Serkin Juxtaposes Schoenberg and Beethoven

This season, Peter Serkin has been busy playing the complete solo piano works of Arnold Schoenberg--which can be polished off in less than an hour--in several American states. At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Friday night, though, he chose to perform most, but not all, of the canon, even though the remaining pieces would have taken only about 10 more minutes to play.

Serkin reportedly did so partly out of deference to Leonard Stein, who played the whole cycle in Pasadena last November, and partly to emphasize a direct juxtaposition of two massive figures who haunted German music in their respective centuries, Schoenberg and Beethoven.

Originally, Schoenberg was to have occupied the first half and Beethoven the second. But by concert time, the order had been changed so that atonal or 12-tone Schoenberg gave way to late-period Beethoven in each half--a more balanced lineup that yielded at least one startling conclusion.

Serkin’s view of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11, was mellow, hazy, short on textural clarity and long on trance-like stillness. He paced the second piece very broadly, much slower than the composer’s indicated timing, with its morbid repeating figure in the bass almost melting away entirely.

He applied the same deft, delicate conception to Schoenberg’s brittle Five Piano Pieces, Opus 23--which wafted distantly into the hall even at fortissimo volume levels--and to Beethoven’s Bagatelles, Opus 126, where he emphasized the elevated, contemplative moods and sanded away the mercurial tantrums of these marvelously quirky little self-portraits.

In other words, Serkin seemed to introduce a third figure into the dialogue. He made both composers sound like Debussy.

In the second half, Serkin expanded his palette, giving Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, Opus 25, a more volatile, sharply defined, even humorously paranoid character.

But he reverted to his earlier meditative state in Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30, which shortchanged the Prestissimo movement, but suited the profound closing variations just fine. It was as if Beethoven were providing reassurance after Schoenberg’s prickly takes on Baroque dance forms.