Leif Ove Andsnes at Cal Performances

 

Leif Ove Andsnes

(photo credit: Helge Hansen, courtesy of Cal Performances)

I have a soft spot in my heart for offbeat repertory, the works you never hear or that are comparatively rare, works that I've never heard. And it's a plus when a famous musician who could play nothing but core repertory goes out of his way to play some rarities.

Leif Ove Andsnes's recital at Cal Performances last night, April 1, had two rarities on the first half, sonatas by Norwegian composers. These were Edvard Grieg (his early Op. 7, written in 1865 when he was 22) and Geirr Tveitt, whose Op. 129 was his twenty-ninth piano sonata. 

The Tveitt comes with a sad story: in 1970, the composer lost an estimated 70% of his work to a terrible fire. Let that sink in: 70% of his life's work gone. Somehow 70% of his work had never been published, and also there weren't copies anywhere else. 

The second half of the concert was Chopin's 24 Preludes, Op. 28, and, well, one major takeaway from the concert was the obvious fact that Chopin was a towering composer, and Grieg and Tveitt were not.

The Grieg is amiable enough, in four tuneful, pleasant movements, sometimes better than that, but not in a class with the truly first-class composers of the Romantic period. 

As for Tveitt: a friend was a big fan, to the extent that he kept a stack of Naxos recordings around to hand out to friends. I have one of those CDs, and while I haven't heard it in many years, what I remember is that the orchestral suites on it are amiable settings of folk songs. (Looking at the cover and contents, yes, that's exactly what it is.) They're competently composed enough but didn't make much of an impression on me. As I said to a different friend yesterday, hearing Tveitt for the first time is not like hearing Messiaen or Leifs or Janáček for the first time, where their artistic personalities make an immediate and unforgettable impression.

The Tveitt sonata has its moments, particularly in the last of the three movements, and Andsnes made the most of them, particularly the dramatic ending. The first movement has a lot of what I would call obsessive - but not very interesting - repetition in the right hand, with countermelodies in the left. 

Then came the Chopin, and here I have to say that Andsnes played well, but his style is not what I want to hear in this music*. He used an awful lot of pedal, which resulted in more blurriness in fast passages than I prefer. And his style of rubato is to vary the tempo but keep the hands aligned. I'm a big fan of the other, older, style, where the melody floats independently above the accompanying figures.

Andsnes was certainly accurate, and his voicing was often beautifully clear. But his overpedalling blurred the distinctions among the faster preludes. Too much of the excitement of the Chopin came from speed and loudness rather than from the phrasing, which I found too prosaic. I would have preferred, how can I put this, more schmalz, more heart. My favorite of the Preludes in no. 17 in A-flat major, perhaps the most nostalgic of the set, and it did not affect me as I would have liked it to.

Overall, the Chopin was good, but not great, not breathtaking, not as colorful or deeply emotional as these works can be. And Andsnes's encore, Debussy's "La cathédrale engloutie," (The drowned cathedral) from the composer's own set of Preludes, Book 1, was, again, good, but not as memorable as Cédric Tiberghien's encore last year at SFS following the Ravel G major piano concerto.

Elsewhere:

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle. "Tuesday night's potent recital...was the first time I'd hear
   him perform in a number of years, and it was both a thrill and a reproach."
• [SFCV review to come]

* Most of my favorite Chopin composers are long gone, people like Koczalski, Tiegerman, Friedman, Paderewski, etc. Shura Churkassky lived into the 1990s, though.