Wolfgang’s melodies ganging up from the get-go? So what’s new?
But mighty Mozart only sparked Shoreline Community College Music Department’s “A Piano, Four-hand Recital” last Sunday afternoon. The fires of creativity were featured guest artist-professors Betty Mallard and David Renner. These University of Texas profs know whereof they profess and perform it.
A dynamic duo at the same piano? Together? At the same time?
Not that solos can’t be tough; but two minds, two nervous systems, two bodies of knowledge, two maelstroms of personal emotion, in sync, doing Mozart and Schubert to Faure and Moszkowski?
That, music lovers, is more than recital. It’s interpretation with zero tolerance for imitation, the real thing.
If Mozart’s playground is no place for grade school kids, his Sonata in B-flat major played Molto Presto is post Ph. D in the next galaxy. But Mallard and Renner boldly went where no man’s gone before, not quite in their way.
M and R’s finely granulated sensitivities kept Mozart’s hyper qualities from getting out of hand while stimulating the excitement that so characterizes the law unto himself’s sheer joy. “Freedom in harness,” as past Poet Laureate Robert Frost preached more than once; aimed at and accomplished, breathtakingly.
Nor could any ear-heart connection fail to engage when the soft sonorities and deeply muted tonal colors of Faure’s “Dolly” expanded on this otherwise brooding Romantic’s deep feeling for his mistress’s daughter, mistakenly thought to be his.
With the liberation Faure’s classicism calls for, Mallard and Renner wandered and wondered through the internalized affections of an essentially introverted nature. The “Kitty Valse,” Faure’s tribute to Dolly’s cat, absolutely heartbreaking.
Rich harmonies and expansive treatment of classicism stylized the Austrian Romantic, Schubert’s Grande Sonate, with a rather unexpected sense of daring; meaning going with how Mallard and Renner felt, regardless, personally and together.
As for Schubert’s gift for song, you couldn’t miss it. Also, as usual, his Three Marches Militaires made you want to march in a parade.
Know mysterious Moritz Moszkowki’s opera, “Boabdil,” and you know the inspiration for his Spanish Dances.
Boadil’s themes, revolving around the fall of Granada, are again explored, I don’t say, further but in the Dances. He developed the dances after the opera.
The grandiose, epic qualities of Moszkowski’s Spanish Dances fitted afterward with Mallard and Renner’s encore playing from Brahms’ Hungarian Dances, made for a rousing concert’s finish.
This was a first rate concert and a tribute to Shoreline Community College’s Music Department. They do marvelous things with plans to go forth and multiply. Let’s hope they do.
Reactions? Comments? E-mail Dale Burrows at entopinion@heraldnet.com or grayghost7@comcast.net.
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