MUSIC REVIEW
Nonken Combines Passion, First-Class Technique
By Richard Buell, Globe Correspondent, 10/19/99
"Dedicated exclusively," it says in Marilyn Nonken's artist's bio, "to music of this century." Does this have a reader's eyes glazing over already? If so, please un-glaze them at once! No two ways about it, what we have here is a remarkable young pianist by any standards, and those other centuries' loss is very much our gain.
Consider. Nonken's gee-whiz, blow-them-away encore was ... the "Six Little Pieces," Op. 19, of Arnold Schoenberg. The sky has fallen.
In addition to being the possessor of a first-class technique, not so unusual a thing these days, Nonken summons up a passionate identification with just the sort of music that would most seem to resist any such identification -- what's derisively known in the trade as "Princeton music." Apart from the color-saturated Schoenberg humdinger, Nonken's program Sunday night was made up of works by longtime Princeton guru Milton ("Maximum multiplicity of function") Babbitt and his pupils David Rakowski, Martin Butler, and Jeff Nichols.
Frankly, this reviewer's guard was up from time to time. Mightn't Nonken be just awfully good at hyping up the unfamiliar and the refractory, something like those actors who can read aloud from the Manhattan telephone directory and reduce audiences to tears? One good sign: If nothing on the program seemed less realized than it should have been, neither did anything seem too realized -- that is, cynically worked over, too clever by half in the execution, ultimately narcissistic. Truth to tell, there were in fact longeueurs, invitations to let the mind wander. But these were honestly come by, so to speak.
Rakowski, a Brandeis faculty member who has been patiently amassing a remarkable set of piano etudes over recent years ("Pollici e Mignoi" for thumbs and pinkies only, "Touch Typing" for index fingers, "Plucking A" for reaching inside the instrument), was represented by yet more of same: "E-machines" (1988) and "BAM!" (1991), done by Nonken to even more of a fare-thee-well than on "Hyperblue," an all-Rakowski compilation on the CRI label.
If Butler's "On the Rocks" (1992) put you in mind, equally, of Debussyan sea music and the clinking ice of plentiful mixed drinks, you were right: a spirit of high sendup was rampant. Oil slick, a piano bar from hell, pitch classes (Princeton-ese for chords) that turned all lewd and lascivious on you ... and there was more. Babbitt's own Three Compositions for Piano (1948) and "Allegro Penseroso" (1999) were, respectively, more American-neoclassical of its age than you'd expect and more expansive (even to Ivesian quotations?) than you'd expect. In the course of its considerable length, "Chelsea Square" (1999) by Jeff Nichols might have been trying to synthesize all of the above-mentioned; a nice try, certainly, but on the dour, determined side.
The New York-based, Eastman-trained Nonken is a member of the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society and of Ensemble 21, which she also cofounded. Sunday's audience was small but enraptured (Others, of course, were taking their raptures at a certain rounders match.) When she returns -- soon, please -- may there be a crush to hear her. She's that kind of pianist.