Marcantonio Barone piano recital

On paper, Marcantonio Barone's recital last week seemed an odd, unbalanced mix; a first half with a Haydn Sonata plus two new works, including a world premiere, and a second half filled with a great, lumbering warhorse, Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition. The perils of poor programming were discussed insightfully in Robert Zaller's recent BSR review of the Philadelphia Orchestra's February 25-28 concerts. But in practice, surprisingly, Barone's diverse assemblage was an unqualified success, with music that sprang to life as if the composers were all vivacious and engaging guests at a really good party, even if one or two of them might have had too much to drink. His exceptionally vivid and smart playing pulled everything together.

Haydn's music tends to be respected by the general public, but not revered. Pianists, however, love his solo keyboard output because it's so dramatically concise and slyly humorous. Alfred Brendel has said that he measures the success of his playing of Haydn by whether or not he can get the audience to laugh out loud. Marc-Andre Hamelin, in recital at the Perelman Theater earlier this year, did actually elicit audible chuckles for a Haydn encore.

The Sonata in E that Barone played contains humor as well, but it was the sort that caused the listener to smile rather than laugh out loud. This Haydn came across with conversational intimacy, and Barone's precise, chiseled phrasing made it easy and deeply rewarding to engage a remarkably eloquent artistic mind.

Quiet guest at the party

Philip Maneval was the guest composer at the party who quietly nursed his Cabernet Sauvignon, carefully observing the crowd and chatting only with those who actually had something interesting to say. Lines From a Poem, his new work written for Barone, is reflective, even poetic, constructed with Maneval's characteristic elegance and precision. It served as a contemplative respite from a generally raucous evening of music making.

David Finko, born in 1936, is a product of the great Soviet music-making machine, a graduate of the vaunted St. Petersburg Conservatory. Russian pedagogy was, and is, quite traditional, including an intense reverence for the giants of the Classical era. Thus we get the neo-Classicism of Prokofiev, and in the case of the Finko Sonata No. 2 (also written for Barone), a Haydn sonata cloaked in extreme modernism.

Extreme is the operative word, and it applies to many aspects of the work, which seems to use all 88 keys of the piano and every possible dynamic variation. Harmonically, Finko sounds like a liquored-up Liszt on acid, with echoes of the Hungarian composer's only sonata occasionally bleeding through the corpulent pile of notes. Wildly entertaining stuff, if not a little scary.

Old work, neat trick

Certain pieces of music, Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition among them, are so stamped by famous performances that it is hard for new performances to carry any kind of freshness. The dueling recordings of Horowitz and Richter, now both over a half-century old, continue to inform the way we hear this music and, consequently, how it's performed. Barone, without in any way violating the intent of the composer, managed to find a distinctive way with the score, via dazzling virtuosity.

That's a neat trick; Marcantonio Barone is a superb pianist whom many Philadelphians may take for granted, as he has been on the scene here since his child prodigy days in the 1970s. We shouldn't. Barone is a world-class artist, and we're fortunate to have him as a vital member of our local musical community.♦


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