Big Hands

On Saturday, I went to Gallery 345 for The Art of the Piano with Sarah Hagen. I had seen her last year in a violin and piano recital. She hinted then that there was an upcoming album of Clara and Robert Schumann works. The release was available for purchase tonight, but no Schumann was on the set list.

Hagen was as voluble as before and explained aspects of the pieces. The first 3 were all from contemporary West Coast composers, which she dubbed the Vancouver Suite. A Prelude from Jocelyn Morlock used Glen Gould's name as chords (actually just G, E, and D). Jeffrey Ryan's Saturn, from dance piece Cosmophony, also used named chords as a starting point but taken from the designation of Saturn's rings (D, C, B, A, F). Fredrik Yamashita based his The Moon Thinned To a Thread on a haiku. I thought the back-stories were more interesting than the pieces themselves which are of the cacophonous modern composition genre.

The bulk of the recital, "quite a meal" in Hagen's words, was all of Rachmaninov's 13 Preludes, Op. 32. Why did he do it? Because Bach did it first (a suite in all keys). And why for Hagen? Because these pieces aren't often performed together. Yet there is a cohesiveness since the composer wrote them in 19 days. The joke about requiring big hands for his pieces came to mind as they typically had a flurry of blindingly fast notes and massive chords. Hagen seemed transported away by them. I was particularly taken with No. 10 in B minor and No. 12 in G# minor. For the encore, there was finally a Schumann piece, as Hagen ended the evening with the introspective Traumerei.