Accompanying Pianos at Piccolo

Listening to live classical music is always a learning experience. Each time you hear new things and gain fresh discrimination. This is even more true when the same instrument is played by different musicians—which is just one of the benefits of the Piccolo Spoleto “Young Artists Series” that has been featuring music students from the College of Charleston’s undergraduate and graduate (artist certificate) programs.

Last Saturday at the Simmons Center, the program highlighted four piano concertos with the soloist at one piano and the ‘orchestra’ part being played on a second piano—something I had not heard before. This allowed eight pianists to perform (and avoided the need for an orchestra), although the overall sound was somewhat muffled as a result. That’s because the second piano often competed with rather than complemented the first. Due to the second piano’s location at the back of the stage, it had a bigger, booming acoustic that drowned out the softer solo passages. The upside, however, was that you could hear what both players were doing, which gave me new insight into the orchestra’s role in a concerto. Several things also stood out about the different techniques of the pianists. For instance, Lisa Lee, who performed the Moderato from Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2  in C minor, plays with unusually curled fingers, as though she is clawing the keyboard. It is by no means unattractive and her sound is excellent. It’s just that her method is the direct opposite of, for example, Vladimir Horowitz, the Russian virtuoso who was renowned for playing with his fingers almost perfectly straight and striking the keys with the pads rather than tips of his fingers.

Freshman Chee Hang See, who exudes as much concentration in his face as in his hands, played the Allegro from Gershwin’s Concerto in F Major. My limited experience with Gershwin is that I rarely get past the ‘Gershwin’ style to the music underneath. This time, however, I heard for the first time Gershwin’s complexity and depth as a composer.

pianist Christopher Lin

The final piece on the program was the full Concerto No. 1 in D-flat Major by Prokofiev, performed by Christopher Lin who is an Enrique Graf student from Carnegie Mellon. Christopher has a firm, crisp technique that kept Prokofiev—who often sounds muddled to my untrained ear—very lucid and alive. I am not entirely sure about this, but I also discerned an unexpected similarity between the Prokofiev and Gershwin pieces. Something about the way the two composers put seemingly disparate phrases together. I am still not sold on Prokofiev when it comes to listening pleasure, but Chrisopher’s interpretation and focused play got me more interested. As with Chee Hang, Christopher took me a layer deeper into the music, which says a lot about these young performers and the laudable path that Enrique Graf is leading them down. ¶