Meagan Cignoli
The latest offering in the Salon Piano series from Farley’s House of Pianos is a thought-provoking one.
First, the performers. Alon Goldstein is the visiting pianist, and he begins things with a Scarlatti sonata, played on a clavichord built by Tim Farley, then repeated on piano. He also plays three other pieces — none of which are identified. Goldstein is a stimulating musician who is also skilled in giving spoken introductions to his performances. But his Scarlatti playing is not to my taste: too fast, and too much Romantic dynamic nuance.
He is then joined by no less than our own Pro Arte Quartet (with David Scholl playing bass) for two major works. The first is a reduction of Mozart’s Concerto No. 23 in A, by Franz Lachner, for string quintet (double bass added) with the piano. Such reductions were common in the composer’s day; Mozart himself made reductions of his early concertos. But the later concertos are too rich in wind writing to be satisfying in this form, save as vehicles for domestic music-making. Still, as concert pieces today, such an arrangement is at least interesting for its intimacy.
The largest work, however, is the Quintet for Piano and Strings in F Minor, by Brahms (Interestingly, just this past September, the Salon series presented Brahms’s earlier version of this work as a sonata for two pianos). This performance, like that of the Mozart before it, was notable for the impetus given by Goldstein, who likes to play fast and is a propulsive stimulus to the quartet members. This is an exhilarating performance.
It was not the visiting pianist who built this as a program of chamber music, but Renee Farley: a welcome broadening of the series. But, in fact, the true star of the concert is the piano played by Goldstein, effectively making its debut here. This is a 1908 Chickering concert grand, recently and lovingly restored by Tim Farley and his team. A video presentation preceding the concert shows the restoration. With an upper register that is less pointed and more mellow than in latter-day instruments, and with a particularly rich bass, it becomes less confrontational with the strings and more readily integrated with them. Indeed, I wondered if we should rethink the balances and textures originally heard in piano-and-strings chamber works of that day.
The concert is repeated Sunday afternoon, March 11, at 4 p.m.
