by Angela Sutton
An audience of connoisseurs joined Benjamin Hochman at SubCulture Monday night for his recital of four sets of contemporary variations for solo piano. In keeping with venue's unpretentious basement space, this was a simple and intimate affair: the performer, the page turner, and one Steinway B on the minimal stage. The program, however, was anything but simple, with each set presenting an array of technical and interpretive challenges to be approached only by a performer with a strong desire to do these works justice.
Mr. Hochman did, indeed, serve the music well. Although keyboard fireworks abounded, the intent was clearly not to dazzle, but rather to surmount the technical problems and reach the core expression of each set.
After a chiseled presentation of the Oliver Knussen Variations, op. 24 (a Peter Serkin commission), Mr. Hochman gave a sensitive rendition of Luciano Berio's Cinque Variazioni, in which—despite the work's abstraction—the pianist developed a broad palette of tone colors and a striking integration of silence. Tamar Muskal's Frederic Variations, a stormy contemplation of Chopin's ability to transform innocuous passages into unexpected tumults, completed the first half. Hinting at moments from Chopin's works, the variations developed a unique language of their own, somewhat reminiscent of Rachmaninoff. The truly startling feature of the piece, however, was its abrupt ending—reinvoking the theme only to halt it on a hanging chord, without fully grounding earlier complexities.
After intermission came Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated, a massive arc of variations that roared on in several waves—classically, jazzy, obsessively rhythmic, improvisatory, etc.—while the eponymous and catchy Chilean protest song that provides the theme remained present almost throughout. It was the sort of tune one leaves the concert whistling, as I did (and the pianist must), and gave the work a built-in accessibility, in spite of its length.
Mr. Hochman performed this beast in such a way that one could both immediately recognize its compositional logic, and yet be pleasantly surprised by the plethora of music al devices by which it was achieved; it was truly an exercise in conceptual control. Although that control left the jazz figures a touch prim-sounding, in general the performance was a delight, flying by without any sense of its 50-minute performance time.