Sunday, March 16 marked the appearance of eight talented youngsters at Steinway the Bay Area’s concert at Le Petit Trianon, sponsored by Bottomley Distributing Company.
The musicians, whose ages ran from nine to seventeen, displayed rather awesome prowess at their respective instrument, six at the keyboard, one at the violin, and one cellist, Travis Chen. The level of student musicianship bodes well both for the Bay Area and for American musical talent generally, if the pyrotechnics and stylistic acumen we witnessed are truly representative of music programs today

Alex Chien opened with strong flourishes and ornamental filigree in Chopin’s posthumous Introduction and Variations on a German National Air. Chien’s attention to a steady pulsation proved an impressive asset to his clean, articulate rendering of this airy piece. Laney Huang’s Abbegg Variations, Op. 1 of Schumann easily invoked images of the young Clara Wieck’s rendering these modal anagrams for her future husband, the composer. A light touch, deft figurations--some suggestive of the later Carnaval--and the continuity of the musical line without noticeable sag made the performance musically impressive.

Hilda Huang proffered excerpts from Bach’s dark The Art of Fugue, quite a daunting proposition for an eleven-year-old, especially as one musician, Philip Jordan, once described Der Kunst der Fuge as “Bach’s looking at the planet much as God does, and lamenting over what Man has done with it.” Alternately severe and lyrically dolorous, the music had Huang attending to the niceties of rhythm and metrical polyphony with lucid, muscular strokes. The Contrapunctus 9 a 4 alla Duodecima achieved a tempo feroce which quite shook the listener. Crisp syncopations and articulated stretti in the Canon alla Ottava bespoke a musician rather than a pianist at work.

Diminutive Travis Chen, accompanied by fiercely competent pianist in Dimitry Cogan, played Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance with blazes of glory; then, Chen realized the sarcastic and sometimes tender sentiments of Dmitri Shostakovich in his animated Cello Sonata.
Violinist Mindy Chen took the program to another level in two soli, first with a Welsh folksong, Watching White Wheat, which might have made a dirge worthy of Dylan Thomas. Harmonics and double stops added to the affecting pathos of the piece; then, Chen the tigress appeared, playing the dazzling figures in Wieniawski’s Etude-Caprice, Op. 18, No. 4, whose wicked alterations in registration and applications of the bow rival its more famous kin, the composer’s Scherzo-Tarantelle.

A pupil of Nancy Daggett Jensen, Jordan Ferrer, fifteen, pulled out the stops for Liszt’s own Tarantelle from his Venezia e Napoli, an Italian excursion in double octaves, percussive block chords, glistening slides and cascading arpeggios. Several of the music’s periods hearken to the composer’s Ninth Hungarian Rhapsody. Strongly percussive, Ferrer’s rendition evoked old-fashioned bravura, a sense of the grand style. Ferrer’s mesmeric clangor found a natural foil in Emeline Oliphant’s realization of Ravel’s Jeux D’eau, a water piece much in the Liszt tradition of his pieces for the Villa d’Este. Musically sober and plastically enunciated, Ravel’s bell-like tones found under Oliphant a light yet scintillating hand, silken self-effacement from a pianist who kept Ravel’s classically restrained colors forward.

Last, we heard from a pupil of Hans Boepple, Angela Hwang, who took on the massive Brahms Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Book I. It became quite obvious that the spirit of Paganini’s demonic violin had been nigh all night; only now Brahms could indulge his own digital wizardry to the mix taken from the A Minor Caprice Huge and sinewy, Hwang gobbled up the obstacles in this work--all sorts of spans, glissandi, and admixtures of touch and contrapuntal texture--with businesslike alacrity that did not lack for visceral passion. From densely packed block chords, Hwang would suddenly reveal lustrous, diaphanous figures, alla musette, in the style of an uncanny music-box. A burgeoning virtuoso, perhaps on a par with the late Gina Bachauer, Ms. Hwang capped an evening rife with stellar talents who will eventually grace our concert halls: all they lack, to quote Berlioz, is inexperience