FORT WORTH — The PianoTexas International Festival and Academy almost didn’t get to celebrate its 40th anniversary this month. Between vicissitudes of COVID-19 infections and shifting policies at Texas Christian University, the host institution, this year’s nearly four-week mix of high-level teaching and public performances had to be assembled in a bit of a rush.
Happily, the festival again is offering coaching for pre-college to post-grad-school pianists, plus teachers and amateurs. This year’s “Distinguished Artists” recital series is featuring PianoTexas alumni who’ve gone on to concert careers. To allow for social distancing of reduced audiences, these recitals are being given in TCU’s Ed Landreth Auditorium rather than the usual PepsiCo Recital Hall.
Tuesday evening’s recitalist was Kenny Broberg, a prizewinner in the Van Cliburn, Tchaikovsky and Dallas piano competitions. His program of four sonatas, composed between 1822 and 1914, represented pianistic romanticism at its most flamboyant.
Two of the works were standard repertory: Liszt’s Après une lecture du Dante (a sort of hybrid sonata-fantasia) and Alexander Scriabin’s Sonata No. 5. Two were off the beaten path: Carl Maria von Weber’s Sonata No. 4 in E minor and Nikolai Medtner’s Sonata No. 9 in A minor.
Weber is remembered as a pioneer of romantic opera, but even his operas are rarely mounted by American companies. More obscure are his four piano sonatas, although they were much admired in the early 19th century and praised in the 20th by Igor Stravinsky.
Although a contemporary of Schubert, Weber (1786-1826) in his Fourth Sonata anticipates Liszt’s dramatic and emotional extremes. The mainly melancholy first movement, with some turbulent outbursts, makes much of cascading motifs. The second-movement “Menuetto” is anything but a courtly dance — rather, an explosion of sound and fury. After a consoling slow movement, varying a songlike theme, comes a frenzied finale.
The Liszt was inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, and commentators have imagined its contrasting themes representing cries of the damned in Hell and visions of heavenly bliss. Scriabin’s one-movement Fifth Sonata has no extra-musical program, but its stormy contrasts and harmonic ambiguities represent late romanticism at its most emotionally unsettled.
Like Weber, Medtner (1879-1951) remains in the shadow of a more famous contemporary, in this case Rachmaninoff. But the two Russian composers were close friends and mutual admirers.
Passages in Medtner’s 1914 Ninth Sonata — like the Scriabin in one movement but multiple sections — almost sound like Rachmaninoff, but with denser harmonies and less overt tunefulness. Elsewhere one hears more than a suggestion of Liszt.
Passion and dramatic contrasts ruled in all four of these pieces, and each posed substantial technical demands. Broberg was the master of every technical challenge, but he also vividly conveyed the music’s theatrical and emotional dimensions. He supplied great rhetorical flair, but also sensuous shaping and caressing of more introspective music.
I wish he’d spared us his quite audible humming. And for an educational enterprise, the absence of program notes was regrettable.
Details
Adam Golka presents the final PianoTexas Distinguished Artist recital at 7:30 p.m. June 26 at Ed Landreth Auditorium, 2800 S. University Drive, Fort Worth. $15. 817-257-5893, pianotexas.org.
