Music review: Gloria Cheng and Piano Spheres at Zipper Hall

Piano Spheres, one of the Los Angeles classical music landscape’s more surprising and also inspiring success stories, began humbly 16 years ago, and the seeds have fully flowered. Launched at Pasadena’s Neighborhood Church by the late, legendary Leonard Stein, pianist, pedagogue and assistant/direct link to Arnold Schoenberg, the series was designed to feature himself and a handful of gifted students, dealing with mostly contemporary piano repertoire.

All these seasons later, Piano Spheres is an ongoing boon to both the piano and contemporary music concerns in town, and to the West Coast.

At Tuesday night’s season opener, in the more acoustically embracing Zipper Hall, some well-deserved internal celebration was in order -- for the main attraction of this year’s recital by famed contemporary music interpreter Gloria Cheng was a clear and captivating world premiere performance of John Harbison’s entrancing but also coolly measured “Leonard Stein Anagrams.”

True to Harbison’s innate spirit of invention, compositional command, and dogma-free musical range, he has concocted something fascinating, a diverse and connective set of 13 miniatures (the last titled “12a,” in deference to the “13”-phobic Stein and Schoenberg). Each piece bears a title based on anagrams of Stein’s name, including “Note slid near,” “L.A. trend: noise” (a garrulous and exciting blast of piano sound) and “Tender as a lion,” a suitable impression of the imposing yet affable Stein.

Stylistically, we get hints of the influence of Schoenberg — and his miniature-minded pupil Webern — and also Satie (especially in “Rise tone, lad!”), along with revealing doses of Harbison, Stein himself, and detectable elements of Cheng’s musical persona.

Harbison’s work, in fact, was one of two notable world premieres here, alongside Andrew Waggoner’s “La Folie (Fantasme on a Ground),” a more maximal organism. This is music at once viscerally charged and intellectually curious — curious as in strangely compelling and actively, restlessly searching. The piece morphs and folds over itself, unveiling a series of ideas, interests and aspects of what the composer calls the “continuous variation.” It’s a wild ride, in other words, but with self-assurance and dignity beneath the sometimes crazed and Messiaenic surfaces.

Cheng tends to tap into relevant “gestalt,” to borrow her term. At last year’s Piano Spheres recital, she performed Lutoslawski, Steven Stucky and Esa-Pekka Salonen, music featured on a CD that  garnered a Grammy in February. This year’s recital model followed a coherent theme and a broad sweep through modern music, involving pieces written in memoriam and with echoes of music’s past.

She began, logically, with pieces from Shostakovich’s Bach-inspired Preludes and Fugues, middle-distance modernism looking back and leaning forward. Kaija Saariaho’s Prelude and Ballade revel in cloudy swirls of harmonic texture, and Thomas Adès’ 1992 “Darkness Visible” uses tremolo effects and Dowland deconstruction to haunting, lamenting ends (Adès was in-house, incidentally). Luigi Nono’s “…sofferte onde serene…”, the program’s most abstract moment, surreally blends live piano with taped, ghostly echoes.

For a finale, the ever-impressive Calder Quartet joined Cheng for Schnittke’s Piano Quintet, written —slowly — in memory of his late mother. The piece works its way through passages of tension and layering to the mesmeric finale. Here, strings dispense echoes of previous themes over the pianist’s sweet, repetitive music box-like patterns, playing like a life passing before our ears, wistfully.

-- Josef Woodard

Photo: Cheng. Credit: Lefteris Photography

Comments

[Mike Lang]

I have to mention that, in spite of the info/impressions of the music --- I received no sense of Gloria Cheng's performance here.

I know that to prepare a program of this nature, months of preparation are involved. So, in the end, the performances were not reviewed here - an inexcuseable omission. (Apart from one sentence about the Schnittke piece.)

Perhaps Mr Woodward would respect the artist with a published addendum?

[MarK]

Actually, the sentence about the Schnittke was, like the rest of this review, also describing the piece itself and not the performance of it at all. But, to be fair, one has to acknowledge that evaluating performances of new works that the critic may have never heard before is rather difficult. On the other hand, not everything on the program was that new, and the critic could certainly prepare himself better by listening to recordings of Shostakovich and possibly some of the other pieces before going to the concert, so that he would have something to compare the performance to.

[Padavos]

The notion that is a critic may be unable to evaluate the performance aspect of a new work simply because it is new or because he or she has never heard before is false at its root level.
A critic must be able to do so or he is in the wrong business. What about a new painting, or a new play that has never been seen or been performed before? Should the critic declare an inability to judge the actors performance? Of course not, that is what critics do. If he needs a benchmark by which to base his judgement, then he is not a critic but a comparator. What a sad notion indeed...

This was a Piano recital and I was hoping to know more about Gloria Cheng's performance but I found no such insight.
The critic instead was focused on giving us a description of what took place which is not the reason the he went there, at least I hope not.
Mr Woodward also failed to mention that the two composers whose works were world premiered that night were also there.

The review was unfortunately not of the caliber one has come to expect from the writers of the LA Times and Mr Woodward should consider publishing an addendum as another reader suggested or be shown back to journalism 101.

[MarK]

A new painting is a bad analogy. A painting is not being "performed" by anybody, so there is no performance to evaluate. A new play is a better analogy because it has to be performed, but the language of drama is not as diverse and has not changed nearly as much during the last hundred years as has the language of music - therefore performances of new music are considerably harder to evaluate. However, harder does not mean impossible, which is why i never suggested that a critic should not be able to do that - only that it is not easy. There is no question that critic's attention when listening to world premieres has to be primarily on the music itself, but the reviewer should still be able to give the readers a sense of the performance as well. The only substantial disagreement i have with Padavos is that in my opinion, this review, unfortunately, is exactly of the caliber one has come to expect from the writers of the LA Times, ever since the departure of Martin Bernheimer. Occasional exceptions are rare.

[piano chords]

I have been to Gloria Cheng concert in London, very recommanded, I urge all the L.A and west cost pianist's outhere to go to her concert, she is really special.