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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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