Every spring, Piano on the Rocks stages its annual festival, which took place this year at Verde Valley School from April 25 through 27. Marking its 10th anniversary, the festival’s theme was “From Paris to Sedona.”
Day One
Festival founder Sandrine Erdely-Sayo started the weekend off with her own “Hymn to Sedona,” written atop Bell Rock, for which she was joined by the festival’s lineup of vocalists, soprano Barbara di Toro, mezzo-soprano Sonja Bruzauskas and tenor Andersen Bloomberg. Whispered lyrics accompanied a mid-range melody with skillfully inserted moments of oddity that hinted at Sedona’s reputation for uncanniness. Erdely-Sayo’s student Madeline Hehn then accompanied Bruzauskas in Maurice Ravel’s “L’enigme eternelle,” a harsh kick dance in music, and in Ravel’s setting of the Jewish Kaddish prayer, the soaring cadences trembling with the force of Bruzauskas’ vibrato. In reference to Sedona’s agricultural heritage were two songs about apples: “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” and “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time,” as well as a sweet but regretful love song from Francis Poulenc.
Erdely-Sayo later gave a humorous performance of Camille Saint-Saens’ “Danse Macabre,” demonstrating impeccable deftness with the Horowitzian complications of Saint-Saens’ rich orchestral themes and making the piano shriek and growl. She paired off with festival regular Cynthia Raim for Aaron Copland’s “Danza de Jalisco,” which they made so delightfully juicy that it was an invitation to get up and dance. Detectable, intriguing effects from the composer included passages that prefigured and perhaps inspired Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story.” The Copland stood in contrast to Raim’s solo in the afternoon, Ravel’s three movement “Sonatine.” Opening in a soft flood with no preliminaries, like stepping outdoors into a rain shower, it became quietly reflective at intervals, as if accompanying someone walking in and out of a line of trees in a storm, while the second movement was contemplative and the third flung notes about with little to link them, the composer racing up the stairs and shedding semiquavers.
Erdely-Sayo also dueted with French pianist Jean-Marc Luisada, returning to the festival after an absence, on Gabriel Faure’s “Dolly Suite.” Flirtatious china shepherdess music with interesting themes, it offered them repeated chances to play a pair of postillions urging their team along. The mild, melting “tendresse” movement with its little internal rush seemed to please Luisada, and in the final rush, they produced harmonies like church bells.
The climax of the afternoon was Luisada’s rendition of Franz Liszt’s “Nuages gris” and “Unstern! Sinistre, disastro” in combination — one of the most extraordinary performances of the weekend. Ambiguous opening notes led to bass sussurations full of buzzing ominous semitones that stalked roughly at first before inching up the scale into bludgeoning chords. Liszt’s music was like high-tension wire strung minimal supports, a fence between the present and nether worlds, and Luisada extracted a sound from his instrument that physically belabored the listeners. It was not a piece anyone would say they liked or enjoyed, but it was an intellectual fascination to contemplate its combination of minimalism and superabundance.
Day Two
The second day was a time for listeners to renew acquaintance with old friends. Erdely-Sayo performed Jules Massenet’s “Meditation” from the opera “Thais,” as well as Liszt’s Romance in E Minor, S.169, and his setting of Petrarch’s Sonnet 104, which she previewed at Community Library Sedona in January. Raim reprised Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” from last year, carefully slurring some notes, blasting off the fourth movement with cocky determination, recalling child hood fantasies of 18th-century elegance in the fifth movement and galloping away in the finale, Fantasy in F Minor insinuated itself like a curious cat peering round a corner. It was heavy on the dynamic contrasts, especially in the cascading flourishes that could not playing intimately from memory.
The afternoon’s vocal features included Erdely-Sayo and Hehn accompanying Di Toro on Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris” and Edith Piaf’s immortal “La Vie en Rose,” which was absolutely ravishing and magnificently effective in the original French. Erdely-Sayo also backed up Bruzauskas on Clara Schumann’s Op. 13, a series of six lieder. “Sie liebten sich beide” — “They Loved One Another” — hardly came across as loving, given the tragedy of the vocal line, but “Die liebe sass als Nachtogall” — “Love’s Magic” — offered an opposite mood of beaming exuberance.
Hehn made two solo contributions with two different pieces: The andante from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 15 and the final movement, “Lightness,” from Robert Casadesus’ “Eight Etudes.” In the Beethoven, the subject was determined to stare out a fogged window into a foggy street all day before changing his mind and developing a rather ironic attitude. Beethoven’s phrasing, always whole and satisfysingly rounded off, hinted at his peculiarly piquant use of popular melodies. The Casadesus sounded like the music of a Manhattanite, with the piano imitating the American highway system in a hurtling pell-mell hurry suited to Hehn’s brighter, harder touch by comparison with Raim.
As for Luisada, he had selected Joseph Haydn’s Variations in F Minor, somewhat of a cold or sterile, or perhaps intellectual, composition for such a jokester as Haydn. The variations remained clean-cut and austere in spite of growing complexity and layering, in line with an unadorned and melancholy commencement. Now and then there was deliberate teasing, or a pre-Tchaikovsky feel with greater depth and color, or little flickers of the right hand like a bird in a bush, but these were exceptions before a brief wave of fire at the end spent itself and collapsed into ash.
Day Three
The third and final day included the finest gems on the program, a superabundance of magnificent music.
American composers were more prominently featured on Sunday, with Navajo composer Connor Chee presenting his “Pathways,” “Female Rain” and “Sandpainting,” which he had previewed at the library in January. Erdely-Sayo also performed “Strata of Silk and Rocks” by Anna Rubin, who was in attendance. Rubin warned that it would be a work embracing dissonance and described it as “spiky.” She was entirely accurate. It left the listener with the impression of a chill, moonlit night on the high desert interrupted by moments of needless alarm and restlessness.
Raim and Erdely-Sayo then tossed another Copland work into the mix, the suite from the ballet “Billy the Kid,” where the sparkly saloon music gave the two pianists a chance to play at, instead of with, each other. Dueling pianos seemed appropriate for a ballet about a gunfighter, and the pianists were getting a kick out of it. Hehn and Bruzauskas delivered a sassy rendering of “Don’t Tell Mama” from the musical “Cabaret”; Bruzauskas not only has a great Broadway as well as lieder voice but also the acting chops to match. Back to France with Cesar Franck’s “Prelude, Choral and Fugue,” Erdely-Sayo bathed the audience in a rippling, lapping sea, giving her most ardent performance of the festival of a lavish but brooding score, liquid and wine-dark. The piece demanded agility and the use of the sustain pedal to develop its throbbing bass. Raim similarly reverted to Ravel with a light and agreeable “Menuet sur non de Haydn” that she nearly danced at the keyboard, an ethereal “Prelude” and a “Vocalise-Etude” filled with tinkling ornaments and the recurring implication of belly dance.
Luisada evoked a gentle, easy charm in Johannes Brahms’ Op. 118 “Intermezzo” before rising on the tips of his fingers, far back on the keys, to turn up the intensity and heat. Although the scoring suggested an imminent change to sombreness, the music always avoided it by resorting to intense tonal colors and big chords, and the satisfying resolution of phrases that Brahms has in common with Beethoven. Luisada’s subsequent performance of Chopin’s Op. 49 Fantasy in F Minor then insinuated itself like a curious cat peering round a corner. It was heavy on the dynamic contrasts, especially in the cascading flourishes that could not mask the music’s internal pulse, the beat of which was visible in the audience’s body language. The fantasy proved itself to be a fantasy indeed, a work of many ideas and no overarching mood, a good-natured bravura display — including a crescendo that nearly fired one member of the audience straight out of her seat.
The climax of the day and the festival, however, was the long-awaited performance of Brahm’s “St. Anthony Variations” by Erdely Sayo and Luisada. Sometimes called the “Variations on a Theme by Haydn” — although the theme was certainly not by Haydn; it might have been by Ignaz Pleyel, but that is far from established — it was originally scored for two pianos but later adapted by the composer for orchestra,in which is it better-known and more effective. Few other works so exemplify serene majesty as these variations.
In the piano version, it was possible to see how simply the music begins before the pianists began to build on it and the first variation erupted in flourishes and at times a complexity of elaboration almost beyond hearing. Their use of tempo variations added an intriguing element typically much less obvious in an orchestral rendering by creating alternate emphases. Luisada in general took the lower parts and Erdely-Sayo the higher, evincing a perfect blending of their sounds in the third variation. The merrily-trot ting sixth variation also proved exceptional, as did the eighth and final variation, a spidery composition to which they applied a beautiful legato. Their efforts resulted in a highly-distinguished rendition that completely captured the strength and melodic abundance of this work.
Piano on the Rocks will return for its 11th season in April, with additional programs in Sedona expected to be announced throughout the year.
