Pianists Play On (and On) at Eclectic Orange Festival

An overgenerous program and overly busy musical textures conspired Thursday night to frustrate the listener seeking musical clarity in the piano event closing the first week of the Eclectic Orange Festival.

Pianists Ursula Oppens and Aki Takahashi, joined by composer Richard Teitelbaum, presented this keyboard marathon for two pianos or piano plus electronics, made up of recent works by Teitelbaum and older pieces by Schubert, Debussy, Ravel, Ligeti and Lutoslawski. It should have been an ear-opening experience in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Instead, it dragged on. The versatile Oppens and the very competent Takahashi are accomplished musicians, but they bring nothing special to their teamwork; their journeyman abilities neither complement nor mesh. And here they contributed only honest, not compelling, musical personalities to the scores at hand.

There was promise in their playing of Schubert’s masterpiece of four-hand pianism, the Fantasy in F minor, but few startling or illuminating insights. They achieved nice, but seldom genuinely colorful results, in Debussy’s “Nuages” and Ravel’s “Fetes,” and failed to realize either the true jokiness or the earnestness in Ligeti’s Three Pieces (1976) for Two Pianos.

Their closing piece, Lutoslawski’s famous Variations on a Theme by Paganini, produced metallic sounds and had only a small portion of its real charms.

Teitelbaum’s two works, “Dal Niente” for solo piano and computer/sampler (1997) and brand-new “Seq Transit Parammers” for piano, two Disklaviers and interactive performance system, proved longish and noisy electronic dalliances in homage to earlier experimental composers like Conlon Nancarrow.

These two works, which a spokeswoman for the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, sponsor of the event, said were commissioned by the society, produce haunting and/or chaotic soundscapes. But they do not hold the listener’s interest, despite regular and relentless activity; instead, they assault the ear.