Playing With Keyboard History

Sitting relatively near the stage, I could see Peter Serkin’s hands clearly and the sharp cuts of his boyish haircut. I could see his intensity as well as hear it during his piano recital Monday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. Like a filled balloon, he was stiff in posture but quivered on the surface, his hands minutely vibrating with nervous tension. The round, exquisitely bell-like tones this singular pianist creates from the keyboard also seemed startlingly sharp in their focus yet mysteriously vibrating at the same time. He tended to play slowly and voice inner lines and chords with extreme care. There was a tremendous sense of purity in his playing.

I was close enough to see, hear, sense and appreciate all that; and yet the overriding impression of Serkin’s performance was one of listening from a distance. The balloon analogy holds, because it felt, listening to Serkin, almost like floating above the music and hearing it from on high.

This beautiful, if strange, sensation was a combination of both Serkin’s playing and his programming. Though a pianist with wide-ranging interests, Serkin did not shirk from the central repository of piano literature, concluding the evening with Mozart’s Sonata in F, K. 332, and Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” Sonata. But before that, Serkin gave a surreal tour of piano style from Mozart to the present. It was surreal because Serkin chose music and played it as if there has been little change in more than two centuries of keyboard writing.

The tour, which took about half an hour, included both well-known and obscure miniatures. The route began with a late Mozart Adagio (in B Minor, K. 540) and continued with an early Chopin Nocturne (in F-sharp Major, Opus 15, No. 2), a little-known Debussy Elegie, an early Messiaen prelude (“Plainte Calme”), four tiny pieces from the third book of the contemporary Hungarian Gyorgy Kurtag’s “Games” series. It landed, if that is the correct word for a recital that rarely touched ground, with the gorgeously buoyant chords of “Meditation on Haydn’s Name” by young British composer George Benjamin.

Most of this music is slow, spare and medi

tative--well suited, therefore, to Serkin’s pensive seriousness. There is a profound contradiction to Serkin’s style of playing. He concentrates on the center of each note and the silences around it. Every sound is a meditation, a single stone in a Japanese rock garden, an individual subatomic particle. Yet in quantum physics, the particle is also a wave, and so Serkin makes his notes. His sense of lyricism is so refined, one hardly can tell the movement from note to note. The centers are distinct, the edges blurred. It is that, along with his fluid sense of tempo on top of a rigid sense of rhythm, that creates the extraordinary feeling of floating.

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An astonishing exhibition of this was in Schoenberg’s Suite, Opus 25, which followed the excursion of miniatures. It was the first completely 12-tone composition, and--to compensate for his venturous idea of making every pitch in the scale harmonically independent--Schoenberg cautiously structured his score with Baroque forms. Revolutionary and reactionary at the same time, it is the most didactic of Schoenberg’s piano pieces. It takes the extravagantly plush resonance of Serkin’s tone and his rhythmic rigidity to fully celebrate the richness of music that is not just one thing.

With all this as prelude, the familiar Mozart and Beethoven sonatas after intermission seemed to drop their historical baggage, to exist outside of time. Again, Serkin centered in on individual details yet moved forward with a buttery smoothness. The slow movements were stunning in their stately, meditative lyricism and in their wonderful colors, as vivid as Messiaen. The fast movements flowed so seamlessly that they seemed, ironically, to stop time. And, once again, that sensation of floating.