NO DULL MOMENTS AT LORENZ KEYBOARD CONCERT

Gilles Vonsattel and Andreas Werz beat the odds.

By Larry Warkentin - May 1, 2010

The life of an impresario is never dull. Andreas Werz has been the director of the Philip Lorenz Memorial Keyboard Concerts for the past several decades and has managed that role brilliantly. He has brought some of world’s finest keyboard artists to Fresno. Friday evening, April 30 was to be no exception. Werz had scheduled the acclaimed pianist, Stephen Hough, to bring the 38th season of the series to a stunning conclusion.

There was a minor glitch: Fresno Grand Opera was performing Macbeth on the same evening. Not to worry, the keyboard audience is a committed bunch and a good attendance could still be expected. Then a few days before April 30 comes the phone call canceling Hough’s American tour due to a family emergency. Werz is up to the challenge. He has found last minute replacements before, already once this season, and he found Gilles Vonsattel, the Swiss-American artist, to be available on last minute notice.

The season ticket holders arrive for the 8 pm event to find the concert hall at CSUF dimly lit. The program is mostly French, perhaps the lighting is meant to reflect the gentle colorations of Debussy and Ravel. No! Power is out for the entire campus. This is a new challenge for Werz, but there are generators and battery powered lights to highlight the featured artist. Fortunately the weather is cool so we won’t miss the air conditioning. The show must go on. His challenges are not over, but that will wait for later in the evening.

Enter Gilles Vonsattel. All is well. This young pianist has verve and technical dexterity. He begins with a seldom heard set of pieces by Francis Poulenc entitled Les Soirées de Nazelles. The eight short works are vintage Poulenc, combining a seductive blend of cabaret intoxication with suave sophistication. Vonsattel interprets the music with chameleon changes in color, witty humor one moment and dark sarcasm the next. He is particularly adroit at emphasizing melodic fragments within a context of blended tone colors.

Images I and II by Debussy follow. This is music that defines musical impressionism. Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections on the water), like French cuisine, must be judged by its subtle nuances. Vonsattel suggests that this is not some shadowed pool of water. In his view it is a lake on a sunny day. He paints the watery images with blended beauty but when a breeze stirs the water he catches the white intensity of the reflected sun. There can be no question of his accomplished technical facility, yet he brings a certain crispness to impressionism that, if not carefully controlled, could detract from the composer’s intended ambiguity. At times he is like a music box that is too tightly wound.

The highlight of Images II was Cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells sounding over the leaves). This was Vonsattel’s most effective interpretation of impressionism. The bells he evoked were more like wind chimes moved by a breeze. He found colors and harmonic blends that are seldom heard from the keyboard. Just before intermission he demonstrated the full range of his interpretative skill and finger dexterity in Poissons d’or (Goldfish). This was no little aquarium of lethargic fish. It was a crowded pond of brilliantly hued koi competing with each other for food tossed from an arched bridge.

Following intermission which was enjoyed in the darkened hallways, Vonsattel returned with the most familiar work of the evening, Chopin’s Ballade in A-flat Major, Op. 47. Vonsattel played this work like a Shakespearian actor determined to find hidden insights in a familiar character. His tempo was slightly slower than expected giving him time to discover details which other artists gloss over. Inner voices and surprising emphases made the music intriguing.

The final scheduled work was Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit in which three rather dark poems are musically illustrated. Ondine (a mythological water nymph) gave Vonsattel another opportunity to demonstrate his unique view of impressionism, which combines blended tone colors with bursts of brilliance. Then comes the dark, barren landscape of Le Gibet (The gallows) in which distant bells ring and a body is discovered hanging by the neck. But wait! Why is that uniformed officer walking onto the stage? The impresario has met his match. The concert is not permitted to continue. Applause thanks the artist. There will be no encore. He walks into the wings. We are escorted out the side doors. It is a safety issue.

With begrudging acquiescence the audience departs hoping that someday soon Gilles Vonsattel can return and finish his program and receive a well deserved standing ovation.

Larry Warkentin, pianist, composer and professor emeritus at Fresno Pacific University.