On Sat­ur­day last Anthony Padilla daz­zled every­one present with blaz­ing tech­nique and melt­ing sen­si­tiv­ity in the music of the two arch-Romantic com­posers, Franz Liszt and Sergei Rach­mani­nov. In a career of many dimen­sions includ­ing rock-star level celebrity, Liszt defined what was pos­si­ble on the mod­ern piano almost before the piano itself was capa­ble of doing all those things. Because Liszt wrote so much for his own–later regretted–ostentatious career as the world’s great­est pianist, he wrote a good deal of vac­u­ous music. Prop­erly, Tony included some of it on his pro­gram. So we had orig­i­nal Liszt and we had Liszt’s takes on the music of other roman­tics such as Bach, Schu­bert, and Schu­mann. The Rach­mani­nov came in the form of his very late set of vari­a­tions on La folia, a pop­u­lar tune run into the ground by so many other com­posers and attrib­uted in error to Corelli, hence the title Vari­a­tions on a Theme of Corelli.

Among so much that was remark­able about the evening–and has been about our “Clas­si­cally Roman­tic” series–is the gen­uine­ness of the musi­cal voices we have heard. On the rec­om­men­da­tion of a friend I once tried to lis­ten to vari­a­tions on La folia by Anto­nio Salieri (yes, that Salieri of Amadeus infamy). I was dri­ving a col­league to the air­port and popped the CD into the player in the car. We lasted maybe seven or eight vari­a­tions, and then to my relief, Craig pushed the eject but­ton in self-defense. That would not have hap­pened had we been lis­ten­ing to Rach­mani­nov or, for that mat­ter, even Liszt at his most meretricious.

So what’s the dif­fer­ence? At least in part, I think the dif­fer­ence is that we hear the unique voice of the com­poser. Could any­one other than Rach­mani­nov have writ­ten those Corelli vari­a­tions? Only a clever imi­ta­tor. One cri­te­rion of a major artist is that they have found their voice and that voice res­onates with peo­ple even cen­turies later. There have been many more ter­rific tech­ni­cians in the arts than great creators.

Along with hun­dreds of con­tem­po­raries, Salieri was an accom­plished and suc­cess­ful com­poser, but he is pretty much a bore because, lack­ing a com­pelling voice, his music sounds deriv­a­tive of an era rather than a per­sonal state­ment that com­mands atten­tion. Like Mozart to Salieri, Liszt had his rivals. Their names are lost to most audi­ences today because they sounded more like their era than like them­selves. Any­body for some Thalberg?

Next up: The music of Schu­mann, Brahms, and Prokofiev on April 15 with vio­lin­ist, Maria Lar­i­onoff, and pianist, Robin McCabe.

Brooke Creswell

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