October 17, 2000 Greeting Ives as an Old, Familiar Friend by Paul Griffiths Ms. Nonken is a pianist from music's
leading edge, associated with new works and with pieces whose challenges
have withstood the last half century, pieces like the Barraque Sonata,
which she will play at an eagerly awaited concert in a month's time, again
at Miller. "Concord," for her, is an old friend and a classic, and she
made it sound as fluent as Schubert if, like Schubert, prone to eddies
and strangenesses in the musical flow.
Her dominant qualities would be advantages
in any music: lightness in attack, clarity of texture, singing lines (and
singing chords), variety of nuance, certainty in defining climaxes and
in moving toward or away from them, a sense that the end of a movement
must matter, as witness her deft conclusion to a brilliant account, at
once fantastical and purposeful, of the "Hawthorne" movement, or her way
of making the disintegration at the end of "Thoreau" secure and affirmative.
That last moment, where the music
drifts away (or, one might say after this performance, drifts here), was
special partly because its previous history had been persuasively outlined
in the appearances of its underlying hymn tune in each of the previous
movements. In the "Alcotts" the culminating entry of the hymn had been
exalted.
What
to program with such a piece? Ms. Nonken's answer was characteristically
intelligent, and looked fine in advance: Michael Finnissy's "North American
Spirituals," with his "Kemp's Morris" thrown in as overture. As its title
implies, "North American Spirituals," like the "Concord" Sonata, uses American
vernacular material.
But where Ives's music has the feel
of fingers ÷ as if it were a tour of the country finding everyone
playing the piano, playing hymns in churches, songs in parlors, ragtime
in saloons, marches and quadrilles in community halls ÷ Mr. Finnissy's
sources are discovered in a more distant and rarefied fashion.
At its best, and helped by a beautiful
performance, his piece suggested a neglected churchyard, with tombs (hymns
and spirituals) garlanded by ivy, their inscriptions partly effaced by
lichens. "Kemp's Morris" found Ms. Nonken, always precise and poetic at
the keyboard, no less so when raising her arms to play the little bells
attached to her fingers. Photo
by Richard Termine
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You
could tolerate not hearing Ives's "Concord" Sonata too often ÷ oddly
few pianists offer it ÷ if every performance were as fresh, as inviting,
as cogent and as delectable in sound and gesture as Marilyn Nonken's at
Miller Theater on Thursday evening.