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By Sarah Cahill
If Thomas Schultz had advertised his concert on Friday night as "protest music," he would have packed Old First Church to the rafters. And he wouldn't have been deceiving anyone. Activists, radicals, and any politically-minded person would have found satisfaction and even a cathartic release in Schultz's ingenious program combining Yuji Takahashi's Kwangju, May 1980, about the horrific oppression of an uprising in the South Korean city, and Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated, 36 variations on a Chilean anthem from the Allende regime.
But Schultz just isn't the kind of pianist who markets the music or himself. Like many pianists in the Bay Area, he often attracts larger audiences in New York or Seoul or Berlin than he does in his own home town.
More than an hour in length and calling on every trick of the trade, Rzewski's People United is a tremendous undertaking. Though relatively new in the repertoire, the piece has already attained the status of a 20th-century masterpiece and has been recorded by a legion of heavy hitters including Ursula Oppens (its dedicatee), Marc-André Hamelin, Stephen Drury, and Rzewski himself. Like the Diabelli Variations which inspired it, it is a veritable compendium of piano technique, stretching to the far reaches of experimentation while echoing centuries of great keyboard literature, and its performer needs exceptional power and stamina to pull it off.
Strength and sensibility
Schultz has both in abundance. Even when the variations strayed into impossibly wild virtuosic territory, he never faltered or showed signs of fatigue, but kept revealing aspects of the music which other pianists miss. He unified the entire set by continually conjuring up the populist spirit of the original song, "El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido," which underlies each variation, no matter how obliquely. Even while maneuvering incandescent scales, booming octaves, jazz riffs, Lisztian pyrotechnics, blistering repeated notes, acrobatic leaps, and cuticle-shredding glissandi, Schultz always gave a sense of the piece's rigorous structure (six groups of six variations each) through masterful pacing. In the last few pages, the triumphant return of the theme, he built the tension until its final moments, which sprang forth with a burst of energy. Schultz's extensive work with classical composers was very much in evidence here: if he were less capable with Beethoven or Liszt, his Rzewski wouldn't have been so brilliant.
Like Rzewski, Yuji Takahashi incorporates folk songs within a style which is generally tonal and accessible. Kwangju, May 1980 commemorates the uprising of students and townspeople of that South Korean city against General Chun Doo-hwan and his army. Augmenting the music is a series of slides from the Japanese artist Tomiyama Taeko, powerful images of protestors with raised arms, soldiers rendered as skulls in helmets, people weeping over their dead loved ones, seas of faces. Schultz captured the plaintive quality of Takahashi's score, and brought out its delicate articulations, while sustaining the dissonant chorale-like theme in the bass which proceeds inexorably, despite interruptions, like a crowd intent on its purpose.
Ephemeral and evanescent
Last year Schultz commissioned another piece from Takahashi, and he performed that as well. For Thomas Schultz (Piano 3) is basically seven pages of musical fragments; some are chords, detached from one another, some are series of notes without bar lines. On each page Takahashi has written a few lines of instructions, some more helpful than others. Below a few intricate lines in which the right and left hands obviously don't line up at all, he's written "Sightread slowly then repeat many times. Don't mind the wrong notes but rather follow mistakes."
A piece like this could sound patched together, but Schultz turned it into a cohesive whole. It begins with delicate rapid irregular figures in the high register, like random water droplets. The hands cross in various figurations then drift down to the bass for vaporous ghosts of melody. Schultz's dynamic control was particularly impressive. Sparse and improvisatory, the piece is quiet throughout, yet Schultz brought such focus to it that it took on an intimate intensity. It ended with one passage repeated over and over, ranging from the top to the bottom of the keyboard, each time softer until notes drop out along the way, and the hands simply travel downward, moving soundlessly.
One rarely encounters a pianist who can tackle new music and experimental notation while enriching it with a firm grounding in the classical literature. (Sarah Cahill is a pianist and music critic; her website is at www.sarahcahill.com) Originally written for and published by San Francisco Classical Voice
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