Pianist’s recital celebrates Khachaturian as national hero
Expressing ethnic identity was not exactly encouraged in the Soviet Union. But Aram Khachaturian got away with it.
Pianist Kariné Poghosyan’s concise all-Khachaturian program in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall Tuesday night—an hour and a quarter with no intermission—drew a vivid profile of the Tbilisi-born composer whose infectious rhythms, exotic Armenian harmonies and persistent optimism helped him (mostly) escape the opprobrium heaped on other modern composers (notably Shostakovich) by Stalin’s arts commissars.
No, Poghosyan did not play “Sabre Dance.” But the energy that made that ballet number a pop hit in the USA was evident throughout her program, as was the cinematic sweep of familiar items such as the Adagio from Spartacus and the Waltz from Masquerade Suite, which bookended the program as opener and encore, respectively.
Unlike composers such as Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff, Khachaturian was not known as a pianist, and yet, as Poghosyan testified in a program note, his piano pieces “feel good under the fingers.” They sounded good too, as she skillfully roamed the keyboard, producing sonorities ranging from orchestral to the jazzy riffs of an Armenian village virtuoso.
A favorite pianistic technique for Khachaturian was rapidly alternating hands, which he used to produce twitchy little ornaments or chordal trills or avalanches of octaves—or all of the above in a single page. At times, in fact, the music was changing horses so often it seemed to have ADHD.
Khachaturian’s Toccata, for example, didn’t follow the runaway-train model of toccatas by Schumann or Prokofiev. Instead it offered a wildly unpredictable bag of pianistic tricks ranging from bounding octaves to rhetorical flourishes to a mechanistic whir—all the different ways to “touch” a keyboard, as the title implied.
Three early pieces from the 1920s mixed influences from that heady time (Gershwin, Bartók, Debussy) with Khachaturian’s move-on style. Poem was no dreamy meditation but an epic, opening in a burst of syncopated rhythms, unafraid of dissonance, pausing for a snatch of modal melody with luxurious rubato, then racing ahead, but chiming softly at the close. Despite its dainty title, Valse-Caprice was a volatile, high-energy affair, bristling with alternating-hands passages, as was Tanz, Bartókian in its raw folk tune and shifting meters.
Poghosyan delivered this turn-on-a-dime music with a strong sense of pace and phrasing to go with her athletic technique. Her tone ranged from massive, unforced fortissimo to atmospheric pianissimo, but could have used a few more colors to distinguish the voices and a firmer center to the tone in soft playing.
Interspersed among these more challenging, unfamiliar pieces were items from the Khachaturian comfort zone, orchestral music for the stage arranged for solo piano. Matthew Cameron’s highly effective version of the Spartacus Adagio swelled the tender melody eventually to a Lisztian roar of octaves and keyboard-spanning arpeggios.
The Nocturne and Romance from the Masquerade Suite, as arranged by Alexander Dolukhanian, became intimate keyboard pieces, molto espressivo, the latter a small-r romantic duet for voices in the piano’s middle and upper registers. Poghosyan’s own arrangement of the “Oror” (Lullaby), a quieter moment than “Sabre Dance” from the ballet Gayaneh,began by rocking its Armenian melody to a gentle 6/8 rhythm, although one imagines the pianist’s persistent rubato and the composer’s short attention span would result in a wide-awake baby.
The program closed with the one large-scale work on the program, Khachaturian’s Piano Sonata of 1961. This product of the Khrushchev thaw in Soviet arts in effect allowed Jelly Roll Morton and Art Tatum to come to the Armenian party, with dazzling results.
The sonata’s first movement was more toccata-like than the Toccata, the right hand whirling over a staccato left and breaking into sonorous octaves and chords. Another romantic melody unfolded in the Andante tranquillo second movement, interrupted by a passionate fortissimo episode in fistfuls of octaves, then returning as a call-and-response, the right hand crossing back and forth over the left.
The Allegro vivace finale, an Armenian boogie-woogie with a driving left hand, exploited every kind of touch from legato to staccato, marcato to leggiero, and dry sound to wet, amid sudden explosions of bass octaves and chords, topped by an extravagant, everywhere-at-once coda.
The Masquerade Waltz, with its glittering “three hands” effects, made a brilliant encore, followed by a brief sendoff, the atmospheric “Unabi” from Six Dances for Piano by Komitas Vardapet.
