JAKARTA (JP): From his first note, Masaru Okada, the winner of the fifth International Franz Liszt Piano Competition in March 1999, captured the imagination of the audience at Erasmus Huis last Friday.
In his first stop on his world tour, Okada, playing music from three centuries -- J.S. Bach, Sergei Prokofiev, and of course Franz Liszt -- gavean absorbing, exhausting, yet gratifying experience to the audience -- a very rare treat indeed to piano lovers in Jakarta.
He paid passionate homage to J.S. Bach's keyboard style in his version ofBach's Partita no.6 in E Major. It is remarkable to note that his renderingwas clear and neat, without sacrificing the boldness appropriate for Baroque music.
He delivered all the numbers -- from the dazzling Toccata and its statelyfugue, the pensive Sarabande to the stirring Gigue -- almost perfectly (well, the Air deserved a more delicate approach).
The sometimes densely-textured numbers like the Toccata fugue and the Allemande were played transparently, without any noticeable inhibition in his dynamic range.
Okada must have a vital knowledge of harpsichord techniques, so successful was his interpretation of the spirit of the instrument on the piano. By very generous, but clever, pedaling and half-pedaling he translated the practice of sustaining certain notes in harpsichord playing to create a more sonorous sound. In doing so he proved something contrary to what many pianists believe: That you may not pedal Bach's music.
The robust tone of Bach changed to a menacing one in Prokofiev's Seventh Piano Sonata in B-flat Major. This ""War Sonata"" (so it is called, together with sonatas nos. 6 and 8) was composed in 1942 at the height of the Germaninvasion of Russia, and the piece can be easily related to the situation atthat time.
The images of the war loom large throughout the work. Its clashing chords, displaced beats, ""military"" rhythm (especially in the first movement) and excessive dynamics could easily overwhelm those who encounterit.
Its savageness is exhausting for both performers and listeners, but Prokofiev accomplished this in a cleverly simple fashion.
His genius lay in his clever deployment of dissonant chords that consisted of a few notes only (the violent first movement is mostly in two or three voices, and both hands seldom play more than six notes simultaneously) so that the lean textures of the movements sound very full and threatening.
From the breathtaking opening of the first movement, to the last unison cry in the uppermost treble and the lowest bass in the closing one, Okada lived the fury by exploiting the percussiveness and the dynamic range of the instrument to the full, completely drowning the listeners emotionally in the sinister atmosphere of the sonata.
The evening's core pieces were Hungarian Rhapsodies nos. 12 and 13, and Riminiscnces de Don Juan by Franz Liszt (1811-1886) Liszt has been portrayed as an ostentatious artist who liked to fly his fingers over the keys as fast, or bang them as loud, as possible. A cartoon shows him as a piano destroyer with excessively long fingers.
On the other hand, there is a painting by Joseph Danhauser that has Lisztplaying the piano while gazing in contemplation at Beethoven's bust, surrounded by his close admirers in appropriately solemn postures.
These contrasting images are preserved in contemporary pianists' playing styles. Okada, 25, apparently chose the second Liszt. He was of course technically superb -- it was taken for granted after the Prokofiev piece, but a rapt reverence toward the music was always present, even during the most vulgar up-and-down scales and filigrees. His discreteness as a Japanese must have somehow helped him in forming this attitude.
His richly nuanced performance was well suited to Liszt's fleeting changeof moods. The Hungarian Rhapsody no. 12 is a perfect example. Formally the scheme shows a then classic tonal symbolism of movement from pessimistic despair to optimism.
For Liszt this journey is an adventurous one, traveling swiftly through ever changing scenery, from a dark, tempestuous minor beginning to a majestic end in major chords. More blatantly ostentatious is perhaps the Hungarian Rhapsody no. 13, with opening gestures not unlike Bach's Toccata and more broken chords, scales, trills, arpeggios and those ubiquitous Lisztian filigrees that are played fast yet very softly.
Before playing the Riminiscnces de Don Juan (an arrangement of W.A. Mozart duet ""La ci darem la mano"" from the opera Don Giovanni), Okada confessed that the piece was difficult for him because he was not a ""Don Juan.""
For Liszt, a superstar who toured widely throughout Europe and was adoredby audiences, the case was certainly different. This piece corresponds easily to his own turbulent affairs with upper class women during his life. It is easy to imagine the duet, and its four variation pieces, as encounters with lovers, and the flanking bravura passages as the storms andstresses of Liszt's own life before and after the affairs (or the resultingscandals).
All the three works were treated to the most diverse responses, but either grandly or delicately, Okada's awesome technical command always served to realize the music to the highest order. Much tribute to this fantastic performance.
The writer teaches Western music history at the Jakarta Theological Seminary.
