A pianistic odyssey opens the Northwest Bach Festival’s Classics series

The 39th annual Northwest Bach Festival opened Wednesday night with something that is all too infrequent in Spokane: a solo piano recital. There is something uniquely satisfying in having a single musician guide us through centuries of musical creativity, demonstrating his or her ability to play in different styles.

At the same time, this strange, unwieldy instrument must be made to sing in different voices, using different accents, phrasing and coloring melodies in different styles. When it is done successfully, there are few musical experiences to match it.

The soloist in the cozy ambience of Barrister Winery was the Australian pianist Piers Lane, who offered a program running the gamut of musical expression from the chaste, severe eloquence of W.A. Mozart’s (1756-1791) late style (mind you, he was only 32 at the time), through the roiling emotions of middle-period Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) and ardent lyricism of Franz Schubert (1797-1828), to the flamboyant exhibitionism of 20th-century touring virtuosi Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938) and Adolf Schulz-Evler (1852-1905). Lane’s success was somewhat uneven, though in a way that proved surprising.

He opened the program with Mozart’s Sonata in C major K. 545, which the composer intended for young students. It is known as the Sonata Semplice, and epitomizes Artur Schnabel’s famous description of Mozart’s piano music as “too easy for children, and too difficult for grownups.”

The music was written for an early form of the piano, known as the fortepiano, which lacked the modern piano’s carrying power and ability to sustain tones over time. As a consequence of this, and of the extreme clarity and intensity of Mozart’s thought, every detail of the music is totally exposed. The pianist cannot hide a careless phrase or half-struck note in a resonant wash of sound, and, to be honest, much of Lane’s playing in the piece was, as a result, revealed as unfocused and generalized. Too many potentially breathtaking harmonic modulations and anxious dissonances were lost in playing that was rushed and inexpressive.

Likewise, in Mozart’s Adagio in B minor K. 540, one of the great tragic utterances in the history of music for the keyboard, his playing was often simply too unremittingly loud to allow the piece to makes its full effect.

It is hard to say whether these problems began to disappear, or merely had a less evident effect on Lane’s performance of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 23 in F minor Op. 57, the “Appassionata.” Certainly, one could admire his lovely tone and the clarity of his voicing, though, again, some moments of high emotional intensity failed to register, either because the pianist did not take sufficient care at points of transition, or because dynamic levels were kept for too long at an unvarying mezzo-forte, rather than rising and falling with Beethoven’s musical narrative.

One could sense, however, the musical temperature begin to rise in the last movement, in which Lane’s superbly relaxed and flexible technique allowed him to surmount the challenge of Beethoven’s hailstorm of 32nd notes in a way that brought the audience to their feet at the intermission.

When Lane returned for the second half of the program, it soon became plain that he had shed whatever factors may have accounted for the smudges of haste and heaviness in his playing up to that point. The bittersweet melody of Schubert’s late Impromptu in G-flat D. 899 was sung with a perfect blend of tenderness and remorse, while the bass trills reminded us, as they do in several of Schubert’s later works, of the shadow of death that trails earthly beauty.

Lane followed this with an arrangement of Schubert’s song, “Standchen,” by one of the founding fathers of modern piano technique, Franz Liszt (1811-1886). With this, the technical demands of the music grew greater, as did Lane’s mastery of them.

In his pastiche of themes from Schubert’s incidental music to “Rosamunde,” Leopold Godowsky asks the pianist to perform feats that even Liszt never imagined. His specialty was to take pieces that were very challenging in themselves, such as etudes of Frederic Chopin, and combine them, requiring the performer to execute unprecedented feats of hand-crossing and dazzling finger-work, while maintaining the independence of two or three separate voices. Lane not only accomplished this, but did so with a degree of swagger and nonchalance that had the audience shaking their heads in amazement.

From the thickets of notes thrown at him by Godowsky and by Adolf Schulz-Evler, whose “Concert Arabesques on Johann Stauss’s ‘On the Beautiful Blue Danube’” concluded the program, Lane extracted a continual shower of color and song. We were treated to glittering scales, thundering octaves, and, above all, a well-spring of full-throated and stylish melody that seemed inexhaustible … as did the pianist, who returned for an encore with Anatoly Lyadov’s (1855-1914) exquisite “Musical Snuff-box.”