Auer and Auer’s four hands make light work of Schubert at Zankel Hall
Pianists spend years learning how to conceal the fact that the piano is a percussion instrument. One skilled player seated at the piano can conjure visions of clouds floating by, a gondolier singing in the night, or a shower of stars.
If one pianist can do that, two should also be able to, right? And yet all too often in performances for piano four-hands, that dream-weaver instrument regresses to a box full of hammers, bumping and thumping through piece after piece. One finds oneself admiring the players’ skill and coordination instead of being transported by the music.
Thursday’s all-Schubert program by the husband-and-wife team of Edward Auer and Junghwa Moon Auer in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall illustrated the point neatly. The first half consisted of well-designed but somewhat pallid renderings of pieces for four hands, including the monumental Fantasie in F minor, D. 940; after intermission, Mr. Auer came onstage alone and gave a performance of another powerful late work, the solo Sonata in A major, D. 959, that revealed new realms of tone color and personal expression.
The Auers’ shared sense of timing and crisp attacks testified to years of performing together. Playing the more prominent “primo” part at the treble end of the keyboard, Ms. Moon Auer introduced themes and added decorative filigree, while Mr. Auer accompanied and occasionally sang out in the piano’s tenor register.
The first sign of what might be called four-hand syndrome came in the impassioned opening bars of the Allegro in A minor, D. 947—subtitled “Lebensstürme” (Life’s Storms) by a publisher after the composer’s death—which, on this night, clattered instead of swelling with emotion. When the dynamic dropped to piano, the liveliness tended to drain out of the players’ tone.
The focus of the performance seemed to be on staying together rather than the intricate play of light and shade that made Schubert the ultimate master of composing for piano four hands.
The sunny Rondo in A major, D. 951, fared better, stepping along in a loose-limbed Allegretto from episode to episode as voices emerged and receded in the piano texture. With few minor-key moments to cloud the picture, the performance could have used more colors of major to sustain interest as the cheerful main theme returned again and again, but this genial music still made an effective contrast with the stormy Allegro.
With its sonata-like sequence of sections, effective contrast is what the F minor Fantasie is all about. In Thursday‘s performance, one wished for more suspense in the hushed opening bars and less brittle tone in the forte outbursts. Still, there was pleasure to be had in a mysterious dialogue of trills here and the interplay of rocketing scales there, and the emphatic coda capped the piece with a dramatic flourish.
As duo playing gave way to solo on Thursday’s program, Edward Auer’s vigorous, deeply personal rendition of the great A major Sonata recalled those heady days of the 1960s, when he and a handful of other young American pianists were turning heads in the most prestigious European competitions.
Auer’s breakthrough came when he finished just behind Martha Argerich in the 1965 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. His subsequent fame as an interpreter of Chopin’s profound lyricism and fire surely informed Thursday’s first movement, which was by turns assertive and thoughtful, and always richly colored.
The slow tread of the somber Andantino was always in time, yet responsive to expressive surges in the cantabile melody, while the middle section blossomed into luxuriant fantasy, an explosion of dramatic scales and octaves. In Auer’s vigorous interpretation, the Scherzo emphasized bumptious humor over the light fantastic, with a thumping trio that pointed explicitly back to the sonata’s emphatic opening chords.
The peripatetic finale opened with one of those irresistible Schubert rondo themes that one never tires of hearing again, then roamed through a thicket of modulations to distant keys, with Auer’s skill at transitions holding it all together. Some artful hesitations, a sudden Presto dash, and one last echo of those big opening chords topped off this epic sonata.
Auer responded to the enthusiastic applause with an encore, Chopin’s “Raindrop” Prelude in D-flat major, meltingly lyrical in the outer sections and sonorous in the middle.
Pianist Yunchan Lim performs Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations 8 p.m. Friday in Carnegie Hall. carnegiehall.org
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