Cliburn Competition: Preliminary Recital 4, June 3, 2022
—Wayne Lee Gay
Russia, China, and the United States, mutually hostile on the world stage these days, came together in the concert hall Friday morning as competitors from those three countries followed one after another in the morning session of the Cliburn competition. Van Cliburn would have been pleased.
The live audience gave a particularly warm welcome to one of our own, American pianist Clayton Stephenson, who opened the session with one of Haydn’s most well-known Sonatas, No. 37 in D. He performed the first movement with lively energy, and the third with more delicate speed, but his finest moment came in between with the slow Largo e sostenuto, presented with moving intensity.
Having proved his abilities in classical period repertoire, and after the obligatory performance of Stephen Hough’s Fanfare Toccata, Stephenson pinned his hopes on two gigantic showpieces. The thunderous piano paraphrase by Italian pianist Guido Agosti of Stravinsky’s Firebird provided an effective vehicle for Stephenson’s impressive technical skills and pianistic charisma, as did Leopold Godowsky’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis” on themes from Johann Strauss, Jr.’s Die Fledermaus. Whether the jury will forgive the one or two tiny, virtually imperceptible technical mishaps remains to be seen.
After neatly dispatching the required Fanfare Toccata, Chinese pianist Yangrui Cai placed Brahms and Liszt, two titans of the romantic era who didn’t particularly like one other or each other’s music, next to each other to complete his program. We’ve been hearing lots of the showy, glitzy Liszt in this phase of the competition; his “Benediction of God in Solitude” shows a different side of that composer; it flowed easily and sonorously through Cai’s hands. Book I of Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Paganini combines purely intellectual exploration of a simple theme with a substantial set of technical challenges for the pianist. Cai conquered the technical problems while maintaining the image of a calmly philosophical musician.
Sergey Tanin demonstrated an impressively wide range in his program, beginning with a rarely heard work by J.S. Bach’s son C.P.E. Bach. Tanin turned that composer’s Sonata in F-sharp minor—a work resting on the cusp of the baroque and classical eras—into a surprising virtuoso showpiece, particularly in the rapid-fire rolling arpeggios of the first movement. Following the Hough Fanfare Toccata, Tanin moved on to two descriptive works by Liszt: Sposalizio (“The Marriage,” inspired by Raphael’s painting The Marriage of the Virgin), which rises only slowly to a passionate climax, and “Les jeux d’eaux à laVilla d’Este,” a musical description of the play of water at an Italian villa. Tanin effectively closed with Messiaen’s noisy, dissonant, exuberantly jazzy “Regard de l’Esprit de joie” (“Contemplation of the Joyful Spirit”) from the Twenty Contemplations of the Infant Jesus. It may be well worth noting that, unlike several other Russian competitors who indulge in wild gesticulations and flailing limbs while playing, Tanin notably avoids extraneous motion, yet achieves equally impressive results.
