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Why review one-off concerts that will never be repeated? The answer: To make you wish you had been there. So to make you wish you had been at the TCCA season opener on Sunday featuring the extraordinary talent of pianist Grace Fong playing the newly overhauled Grotrian piano, here's my review: Wow!
Music schools turn out pianists by the hundreds. Few gain the kind of recognition achieved by Grace Fong. Winner of the 2006 Leeds International Piano Competition, a launching pad for international careers, Fong was 2009 winner of one of America's most prestigious awards from the American Pianists Association.
This is no “American Idol.” The competition is a grueling process of solo, chamber, lieder, and concerto performances, as well as outreach with local schools and teaching.
Now Fong combines a busy solo and chamber music career with her teaching as Director of Keyboard Studies at Chapman University.
Her breadth and depth was much in evidence in a program spanning 200 years from Mozart to the contemporary Australian Carl Vine. The opener, Prokofiev's first piano sonata, set a tone of rich romanticism not typical of later works which would earn him censure from the Soviet government. The single movement, played with evident gusto, reveals such musical influences as Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky.
Some of Prokofiev's early style comes from the piano masters also featured in the program: Less familiar pieces by Chopin and a powerful and dramatic Ballade by Liszt. Chopin's Nouvelle Etude No. 2 is said to have been a favorite of Liszt's. “Study” it may be, but it is no mere technical exercise. The beautifully crafted piece showed Fong's grace after the drama of the Prokofiev. Three Chopin impromptus followed. The title suggests spontaneity, as if Chopin had tossed them off one afternoon, though they are in reality carefully structured. Fong's thoughtful interpretation melded a sense of improvisation with warmth.
Mozart opened the second half, with “Variations on “Ah! Vous dirai-je, maman,” a set of 12 variations on a simple theme familiar to us as “Twinkle, twinkle little star.” Full of Mozartean humor, it showed off Fong's own wit and sensitivity, as well as impressive fingerwork.
The final work in the intriguing program, Carl Vine's Piano Sonata No 1 of 1990, broke new ground. Australian classical music has come of age, though few Australian composers are yet household names in the US. The sonata, rhythmically complex and technically dazzling, was stunningly carried off by Fong, by turns passionate, animated and introspective, with enough driving power to exhaust the audience, never mind the performer. Fong says she plays the Vine last because it's hard to follow. But follow it she did with a dreamy encore of Schumann's “Traumerei” to bring us back to Earth.
A critic recently described Fong as “absolutely outstanding – and now I've run out of praiseworthy adjectives.” Enough said. Don't you wish you had been there?
Charles Atthill lives in Alta Sierra. He was never nominated to take part in any piano competition.
Music schools turn out pianists by the hundreds. Few gain the kind of recognition achieved by Grace Fong. Winner of the 2006 Leeds International Piano Competition, a launching pad for international careers, Fong was 2009 winner of one of America's most prestigious awards from the American Pianists Association.
This is no “American Idol.” The competition is a grueling process of solo, chamber, lieder, and concerto performances, as well as outreach with local schools and teaching.
Now Fong combines a busy solo and chamber music career with her teaching as Director of Keyboard Studies at Chapman University.
Her breadth and depth was much in evidence in a program spanning 200 years from Mozart to the contemporary Australian Carl Vine. The opener, Prokofiev's first piano sonata, set a tone of rich romanticism not typical of later works which would earn him censure from the Soviet government. The single movement, played with evident gusto, reveals such musical influences as Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky.
Some of Prokofiev's early style comes from the piano masters also featured in the program: Less familiar pieces by Chopin and a powerful and dramatic Ballade by Liszt. Chopin's Nouvelle Etude No. 2 is said to have been a favorite of Liszt's. “Study” it may be, but it is no mere technical exercise. The beautifully crafted piece showed Fong's grace after the drama of the Prokofiev. Three Chopin impromptus followed. The title suggests spontaneity, as if Chopin had tossed them off one afternoon, though they are in reality carefully structured. Fong's thoughtful interpretation melded a sense of improvisation with warmth.
Mozart opened the second half, with “Variations on “Ah! Vous dirai-je, maman,” a set of 12 variations on a simple theme familiar to us as “Twinkle, twinkle little star.” Full of Mozartean humor, it showed off Fong's own wit and sensitivity, as well as impressive fingerwork.
The final work in the intriguing program, Carl Vine's Piano Sonata No 1 of 1990, broke new ground. Australian classical music has come of age, though few Australian composers are yet household names in the US. The sonata, rhythmically complex and technically dazzling, was stunningly carried off by Fong, by turns passionate, animated and introspective, with enough driving power to exhaust the audience, never mind the performer. Fong says she plays the Vine last because it's hard to follow. But follow it she did with a dreamy encore of Schumann's “Traumerei” to bring us back to Earth.
A critic recently described Fong as “absolutely outstanding – and now I've run out of praiseworthy adjectives.” Enough said. Don't you wish you had been there?
Charles Atthill lives in Alta Sierra. He was never nominated to take part in any piano competition.
