Pianist Sandrine Erdely-Sayo previewed the upcoming Piano on the Rocks festival at the Community Library Sedona on Saturday, Jan. 25, joined by Navajo composer Connor Chee, who will be featured at this year’s concert series in April.

Erdely-Sayo selected Jules Massenet’s familiar “Meditation” from his opera “Thais” as her opening number, starting off with bright top notes and an initial somnolence from which she drew emergent waves of passion, building them to a force that made the baby grand tremble. It was a lush, luxuriant performance through which the listener could almost smell the incense and hear the palm fronds rustling over the Nile. And yet, in spite of the intensity which Erdely-Sayo always brings to the keyboard, she handled the subtle bass of the closing bars with masterful care.

Franz Liszt

Known for her interpretations of the works of Franz Liszt, which formed the exclusive subject of her most recently-released album, Erdely-Sayo next offered three selections from the composer’s copious output, beginning with the Romance in E Minor. This one was a true German romance, which is as much as to say a lament. Germans are never truly happy about their love affairs unless they are reflecting upon the collapse of those affairs in catastrophe. However, that worked to Erdely-Sayo’s advantage, as she was able to squeeze every one of its twists and turns for emotional effect in a lucid rendering that admirably captured the atmosphere of the early nineteenth century.

Liszt’s setting of Petrarch’s Sonnet 104 gave her even more scope for her evocative style. As written, the verse expresses the poet’s temporary schizophrenia resulting from his love for an unnamed lady. Musically, it begins with a sudden, alarming intensity and great clusters of notes being flung at the listeners. Erdely-Sayo showed herself entirely absorbed in the cascade of climaxes that flowed into one another, using a precisely-calculated force that appeared not to be calculated at all. As the composer’s notation emulated the howling wind and scampering heartbeat of the poet, she seemed to grapple with the instrument like Jacob with the angel in the wilderness.

Erdely-Sayo’s final solo choice was Liszt’s transcription of the fourth song in Franz Schubert’s “Swan Song” series, which was an interesting choice of title on Schubert’s part. It begins with an immediately-recognizable, somber melody that can certainly be understood as a sound-painting of a swan — but a black swan molting into the dim water beneath a willow on a gray day and refusing to be cheered up beyond a point by the folksy encouragements of the pianist. Still, when Erdely-Sayo played it, the listener could feel himself there with the swan, sharing in its mood.

Connor Chee

Liszt was known in his own day for promoting the Romantic concept of programmatic music — that is, music written to depict or imply a particular location or visual setting — which established a conceptual link between Liszt’s and Chee’s works, as Chee likewise presented several pieces of program music, in his case compositions reflective of the Southwestern environment. His “Female Rain” was a sparkling and vivid representation of a light shower sweeping across the desert, with sunshine and rainbows bursting through the clouds. Refreshing and delightful, Liszt likely would have approved.

Chee followed up on the main theme from “Female Rain” in four short pieces titled “Sandpaintings” that dealt with the subject of clouds. Open, yearning chords tight with tension greeted the audience in the first of these pieces, a tension that was resolved when the idea was restated as single notes before rising to an intense drumming. The second section conveyed a simple, wideopen-spaces feel covered in filigree work that suggested the wind kicking a herd of mustang clouds across the range, mountains in the distance, the massiveness of the West present and pressing. By the third section, the wind had tired itself out and was coming in puffs and spits until it could be coaxed to make more of an effort to produce some energetic colors. In Liszt-like fashion, the last of the pieces started with ominous repeating bass notes that introduced the resolution of the “Female Rain” theme, which had appeared reversed and varied throughout the preceding passages, and interrupted it more and more loudly at intervals before uniting with it to form a single crescendo. There are, apparently, still a few composers who can write music that is both intellectually structured and enjoyable.

Four Hands

And then there were four — four hands, that is, as both pianists took their places for Chee’s “Pathways” from his album “Scenes from Dinetah.” It hinted at the epic, with much optimism and many ideas, and fast fingering from the composer. Nevertheless, Chee’s playing style looked almost placid as Erdely-Sayo added contrasting power at the lower end of the instrument’s range before they tackled Debussy’s charming “In the Boat,” with Erdely-Sayo taking the opportunity to draw a further analogy between the frequent appearance of the pentatonic scale in the works of both Debussy and traditional Navajo music. The parallel was justified by the highly conversational and idiomatic texture of the Debussy work, a streamof-consciousness stream of anecdote backgrounded by the changing lights in the metaphorical waterway.

Received wisdom has it that it takes two to tango — or to quango, if one is in government work. Without either proving or disproving that contention, Erdely-Sayo and Chee did in fact tango their way out of the afternoon, finishing with “La Cumparsita,” a smoky tango with a slow start demanding close coordination from the performers with its hand-crossings. The famous and spirited “El Choclo” was even more fun to watch, as Chee caught a bit of Erdely-Sayo’s vigorous style along the way and Erdely-Sayo took the lead in her enthusiasm, adding traces of Parisian flavor here and there.

Piano on the Rocks

The 10th annual Piano on the Rocks International Festival will return to Verde Valley School from Friday to Sunday, April 25 through 27, and will include appearances by both Erdely-Sayo and Chee as well as JeanMarc Luisada, Cynthia Raim, Anna Rubin, Barbara Di Toro, Sara Catarine, Sonja Bruzauskas and Madeline Hehn. The festival’s theme will be “From Paris to Sedona.”