Symphony review: Pascal Rogé’s weekend of joyful, masterful pieces to continue next week
Pascal Rogé, internationally recognized for over 50 years as one of the world’s most engaging and illuminating pianists, arrived in Spokane last week for an extended stay. Violating the expectation honored by most touring musicians – arrive on Friday night for a rehearsal on Saturday morning, a performance that evening, and a departure early Sunday morning –Rogé, accompanied by his wife and duet partner, Elena Font, will be here for nearly two weeks. This will allow sufficient time for a radio interview, a master class and three public performances, the first two of which took place this past weekend in the recital hall of the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center on the Gonzaga campus. Another opportunity to see and hear Rogé will come at 7:30 pm April 27, in the Fr. Bernard J. Coughlin, S.J. Theater at the Woldson Center, when he and Elena Font will join the Gonzaga Orchestra and their conductor, professor Kevin Hekmatpanah in a performance of Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for two pianos.
On Saturday, the duet of Font and Rogé offered a wonderfully generous program of music for the piano by French and Spanish composers between 1892 and 1920. While orchestral versions exist of all the works we heard, most of them were composed originally for piano by accomplished masters of the instrument who excelled in their ability to use sound to evoke the sensory experience of color, scent and narrative drama.
From the opening measures of the first piece, Ravel’s suite, “Ma Mère L’Oye,” the exceptional qualities of this duet were apparent. There was a unity of conception between Rogé and Font, allowing them to render Ravel’s open, transparent textures in a manner both relaxed and disciplined. Both players inflected their parts subtly, but effectively, drawing attention not to themselves, but to Ravel’s delicate changes in harmony.
Most of all, one noted the delicious variety of colors that resulted from the two players’ differing approaches to the keyboard. Font, who took the upper, or “Primo” part in the Mother Goose suite, produces a distinct, bell-like quality of sound which retains its firm center at every dynamic level, while Rogé’s remarkable technique produces a tone that is both deep and wide, an enveloping cloud of overtones that he controls at will, in part through masterful use of the pedals, and in part through management of fingers, wrists and shoulders far too subtle to analyze.
Elena Font’s performance of her solo piece on the program, the Ritual Fire Dance from Manuel De Falla’s ballet “El Amor Brujo” (“Love, The Magician”) proved she is a completely finished musician. Her clarion tone wedded to a temperament that expresses Falla’s ardently Hispanic music, matching fierce passion with equally fierce discipline. Font kept her focus on the emotional trajectory of the piece, as well as its balletic origins. One could easily imagine a dance passage beginning with only tapping of the heels, progressing by stages to a passionate frenzy. During it all, Font remained poised and still at the keyboard, allowing our imaginations to be swept along by the music, rather than short-circuited by a need to watch the performer.
In an interview with radio’s Jim Tevenan, Rogé explained that, at its heart, French music is grounded in sensory experience – in impressions of color, light and images – rather than in rational forms, as is the case with music of the German tradition. One could not imagine a more complete embodiment of that idea than the way in which Rogé plays the piano. He more fully attains Debussy’s ideal of “a piano without hammers” than any other pianist, either alive or on record, with the single exception of the Alsatian-German pianist Walter Gieseking (1895-1956), whose renditions of the music of Debussy and Ravel are legendary.
The entire program on Saturday was cleverly and effectively planned to explore the mutual fascination that French and Spanish artists felt for each other’s culture. At the same time, it demonstrated the artistic benefits of combining the talents of two exceptional pianists, one Spanish and the other, French.
On Sunday, the Franco-Hispanic duality was maintained, and a significant new element introduced: All works on the program were for cello and piano. Kevin Hekmatpanah, professor of music at Gonzaga, director of the Gonzaga Symphony and an experienced professional cellist has been a member of the Spokane Symphony cello section since 1996. In the first portion of a diverse and demanding program, consisting of works by Debussy, Falla and Lili Boulanger, Hekmatpanah was partnered at the piano by Font. Rogé assumed that role in the second portion, comprising two brilliant and demanding works by Piazzolla and Poulenc.
By the time the recital concluded, hardly a mood or emotion remained unexplored. The Debussy was terse, elusive and enigmatic. The Falla “Suite Populaire” was adapted from a set of seven songs which Falla invested with all the passions of Andalusian culture. The robust, mahogany quality of Hekmatpanah’s tone (which he is able to replicate in the Gonzaga Symphony) proved the ideal simulacrum for the mezzo voice of Falla’s songs.
When Lili Boulanger wrote her Nocturne, originally for violin and piano, she was 18 years old. For someone so young to achieve such mastery of harmonic and emotional complexity is truly astounding. It reinforces the tragic nature of her death only seven years later. Partnered with great subtlety and quicksilver alertness by Font, Hekmatpanah played with all the sensitivity and pathos demanded by Boulanger’s remarkable masterpiece.
Shortly after he took his seat before the lovely Steinway provided for the occasion, Rogé revealed an additional dimension to the command of the instrument he displayed on Saturday. The warm, rounded tone with which he evoked the playing of the Javanese gamelan in Debussy’s “Pagodes” was not appropriate to the passions and ironies of Piazzola, or to the jaunty rhythms and melodies of the Parisian boulevard found in Poulenc’s Sonata. Furthermore, the addition of the cello’s chesty tone calls for a more focused, penetrating tone. Accordingly, with no perceptible change in his physical movements, the quality of tone he produced from the piano was different.
Despite the brief period available to prepare works of such extravagant difficulty, Hekmatpanah navigated the technical and – more significant – the emotional/interpretive demands of both the Piazzolla and Poulenc pieces with magisterial control, revealing both relatively little-known works to be authentic masterpieces, demanding further study and exposure by every serious lover of music. To enjoy the partnership of Rogé, who mined every measure for all the pathos, joy and wit it possessed was, of course, of inestimable value to Hekmatpanah, as, indeed, it was to the audience.