Pressler Leaves Audience Spellbound

By Richard Scheinin
Mercury News

For some young Turks of the piano, performing Beethoven or Schubert means vanquishing the music with sheer speed and athleticism. Menahem Pressler, at 82, isn't that sort of artist. He plays the music as if on a mission of love.

His recital Saturday at San Jose State University's Music Concert Hall was filled with wisdom, sweetness, humor -- and compassion. Two of the works on the program -- Beethoven's Sonata in A flat major, Opus 110, and Schubert's Sonata in B flat major, D. 960 -- were among the last works those men composed. Pressler's performance seemed to see straight into their emotional worlds.

He played some wrong notes; it wasn't a flawless performance. But that hardly mattered. Pressler breathed each chord, juicy with feeling. German-born, he knows this repertory, has played it for decades (he founded the Beaux Arts Trio more than 50 years ago), and also speaks about it with sincerity and charm. When he told the audience about Beethoven's tenderness, idealism and even hedonism, there was a twinkle in his eye.

He began the program -- presented by the university's Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies -- with Beethoven's Sonata in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, the ``Tempest.'' It opens with a simple arpeggio; Pressler lingered over it, infused it with wonder. Such attention to key details characterized the performance: continually, Pressler boiled things down to essential elements, guiding his listeners to ``the beauty,'' as he puts it.

In the second movement, there was a simple rising scale, bits of ravishing melody, and the steady punctuations of a funereal drum-like figure. It was all played with unusual delicacy, laying the music open: colors, moods, the voicings of chords; all seemed transparent.

The ``Tempest'' is a work of volatility and extremes, mid-period Beethoven pointing toward late-period compositions, including Opus 110. Introducing that work, Pressler explained how Beethoven based portions of the second movement on ``a popular song of the time, which he heard in bars and places he shouldn't have been.'' Then he translated the song's German words for the audience:

``I'm a bum! You're a bum! We all are bums!''

He also described the magisterial fugue, which concludes the piece, as ``confirmation of what is good, great and beautiful in this world -- and possibly the next.''

The opening movement, to be played singingly, with great expression and amiability (cantabile molto espressivo; con amabilità) began with quiet grandeur. As its lines unfolded, the music flowed inexorably, almost a living presence. The ``I'm a bum'' second movement, frankly, was clumsy, though Pressler went at it with gusto.

Then came the finale, healing music. The pianist stretched time in the opening recitative, repeating notes as soft, soft caresses. The aria, with its hushed, droning accompaniment, felt enchanted. The fugue, rising out of a pair of separate, then intertwining, lines, was clear and yearning. Straight through to the coda, the music was now tender, then clangorous, and seemed to be climbing toward the light.

Schubert's Sonata in B flat major emerges out of a similar sensibility, music of an artist who senses life's impending end.

Ironically, Pressler explained, it was Beethoven's death in 1827 that freed Schubert -- one of the titan's pallbearers -- to compose his own monumental piano statements in what turned out to be his final year of life. In the B flat major, Schubert gave the world, Pressler went on, ``something that even Beethoven didn't have -- this overflow of melodies,'' a ``feeling that . . . either in life or in heaven, the angels must dance.''

Pressler rendered the unbelievably rich, opening melody with a sense of vulnerability, which Schubert surely felt. In the second movement, he unveiled more juicy, joyful chords, but quietly, prayerfully. The Scherzo was almost sassy. And Pressler performed one of the closing Allegro's great songs with a child's smiling openness; the angels must have danced to it.

As an encore for his rapt audience -- there was hardly a cough all night -- Pressler offered Chopin's posthumous Nocturne in C sharp minor, which was about as exquisite as it gets. He said ``good night'' with the Brahms Lullaby, in his own arrangement.