New York Classical Review

Pianist Seong-Jin Cho may cut an impeccably groomed figure onstage, but he uses a lot of hairpins.

“Hairpins” is musicians’ slang for those elongated, V-shaped symbols in musical notation that tell a pianist (or violinist) to play gradually louder or gradually softer. Sharp as they look, they are a blunt instrument. The pianist who simply dials the volume up or down as indicated won’t hold our attention long.

Cho’s hairpins, as abundantly displayed in his Carnegie Hall recital Sunday afternoon, came in all sizes and colors, and taken together they brought a molto espressivo style to composers as diverse as Bach, Schoenberg, Schumann and Chopin.

Do the stately Baroque curves of the Prelude of Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B-flat major really need to swoon and sway as much as they did in Cho’s performance Sunday?  No, but the pianist’s subtle rubato and soft swells made a case for the piano as the medium of this music that was composed for a harpsichord. On the page, the lively figurations of the Allemande and the Courante seem to stack like geological strata, but Cho’s constant inflections made them seem less like terraces and more like verdant banks.

Like the “Passion” variation at the center of the Goldberg Variations, this Partita’s Sarabande is the meditation garden in the middle of a lot of scampering music. Cho unwound its florid melody to heavenly length, using the repeats to sink even deeper into introspection, before two jaunty Menuets cleared the way for the left hand to dialogue with itself in the witty hand-crossing Gigue.

With a little help from Carnegie’s live acoustic, Cho achieved his many effects of color and phrasing in Bach without once resorting to the piano’s damper pedal.

The pedal is also a no-no in Arnold Schoenberg’s Bach-inspired Suite for Piano, Op. 25, or at least a less-less, according to the composer’s instruction in the score. But composer and pianist alike seemed to recognize that the “modern” piano is in fact a 19^th-century instrument, engineered for playing music of the Romantic era, and Cho held nothing back when it came to powerful and rich sonorities, or exploiting the contrasts of loud and soft that gave the “pianoforte” its name.

In its day (1923), this Suite was a feat of harmonic daring, the first piece created entirely according to Schoenberg’s revolutionary “system of composing with twelve tones.”  Present-day listeners, with a century of emancipated dissonances behind them, would be more likely to revel in Cho’s robust performance and to pick up on the influences of Debussy and jazz than to fret over the absence of tonic and dominant chords.

In six movements ranging from an athletic Praeludium to a closing Gigue of almost Schumann-like volatility, the founder of the Second Viennese School took pains, in the midst of revolution, to link his music to its Baroque ancestors. 

Cho’s well-planned program moved next to Schumann in Vienna. The composer visited the city of Mozart and Beethoven in 1838 in search of career advancement, but found mostly parties and pretty ladies that momentarily distracted him from his true love Clara back home. He did come away with one new composition, Faschingsschwank aus Wien (Carnival Jest from Vienna), Op. 26, a five-movement piece that approached the heft of a sonata while keeping some of the volatile spirit of his earlier piano cycles such as Carnaval and Papillons.

Bookended by a long, episodic first movement (marked “very lively”) and a brilliant finale (“extremely lively”), the brief middle movements offered glimpses of the small-town visitor in the imperial capital: missing his girl in the melancholy Romanze, skipping down the boulevard in the airy Scherzino, and missing her even more in the impassioned Intermezzo.

Cho vividly conveyed the character of these vignettes, and if he rushed and played out of time a bit in the fast outer movements, Schumann’s impulsive personality at least partly justified it.

The 19-year-old Chopin visited Vienna 10 years before Schumann did, and was less impressed with the party scene there. “Here waltzes are called works!” he wrote home indignantly. But upon settling in Paris, the Polish composer got with the continent-wide dance craze and composed waltzes himself, “works” that, in their subtlety, variety and expressiveness, could sustain the entire second half of a piano recital, as they did on Sunday.

Billed in the program as “Selected Waltzes,” this group of 14 pieces actually constituted the entire canon published in or just after Chopin’s lifetime. (At least three more saw print in the 20^th century.)  They were artfully ordered into a kind of mega-suite, with the more reflective or minor-key ones as a sort of central interlude between frothy confections at the start and heftier ones that grew in virtuosity, closing with the Grande Valse brilliante in E-flat major, Op. 18.

Cho favored fast, free tempos in the early going, undanecable but irresistible in their heedless gaiety.  A more thoughtful note intruded with the Waltz in A-flat major, Op. 69, no. 1, tinged with graceful melancholy despite its major key, and the sighing phrases of the C-sharp minor, Op. 64. no. 2. The influence of the Johann Strausses was evident in the animated main tune and courtly interludes of the G-flat major, Op. 70, no. 3.

The A minor, Op. 34, no. 2, was the still point at the center of this turning world, marked Lento and growing from a mere murmur of a tune in the left hand.

These entertainments gained substance from the counterpoints, actual or implied, that Chopin wove through them and to which Cho was ever-alert, culminating in the D-flat Waltz, Op. 70, no. 3, in which the right hand played an intricate duet with itself over the left’s simple accompaniment.

The logical next step was the Waltz in A-flat major, Op. 42, with the right hand blithely contradicting the dance’s three-to-a-bar accompaniment with a tune in two, but this fetching cross-rhythm was somewhat obscured in Cho’s swirl of eighth notes.

Yet another Waltz in A-flat major, Op. 34, no. 1, opened the door to the grand ballroom with its merry figurations, so that the Grande Valse, Op. 18—closing this set, but actually Chopin’s first published waltz—could burst forth in its full Straussian splendor. With its initial call to the dancers, galloping refrain, amorous episodes and tease-and-thrill coda, this performance put the cherry on top of a molto espressivo recital.

The pianist favored the audience with two encores: Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9, no. 2, arioso to a kind of slow-waltz beat, and “Soirée de Vienne” by Strauss’s contemporary Alfred Grünfeld, a virtuoso mashup of tunes from Die Fledermaus and other Strauss hits.

Carnegie Hall presents pianist Khatia Buniatishvili performing works by Schubert, Beethoven and Liszt, 8 p.m. Wednesday. carnegiehall.org.