Savage Innocence

By Gary Lemco

With the conclusion of her third encore, Chopin's A-flat Etude, Op. 25, No. 1, youthful pianist Natasha Paremski elicited another volley of enthusiastic applause for her digital prowess, demonstrated with often savage resolve Saturday, January 8 at Le Petit Trianon, Theatre, under the auspices of the Steinway Society the Bay Area. Ms. Paremski had already adumbrated this particular etude in the second of Three Character Studies by Fred Hersch (b. 1955), whose rippling arpeggios had followed a left-hand Nocturne, whose style, again, seemed to combine aspects of Scriabin and Chopin's late Prelude in C# Minor, Op. 45. The last of the Studies, a Brazilian chorinho or tango, careered in a fashionable, jazzy spirit, rhythmic but bereft of sensuality.

The Hersch pieces rather instantiated the paradox of Ms. Paremski's volatile but innocent virtuosity. Merely eighteen-years-old, this gifted pupil of Malikova and Dokovska possesses a potent technique and stunning sound projection. Peremski is the Gilmore Young Artist Award reciient, 2006. But she suffers a tendency to execute her repertory in the manner of brilliant etudes, each a studied vehicle for a colossal host of effects instead of a nuanced continuity of affect. Each of the movements from the Chopin B-flat Minor "Funeral March" Sonata reverberated with whiplash motor elements and exploding sforzati, but the interior episodes of calm and quiet, as in the trio section of the Scherzo, could be unsettlingly prosaic or insistently militant, the repetition of each melodic series in the arioso passages utterly identical, without any of rhythmic give-and-take, the rubato, that characterizes Chopin's erotic impulse. If the opening Doppio movimento unleashed a tiger, the Funeral March smacked of the Great Gate of Kiev, and Finale: Presto resonated with Lisztian fervor.

Ms. Paremski opened with Beethoven's D Minor Sonata, Op. 31, No. 2 "The Tempest," which certainly earned its meteorological epithet in this superheated rendition. Paremski attacked this piece as though it were the same composer's Appassionata Sonata, and I cannot say this worked for me. Paremski played it for the long line, the sudden terraced dynamics, and for its harmonic restlessness. The Adagio proved intriguing, as Paremski executed the ostinati in a dramatic manner suggestive of the G Major Concerto. The moto perpetuo, the concluding Allegetto, reverted back to the character of a toccata or eccentric bagatelle, which it is not. I found myself less concerned about the resolution to a cosmic drama than fascinated by the velocity in Paremski's fingers. This aforementioned penchant for bravura undermined Debussy's Estampes, where a hard patina in the style of Ravel and the ability to turn Jardins sous la pluie into a staccato etude do less to reveal the music than to highlight the digital prowess of the performer. Paremski would splash on Debussy's colors less as an engraving and more as a Jackson Pollack action painting. I detect a stolid fixity in Ms. Paremski's conceptions, a lack of plastic flexibility in the music's unfolding which bespeak a sense of always having been "right." Several times I wondered if the piece she should be playing were Scriabin's Fifth Sonata, except that it would be rhythmically dynamic and erotically colorless.

But these are the privileges of youth and precocious genius. That Ms. Paremski is a keyboard star in the making is of little doubt. Her Petrouchka Suite, which she opened with a wonderful pianissimo, had the color and sensational vibrancy for which I had waiting most of the evening. Again, blazing pyrotechnics were the order of the moment, with Stravinsky's Russian fair alit with whirling fireworks and shimmering arabesques. Sometimes burying the melodic tissue in contrapuntal flurries we could hardly follow for the speed of execution, a scalding panoply of effects. Breathlessly played, no lacunae between the three sections, Ms. Paremski had finally come home. Her first encore, Rachmaninov's lovely Elegie from Op. 3, added a moment of repose to the Witches' Brew of the evening. Melancholy and songful, the piece seemed to benefit from Ms. Paremski's habit to undulate in the course of her playing. The second encore, Chopin's fiery Etude in C minor, Op. 25, No. 12 is just the kind of demonstration piece her volcanic temperament requires, a crucible for her technically flawless energies. Ah, but I was young and twenty ...

Posted Tuesday, January 10, 2006 to The Classical Music Guide (www.classicalmusicguide.com).