody piece that, like the Dante Symphony, exploits Liszt’s writing in ecstasies, emotionally charged ascents and descents into Heaven and Hell. This piece takes a thematic kernel and sends it on a passionate journey that has blazing block chords and double octaves, murderous challenges for the wrist and hands that Penneys threw of with ease and finesse. The idea that much of her program was basically exercises found fruition in a set of Gershwin songs, arranged as etudes by Earl Wild. In the midst of cascading arpeggios and broken-octave writing, we could make out “Embraceable You,” “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” “The Man I Love,” and “I Got Rhythm.” After these knotty labyrinths, no one wanted Penneys to leave, so she encored Schubert’s little F Minor Moment Musical and The Swan from Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, each elegant testimony to a major artist of intelligence, technique and the bravura temperament.
