March 9, 2005 Tonic modern sounds, off the beaten path by David Patrick Stearns Philadelphia's
more out-of-the-way concerts were the place to be over the weekend for
bracing cross sections of modern music.
A surprisingly large audience spent
Saturday night hearing Marilyn Nonken play Charles Ives' dense, cantankerous,
monumental Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord") at the Convention Center, presented
by the fledgling Chamber Music Now! (The exclamation isn't mine.)
The Ives sonata is a perennial touchstone.
There's so much in it that the piece is a quarry of meaning, making it
rarely
the same touchstone at any given encounter. Pity the young composers on
the first half of Nonken's program. Only David Feurzeig's Stride Rite,
with its collagelike juxtaposition of Harlem stride piano and Stravinsky's
The Rite of Spring, had the kind of purpose and trickster sensibility that
allowed it to stand up well next to Ives.
The best news is that Nonken lived
up to her considerable press. There's nobody like her out there, from her
attractive stage presence (think Bebe Neuwirth in Broadway's Chicago) to
her lack of self-serving ostentation in a piece whose very presence on
a program is, to say the least, cheeky. Unlike the better-known Pierre-Laurent
Aimard, Nonken doesn't sell the music with digital scintillation.
Each of the four movements -- which
are inspired by specific American literary figures -- had its own distinctive,
well-chiseled character, which was a reflection of how deeply she meets
the music on its own terms. Immediately in the opening Ralph Waldo Emerson
movement, the music's thick textures and seemingly garrulous character
were prioritized into layers, with a clear sense of progression from one
block of thought to another.
"The Alcotts" movement was touching
in its hymnlike simplicity, and large sections of "Hawthorne" and "Thoreau"
were mesmerizing thanks to Nonken's deep concentration. Ives is often full
of unhomogenized quotations from popular music, and Nonken never let them
become jokey. What you heard was a musical Mount Rushmore, though instead
of the conclusiveness that comes with the broad strokes of enshrinement,
the performance raised myriad questions about who these literary figures
were and what Ives was saying about them.
|