Peter Serkin piano recital at Perelman

When Peter Serkin strides youthfully onstage, it strains credulity to realize that he has now been before the public for some 50 years, and that his Curtis Institute teacher Mieczyslaw Horszowski was born only six years after the death of Liszt. Serkin is also powerfully linked to the Romantic tradition through his father, the great Rudolph Serkin, whose performances and recordings of Beethoven, Brahms and other 19th-Century masters are still canonic.

Serkin did offer a Chopin sampler at his recital last Wednesday in the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society's series: a Polonaise (the Op. 40, No. 2); an impromptu (Op. 29); an etude (the A flat major from the Trois études nouvelles), and the Nocturne, Op. 62, No. 2. Debussy appeared, too, with his Epigraphes antiques, a suite of six pieces after the poet Pierre Louys.

The remainder of Serkin's program, however, was aggressively modern, at least by local standards. Arnold Schoenberg's Three Pieces, Op. 11, a landmark of the 20th-Century piano literature, opened the program, and Schoenberg's Suite, Op. 25 ended it, while two works by living composers— the Hungarian Gyorgy Kurtag and the American Charles Wuorinen— were sandwiched in between.

At first glance, such a program might seem a miscellany, not to say a smorgasbord. But Serkin never programs casually, and as the evening progressed it became apparent that we were being treated to a grand tutorial on the Western piano tradition, at least from Serkin's perspective.

Schoenberg's central role

It's obvious enough that Chopin and Debussy are central to that tradition; but so, Serkin would argue, is Schoenberg, even though he wrote only five works for solo keyboard. The Three Pieces of Op. 11, composed in 1909, are a critical milestone in Schoenberg's abandonment of tonality that year, just as the Five Pieces, Op. 23, would see the first full-fledged deployment of serialism.

The first two pieces of Op. 11 are marked Massig (solid), but they represent in fact Schoenberg's first tentative explorations of a new sonic and expressive world. Hearing them at a distance of a century, I'm struck less by their novelty than their resemblance to the not dissimilar experimentalism of Scriabin and Debussy.

The last piece, however— marked Bewegt (agitated)— is another matter. It leaps from the piano like a panther stalking his cage, and brings with it a fury that, still trammeled in some respects, is unlike anything heard before.

Revolutionary potential

The remainder of Serkin's recital was really an extended commentary on the opening work, which he used to pivot both backward and forward along the tradition. Against the backdrop of Schoenberg, Debussy's Epigraphes wore a harder, more modernist edge, while the contemporary works that concluded the first half of the program— four miniatures by Kurtag and a ferocious Scherzo by Wuorinen— showed in their very different ways the expressive potential of the revolution that Schoenberg unleashed.

Kurtag's work exhibited a Webernian concision, while the Wuorinen Scherzo, written two years ago for Serkin, is an outburst, a take-no-prisoners work that never pauses in its volcanic yet tautly controlled discharge. Serkin's mastery of it was as extraordinary a feat of sheer pianism as I can recall, and I've heard the likes of Horowitz and Richter.

Chopin without sentiment

Chopin, after that? Yes, but a notably robust and unsentimental Chopin, meant to reveal not only a tender poet but a formidable innovator— one who could plausibly lead not only to a Debussy but to a Schoenberg, as deeply different as all three men were in sensibility.

There are, certainly, other and more affecting ways to play Chopin, not that Serkin lacked a poetry of his own. But the impetus of the performances seemed to be as much pedagogical as expressive, urging us to perceive Chopin as part of a broader musical continuum. So it was logical after all to end with Schoenberg, the movements of whose Op. 25 Suite— marked, respectively, Praeludium, Gavotte/Musette, Intermezzo, Minuet/Trio, and Gigue— return us to the forms of the Baroque.

In ends, beginnings

To be sure, this is genuinely modern music, not the tedious toying with neotonalism that Schoenberg was to indulge in his more retrograde works of the 1930s. But the Eliot-like point is made: In our ends are our beginnings. The piano's individually struck notes made it particularly suitable as a vehicle for the 12-tone system (the harpsichord, with its complete absence of overtones, would seem even more ideal). And that, of course, leads us back to the Baroque formalism that Schoenberg perhaps ultimately represents.

With this, Serkin concluded his program, but he immediately returned to cap it with an encore by Bach, as if to say, "You knew where I was taking this all along, didn't you?"

To hold the whole span of musical history, from the well-tempered clavier to the terrible-tempered Charles Wuorinen, in the suspension of a single evening, to unfold a full vision of the classical tradition through selection and performance alone and without a single word of commentary (think how Bernstein would have hammed this up!)— that is first-class pedagogy, and first-class music making too.