The latest in the 2018-2019 series of İstanbul Recitals was given by the American pianist Andrew Tyson at ‘The Seed’, the concert hall attached to the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Emirgan, on Friday 15 February. As was the case with last month’s recital, the weather was cold, wet and windy. Stepping off the boat at the quayside in Emirgan, my companion and I were nearly blown sideways into the coast road as the wind lashed the spray off the surging waves of the Bosphorus. Having avoided this fate and regaled ourselves at a nearby café with figgy pudding (in the case of my companion) and with a milkier variety of dessert (in mine), we sought the warmth and comfort of the concert hall. Here, we took our seats – and were most gratified to see that Ms. Nazan Ceylan, co-founder and organiser of the recitals along with Mr. Mehmet Şükûn (the son of the late Mr. Kamil Şükûn, the other co-founder), had once again granted us a grandstand view of the piano.
Mr. Tyson, born in 1986 and trained at the University of North Carolina, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the Juilliard School in New York, won first prize at the Concours Geza Anda in 2015. He has, in addition, been a finalist in the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 2010 and in the Leeds Competition in 2012; at this latter event, he received the orchestra’s award. He began his recital in Emirgan with a selection of works from the suites of François Couperin (1668-1733).
The titles of these pieces are an entertainment in themselves: Les barricades mistérieuses, La muse Plantine, Le dodo ou l’amour au berceau and Le tic-toc-choc, ou Les maillotins. One online dictionary informs us that a Maillotin is a member of a group of insurgents who, armed with lead maces (a maillet being a mace or mallet), led a riot in Paris against King Charles VI in 1382. Personally, I feel this explanation is less plausible than that of one commentator who surmises that as maille means ‘stitch’, maillotin may in fact refer to stitches, and the tic-toc-choc to the clacking of knitting needles. Be all this as it may, the following website seems absolutely convinced that the Maillot were a famous family of rope-dancers. Take your pick of this bizarre bunch:
http://www.hpschd.nu/index.html?nav/nav-4.html&t/welcome.html&http://www.hpschd.nu/tech/rsc/tic.html
I was immediately struck by how modern this French Baroque composer can sound today given a degree of sensitivity to the possibilities inherent in his music. The trills and ornaments that are a major feature of his style actually came across, in Andrew Tyson’s interpretation, as an indicator of originality (albeit a somewhat eccentric one) rather than as an annoying foible and an unnecessary distraction – which is how I myself, I freely admit, used to view them. I have to say that I was converted to Couperin by this performance. The pianist made the most of all the opportunities the pieces afforded for bringing out counter-melodies in the lower parts, and also revealed himself to have a superlative sense of timing, the result being both polished and tasteful – taut but at the same time subtle. I noticed that the somewhat ‘artistic’ hand movements he indulges in at the end of phrases he has particularly enjoyed playing do not indicate a loss of control due to emotional over-involvement: although he does indeed wring the last drop of nectar out of the music, his basic approach is invariably measured, and he always stops well short of abusing poetic licence.
Here is a link to a performance of Les barricades mistérieuses from the Guardian website with some programme notes by Tom Service below it. I can find no satisfactory explanation, even on French websites, as to what exactly these ‘mysterious barricades’ are. Apparently, Couperin himself never gave out any clues:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2010/jan/14/francois-couperin-barricades-music
The next three links are to La muse Plantine (played on an Erard-Flügel piano dating from 1875), to Le dodo ou l’amour au berceau played on a clavecin, and to Le tic-toc-choc, ou Les maillotins played on an ordinary piano by Grigory Sokolov, who by the way is a first-class Russian pianist:
[url] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYhfopkMhEA
[embed code] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UYhfopkMhEA" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
[url] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUygj9rupho
[embed code] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VUygj9rupho" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
[url] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r5kecJfS2I
[embed code] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8r5kecJfS2I" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Following this, we heard some Messiaen – three of the Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus, a suite of 20 pieces composed in 1944 which, if the work is played in its entirety, takes two hours to perform. The ones we heard were those entitled Première communion de la Vierge (no. 11), Noël (no. 13) and Le baiser de l’enfant-Jésus (no. 15). Ever since hearing some Messiaen performed on the organ in the lofty, echoing school hall in my teens I have been a died-in-the-wool fan, so I must plead special interest. I lapped up Mr. Tyson’s rendition, especially as he showed a full understanding of the contemplative character of these pieces, which are the work of a composer with extremely strong religious beliefs and pronounced leanings towards mysticism. The pianist never, ever, hurried; he gave all the pauses their full value, thus demonstrating sympathy with Messiaen’s intention, which surely must have been to allow the audience sufficient room to space out at leisure.
No, I am not being disrespectful: spacing out is a natural reaction to certain forms of religious music, and Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) quite clearly saw music as a stimulus for metaphysical meditation. The glassy quality of the atonal flourishes in the top register – like shards of a smashed prism exposed to a sudden, strong light – always sends a tingle up my spine. Definitely this is music to accompany the Harrowing of Hell in some medieval mystery play. It digs deep.
I urge the reader to listen to Messiaen’s organ music as well as what he wrote for piano: he was, after all, an organist by profession, and his understanding of organ registers comes across very clearly even in his piano music. In the two videos below, I have thus followed a full performance of Vingt regards by Yvonne Loriod (who co-operated with the composer as a performer of his works, and eventually became his wife) with a video of an organ piece by the name of L’Ascension, accompanied by the score:
[url] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-1iJUb4-hw
[embed code] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L-1iJUb4-hw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
[url] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icCQu1FCtfQ
[embed code] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/icCQu1FCtfQ" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Here are two critiques of Vingt regards – the first by Frances Wilson, and the second by Michael Symmons Roberts:
http://www.interlude.hk/front/monumental-twentieth-century-pianismmessiaens-vingt-regards-sur-lenfant-jesus/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/27/poetic-visions-my-vingt-regards-to-messiaen
The last piece in the first half of the programme was Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann from Suisse, the first of the three volumes of Années de pèlerinage (‘Years of Pilgrimage’); this first volume was written between 1848 and 1854. I have to say that Liszt is a composer whose music for solo piano does not awaken any enthusiasm whatsoever in me: the overt appeals to the emotions do not, in my opinion, compensate for the lack of underlying content. Frankly, in my leisure moments I only listen to his orchestral pieces and those for piano and orchestra, in which this Hungarian Houdini of the keyboard demonstrates his grasp of thematic development and musical form. After all, to give him his due, it was Franz Liszt (1811-1886) who invented the ‘symphonic poem’ – a work in one single movement intended to convey a literary idea. The following article by David Guion explains the nature of this form, and the process by which the composer arrived at it, very clearly:
https://music.allpurposeguru.com/2012/02/franz-liszt-and-the-symphonic-poem/
Perhaps I am prejudiced by my own failure to play one of Liszt’s fearsome piano Etudes during my twenties – and that in spite of practising until the blood ran out of my fingertips. But there is clearly a place for him in any pianist’s repertoire, especially if the intention is to impress. (There, now, I really must resist the temptation to go after those low-hanging sour grapes!) Anyway, here is a performance of Vallée d’Obermann by Evgeny Kissin:
[url] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbnPiQ-VaBc&start_radio=1&list=RDAbnPiQ-VaBc
[embed code] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AbnPiQ-VaBc?list=RDAbnPiQ-VaBc" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
And now some programme notes by Zhang Zuo (you will need to scroll down to the fourth item):
https://vanrecital.com/tag/vallee-dobermann-from-annees-de-pelerinage-i-suisse/
The second half of the concert began with a piece of great charm that I had never heard before: the Nocturne in G flat major, one of the Six Pieces for Piano composed by Ottorino Respighi between 1903 and 1905. It came as a surprise to learn from the programme notes that Respighi (1879-1936), born in Bologna, actually went to St. Petersburg and became a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov – who must surely have been responsible for laying the foundations of the highly original orchestration that characterises Respighi’s symphonic poems The Fountains of Rome and The Pines of Rome. In this piece, Andrew Tyson’s technique impressed with some evenly-played prestissimo arpeggios (now you see it, now you don’t): following his hand movements must be a challenge even for a creature with such speedy synapses as a cat. The following YouTube video is of a performance of the Nocturne by Konstantin Scherbakov, with the score:
[url] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk1WtIjF9Jw
[embed code] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qk1WtIjF9Jw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
At this point, I must reveal that my enjoyment of the Respighi was severely compromised by having to endure the monologue that was going on behind me, where a lady of mature years spent the first half of the piece fishing in her handbag for some no doubt indispensable object, making loud comments to her neighbour as she did so. Seething with uncontrollable outrage and an all-too-British sense of Entitlement (that deadly virus), I turned round to stare at her, morphing temporarily into a black- and yellow-striped entomological nemesis. The monologue ceased, probably not as a result of my efforts but because her companion had told her to shut up. It occurred to me that what we need here in İstanbul is psychic Attitude Inspectors standing at the entrance to every concert hall with a barrier that can be raised or lowered; any person intuited by the Inspectors’ ultra-powerful sixth senses to be lacking in the necessary training in audience etiquette should have the barrier slammed down on the hand holding the football rattle, and be shown the exit (“Son / Lady, I don’t like your addatood!”).
And so to the last item in Andrew Tyson’s recital, which was Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor (the last of his piano sonatas), written in 1844. It was a flawless performance, particularly pleasing in that the pianist paused for only a second or two between movements. Come to think of it, he began nearly every piece in the whole concert before the initial applause had died away. I very much appreciated this let’s-get-down-to-business approach, though many members of the audience showed themselves up by failing to notice that the pianist had started playing, and therefore that it was time to leave off clapping.
In the magnificently unhurried slow movement, Mr. Tyson’s talent for lyricism stood him in good stead: this was the part, above all, in which I truly appreciated his highly expressive but invariably disciplined musicianship. And it was, in fact, the pianist’s combination of what has been called ‘poetry’ by some critics with a never-failing underlying control that was the feature of his playing I found most satisfying. He is not a wildly original stylist, and indeed is basically traditional in his interpretative approach, but he nevertheless succeeds in communicating the impression of being an unrestrained Romantic. I really don’t know how he does it.
And now, a video of an excellent performance of the sonata by Andrew Tyson himself (complete with close-ups of his hands), followed by a description of the work by James Reel:
[url] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bx95u3meM
[embed code] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/51bx95u3meM" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
[url] https://www.allmusic.com/composition/piano-sonata-no-3-in-b-minor-op-58-ct-203-mc0002365575
As a taster for the talents of Seong-Jin Cho, who on 11 June is to perform at the opening concert of this summer’s İKSV İstanbul Music Festival together with the Tekfen Philharmonic Orchestra, here is a performance by him of the Chopin sonata’s last movement:
[url] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pRQ4LqTJr4
[embed code] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1pRQ4LqTJr4" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
To end with (but not quite), here is a short description of the origins of the name ‘Tyson’ – a surname which, thanks to my Dyson ancestors, I share with the pianist who entertained us on 15 February. The initial ‘T’ and ‘D’ in the two names, both being plosives (that is, ‘stop consonants’ pronounced by blocking the vocal tract so that airflow is stopped), are of course interchangeable from the point of view of derivation, being but voiced and unvoiced versions of the same sound. Two early Christian saints by the name of Dionysius and Dionysia were apparently popular in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the Middle Ages, and their names were commonly shortened to ‘Di’. Both ‘Tyson’ and ‘Dyson’, therefore, mean ‘son of Dionysius or Dionysia’ – ‘Di’s son’. The gravestones in the churchyard at Linthwaite, near Huddersfield, bear the names of quite a number of my Dyson forebears.
The problem for me has always been not that despite my Yorkshire roots I was born in Lancashire, but that a certain James Dyson invented a rather clever way of designing vacuum cleaners. A problem? Surely not, you may say. But in the 1990s, when his domestic appliances achieved worldwide popularity, I would receive telephone calls from people asking whether or not I was willing to appoint them as Turkish distributors for the Dyson device. This precipitated a crisis of conscience in me, and the temptation to overstep the bounds of probity was strong; however – foolishly, perhaps – I always disabused my interlocutors of the impression that I was a relative of Sir James.
Finally, I must add that Andrew Tyson is quite clearly on top of every aspect of his game and is a highly accomplished pianist and musician who fully deserved his invitation to Emirgan; my companion, accustomed to Moscow standards of performance, agreed with me. I must also point out that the Steinway piano at ‘The Seed’ is a very fine instrument indeed, and that especially in the higher of the two octaves above middle C it has a timbre that somehow manages to be cloudy, like a dry-tasting red wine (in Turkish, the word for this would be buruk), and bell-like at the same time. My nearly-namesake Andrew Tyson clearly appreciated this feature, and made the most of it. Nazar değmesin – may the Evil Eye not touch it, or him.