Reviewer: Bradley
Lehman
“The long 17th Century” refers to the time span of this enterprising survey
of keyboard music: from about 1570 to 1710. Most of this music hasn’t been
recorded on piano before. There are 36 pieces by Buxtehude, Byrd, Kuhnau,
Sweelinck, Frescobaldi, Cabanilles, Correa Braga, Bull, Froberger, Kerll,
D’Anglebert, and 26 other composers. It is welcome to have all this music
together, encouraging pianists to explore more of this vast keyboard
repertoire before Bach. This is more satisfying than Jeremy Denk’s half
program of keyboard music before Bach, played timidly (M/J 2019, p 163). The
longest piece is Buxtehude’s set of 32 variations on La Capricciosa,
which Pienaar races through in 16 minutes, deleting about half of the
repeats. In the last variation he plays the bass in astonishing octaves,
though it isn’t written that way. (“Because I can!”—Vladimir Horowitz)
Pienaar here relies on the same glib fluency and fast tempos that
characterize his complete Orlando Gibbons (M/A 2008), Bach’s WTC (M/A 2004 &
2014), and Mozart sonatas (not reviewed). With his speeds and articulations
it seems that he’s using pianistic standard smooth fingering all the time,
not experimenting with fingerings contemporary with the music. Part of the
point with old fingerings is to attack and release the notes asymmetrically
in small groups, not simply to blast through long phrases as fast as
possible. When done well, it’s like the way a good Baroque woodwind player
invests the music with speech-like syllables. This important speaking
feature of the music is absent from Pienaar’s delivery.
His program notes are mostly self-congratulatory, about the clever way he
re-imagined and transcribed all these varied pieces to fit the tricks
available in his piano technique. He considers the piano a superior
instrument for expressing this music, at least for himself, maybe because
this is the one he knows how to play. He does concede that he has “very
different ways of experiencing and communicating” this repertoire. Indeed If
we had a rating system, I would give Pienaar 10 out of 10 for repertoire
here, and 7 for his interpretation—losing some points mainly because he
plays so much of the music too fast for clarity. In slow pieces he often
plays the bass note before the beat, which is appropriate to some much-later
piano music but sounds out of character here in music that lives by the
dependability of its bass line. There are also some questionable choices of
accidentals in his Froberger suite. I’m aware that these observations are
pedantic, but in performances this well-prepared it’s a mild disappointment
not to go all the way toward getting it right. All that said, he plays with
sensitive phrasing and contrasts the characters of the compositions. It just
seems too anachronistic to me, along with playing an instrument tonally
foreign to the music, of course. Recommended, anyway, for the adventure.
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