SUBSTITUTE PIANIST LIGHTS UP LORENZ CONCERT

Ilya Yakushev turns the familiar into the spectacular.

By George Warren - March 18, 2010

How does one present Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” in a way that wins an audience and makes people glad they attended the concert? Ilya Yakushev knows, and he did exactly that in the Concert Hall at Fresno State Wednesday, where he appeared as a last-minute replacement for Horacio Gutiérrez in the Philip Lorenz Memorial Keyboard Concerts series.

Yakushev’s program looked ordinary at first: the Beethoven, Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 6 in A Major, Op. 82, and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” That’s a tough sell, considering how many times two of those works have been presented and the probable number of people in the audience who have at one time or another played them.

Yakushev sat quietly at the keyboard, picked some lint off the keys, made sure everything was ready, and then, like an Olympic downhill skier, shot out of the gate at breakneck speed with the “Moonlight Sonata.” To set a performance of this work apart from the ordinary, one can change the tempo, the dynamics, the emphasis of certain notes, but not the notes themselves—those are required for the composition to retain its integrity.

Here, the pianist took top speed for all three movements, and it worked well. In the first movement, Yakushev concentrated on bringing out the melody well over the top of the harmonic texture, and he blended that effect with a very thin tone. One imagines that he had the soft pedal mashed through the floor of the stage to achieve that effect. His legato melodic treatment carried the surface of this movement, and he brought it to a quiet close.

The second movement, again on the fast side of average, danced as expected, and Yakushev’s special treatment lay primarily in the rhythm. He toyed with a fluctuation in the tempo at times, emphasizing some beats, pulling back on others. At the end, he charged directly into the powerful and precarious third movement.

If the audience was not sold yet, this movement closed the deal. Chopin has a “Minute Waltz,” Yakushev has now presented Beethoven’s “Minute Moonlight.” But it wasn’t just speed. Yakushev pulled off this feat without burying the tough parts under the sustain pedal as so many touring pianists do. Instead, he played much of the arpeggios dry, and then plunged into the big chords and pounded away at them with glee.

There were a couple of noteworthy effects. First, he supercharged the dynamic contrast between loud and quiet sections. But the most unusual effect was his treatment of the fp’s (forte-piano, meaning that you start the note loud and immediately back off and play the remaining value of the note quietly). This effect is written into piano works, but it is not usually expected that a player will be able to create the effect on a single note—it’s an illusion on the piano that takes at least two notes to achieve, the first loud and the next soft. Yakushev managed to do the fp at least twice on a single note by hitting the note hard, releasing it and catching the note with the sustain pedal before it completely went silent. It was a stunning effect. The third movement was not note-perfect, but who is counting all those notes? This pianist made something fresh and new of a very tired piece of music.

Anyone who has picked up the score to Prokofiev’s sixth piano sonata and read through it at the piano might have been mystified by the notes at first. One may think: “I know this sounds coherent when played well, but this is unbearable reading at sight.” Hence the pure joy of hearing Yakushev untangle all the notes and make sense of them.

At the start, one realized that Yakushev held back some of his power with the Beethoven, despite the intense energy of the third movement. Here, he put his strength on display and hammered out the primary thematic material in the middle of all the surrounding distractions. The Prokofiev demands that the pianist keep the main points in mind and create a secondary texture that works with and against the main material. Yakushev found the heart of the movement and let it show.

To this point in the program, all of the music could be characterized as “tempo rubato,” or irregular of beat. In the second movement, Yakushev struck a metronomic tempo and held to it as long as the texture demanded. It was good to hear that his creativity with the timbres and textures did not happen at the expense of an ability to keep a beat.

The fourth movement is about speed, and Yakushev had all the technique he needed to dazzle the ears. He ripped through the material, and then, in the midst of the argument, reset one of the motifs from the first movement. Here is Prokofiev and his interpreter making certain that the audience knew what all that noise was about in the first movement. It was fascinating to hear what sounds like an afterthought, or just a small bit from the first movement, find its development here in the third. Yakushev made everything he could from this part, then charged to the end and brought down the house with his brilliant playing.

Hearing Yakushev play makes one wonder why the other pianist had been engaged in the first place. This was yet another brilliant “emergency substitute” in the history of the Lorenz series. May all the substitute players in the future be as thrilling to hear as Ilya Yakushev.