Veteran pianist Garrick Ohlsson graced the McAfee Theatre in Saratoga, Sunday evening 12 October 2008, the second artist to appear as part of the Steinway Society's Bay Area series, 2008-2009. With a program devoted to Beethoven and Scriabin, two keyboard composers of disparate temperaments and sensibilities, Ohlsson demonstrated the plasticity and bravura of his digital prowess and his musical tastes, which run the gamut of Romantic expression.

Ohlsson opened with the time-honored “Pathetique” Sonata in C Minor, Op. 13, an early example of Beethoven’s internalizing of the sturm und drang sensibility of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Ohlsson took the opening Grave section with a resounding maestoso affect, including the repeat, which evolved into a typical Beethoven confrontation of light and dark forces, the chromatics of the composer’s pain in dire combat with the diatonism of his will. That Ohlsson can play tenderly as easily as he can accommodate wild abandon became evident in the Adagio cantabile, a movement of tender melancholy. The Rondo facilely captured the disquiet of the opening context, the quick figures darkly hinting at those figures from the Allegro di molto, which Wagner seized for Tristan. Nice applications of luftpausen lent a dramatic pathos to the reading, thoroughly in sympathy with the requirements of this virtuoso, often titanic masterpiece.

A different Beethoven emerged via the Sonata No. 11 in B-flat Major, Op. 22, an engaging, often wildly experimental exercise from Beethoven’s “Vulcan’s laboratory” of the piano sonata. Though cast in a traditional, even conservatively Classical format, this devilish piece exerts a sense of humor Beethoven will evince more explicitly later, in his Eighth Symphony. Graceful, easy figures chase each other in the opening movement, played by Ohlsson as a kind of scherzino etude demanding lightness and digital fluency. The Adagio con molto espressione, however, proved much closer to the “emotional” school of Bach’s sons, often bordering on what Chopin accomplished in his night-pieces. Angular and modal, the Minuetto played the Manichean, with divisions of major and minor shades. The last movement, especially, both saluted and mocked the Mozart tradition, contrapuntally engaging and impishly accented, with touches from the so-called “sonatinas” from Beethoven’s Op. 49. Witty and buoyantly explosive, Ohlsson’s performance made many an onlooker query the absence of this brilliant sonata in many an instrumentalist’s repertory.

The entire second half of Ohlsson’s concert devoted itself to the Russian mystic and iconoclast Scriabin; and Ohlsson provided a ten-minute lecture mid-way in this section, just after his having performed four of the Chopin-influenced Op. 11 Preludes and the Second Sonata in G-sharp Minor, Op. 19. The moto perpetuo of the Fantasy-Sonata played right into Ohlsson’s massive hands, a brilliant toccata of sensual and arresting character. With Scriabin’s Desir, Op. 57, No. 1—Ohlsson likes to play the composer along chronological lines, the opus numbers progressing toward Op. 72—we entered a hothouse world of post-Tristan harmony suffused with idiosyncratic mysticism. The Poem and Prelude, Op. 59, proved noteworthy, infrequent works, of which the Prelude, marked “bellicose,” suggested the liquid fire that comprises much of Scriabin’s legacy. The Etude, Op. 65, No. 1, in ninths, had Ohlsson stretching fingers and harmonic diction into the aether of misty worlds, a journey Vers La Flamme (1914) extended, with its surreal moments that could be linked to Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory.” That the piece ends with an E major scale seems almost an after-thought, a concession to a tonal world Scriabin had virtually discarded.

A hearty round of applause inspired Ohlsson to offer us three pieces from Scriabin’s idol, Frederic Chopin. The Grand Waltz in E-flat, Op. 18 shone and sparkled, leading to the tender and aggressive Etude in E, Op. 10, No. 3. Although we might have been sated with Romantic poetry, Ohlsson decided to end his generous, even voluptuous recital with pungent fire, Chopin’s Etude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 10, No. 4, which even had Ohlsson’s uttering a resounding “Whew!” in response to his own, formidable virtuosity.

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Dr. Gary R. Lemco is a guest reviewer for
Classical Music Guide and resides in California