RECITAL

Carnegie Hall
Murray Perahia

• Bach - French Suite No. 6 in E Major, BWV 817
• Haydn - Sonata in A-flat Major, Hob. XVI: 46
• Beethoven - Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat Major, Op. 81a, "Les Adieux"
• Franck - Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, Op. 21
• Chopin - Scherzo No. 1

"In the more than 40 years he has been performing, pianist Murray Perahia has left audiences around the world breathless. “You've never heard a pianist who considers each note with such deep care. No phrase is left unconsidered; every line of the score has been probed to make it as musical as possible,” proclaimed The Seattle Times."

"This evening’s program begins with Johann Sebastian Bach’s French Suite No. 6 in E Major, which is perhaps the most brilliantly entertaining and tuneful of all the French Suites. César Franck, who made a reputation for himself as one of France’s greatest organists, was endlessly fascinated by Bach’s music. It is not surprising that this naturalized Frenchman, who much preferred the Germanic musical tradition, should adopt three of Bach’s favorite forms and use them to create his Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue, Op. 21, which is arguably one of the finest late-Romantic keyboard masterpieces. Franck was also strongly influenced by Ludwig van Beethoven, as was Frédéric Chopin, who transformed Beethoven’s development of the scherzo as a replacement movement for the minuet into his four independent scherzos for piano, of which we hear the first on tonight’s program. Beethoven was a student of Joseph Haydn, and Haydn’s formal and emotional intensification of the piano sonata, on display in his Sonata in A-flat Major, paved the way for Beethoven’s programmatic “Les adieux” Sonata."

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Review: Murray Perahia at Carnegie Hall

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

APRIL 3, 2015

The beloved American pianist Murray Perahia turns 68 this month, an age at which you might expect him to be mellowing as an artist and reaching new realms of profundity.

Actually, Mr. Perahia has been playing with increasing boldness in recent years. On Wednesday night at Carnegie Hall, during a much-anticipated recital, he sometimes sounded like an impetuous youth, especially during the last movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26 in E flat (Op. 81a).

Beethoven composed this piece as an expression of loss when Archduke Rudolf of Austria, his supporter and friend, had to leave Vienna with his family to escape Napoleon’s artillery barrage in 1809. Beethoven gave programmatic titles (in German) to the three movements: “The Farewell,” “Absence” and “The Reunion.” That finale, which begins with a spiraling flourish that leads to a joyous theme, usually comes across as almost giddy in its exuberance.

Mr. Perahia dove into the movement at a breakneck tempo and never let up. Given his renown as a pianist of scrupulous musicianship and elegance, he still managed to bring textural details and structural clarity to the music. But he certainly cut loose here. In repeated passages, he would play a thumping low octave with his left hand, then sweep up the keyboard in a burst of dizzying arpeggios, landing on a crackling high note. It was actually fun to see Mr. Perahia, who can seem very serious-minded, going a little wild in a Beethoven finale.

True to his conservative orientation, Mr. Perahia offered a program of classics, including a stately, perhaps too much so, account of Haydn’s Sonata in A flat (Hob. XVI: 46). He began with Bach’s French Suite No. 6 in E. He drew maximum lyricism from the flowing, undulant Allemande and rendered the Courante at a fleet tempo, with limpid touch, so that the music’s racing lines sounded like whirlwinds of sixteenth notes. He revealed the bittersweet inner life of the stately Polonaise and infused the final Gigue with hearty, bouncing happiness.

In Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, Mr. Perahia was at his most rhapsodic, especially in the Prelude section, which came across like an improvisation in which a sighing motif inspires explorations of wandering chromatic harmony. He ended with Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1 in B minor. While taking a hellbent tempo in the first section, he managed to dispatch Chopin’s teeming bursts with crispness and fire. His poetic, tender playing of the middle section was especially beautiful.

The enthusiastic audience wanted encores and got them. First a Chopin nocturne and then Schumann’s “Traumes Wirren” (“Dream’s Confusions”) from the Fantasy Pieces, a work Mr. Perahia recorded in 1973, at the beginning of a continuing relationship with Sony. His performance on Wednesday was riskier, more headstrong, than on that classic recording.

So much for mellowing in your late 60s.