Music Review : Franghiz Ali-zadeh at Schoenberg Institute

It’s not every day that you run across an Azerbaijani avant-garde pianist as talented as Franghiz Ali-zadeh. Not the least of her talents is her strong sense of programming, amply displayed on Wednesday at the Schoenberg Institute at USC.

The music of Sophia Gubaidulina (born in 1931) has been greeted with considerable praise since glasnost has released it to more widespread Western scrutiny. Her Piano Sonata (1965), played Wednesday by Ali-zadeh, is a real find, and reveals some surprising influences.

This three-movement, 15-minute piece is enlivened by the rhythms and colors of American jazz. The opening movement is an angular, pounding, playful romp over the keyboard, like jazz written by a gorilla. The finale is also jazz, at first some pointillistic jabs and feints, then building into a full-blown, toe-tapping, rattlingly dissonant Eubie Blake stride.

These movements are contrasted by the subdued, coloristic middle movement, which calls for the use of extended piano techniques, including strumming the strings with a mallet or altering their resonance by hand. Ali-zadeh played this work with utter abandon and a sure sense of its style.

This was followed by the brief “Signs on White” by Edison Denisov (born in 1929). The hushed Impressionistic flutterings of this simple, fragile music suggested, surprisingly, a combining of Debussy, Philip Glass and George Winston.

Ali-zadeh’s own engaging Music for Piano (1989), “a coloristic piece for prepared piano,” heard in its premiere, combines a lush Oriental chromaticism, Middle Eastern chant and instrumental effects evoking the harp and sitar.

Crumb’s “Makrokosmos II” (1973) for amplified piano concluded the program. The piece is wearing well, despite some of its dated devices. In a program note, Ali-zadeh states that the power of Crumb’s music “lies in its vivid images.” These she summoned forth with utmost clarity, through dramatic timing and crisp execution of the array of extended techniques. The heavy-handed mysticism gave way to concise, no-nonsense timbral effects.

She began the concert with a remarkably cohesive and singing account of the Six Little Pieces, Opus 19, by Schoenberg.