Robertson's EMC recital masterful

Michael Reckord, Gleaner Writer

"A lot of people missed a great performance," was the half-time comment by one patron at Dr Kaestner Robertson's piano recital at the Edna Manley College (EMC) School of Music on Sunday afternoon.

She was right. Robertson was masterful in his playing, but the auditorium, recently refurbished in tasteful earth colours, was only one-third full.

Tall and distinguished, with salt-and-pepper hair, the Jamaican who is now professor of music and chair of the music department at Atlantic Union College, Massachusetts, chose a quartet of great composers for his programme. They were Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt.

Celebration of 50 years

The evening began with Music School head, Roger Williams, explaining the genesis of the recital. Late last year or early this year, he said, Robertson, a graduate of the school, telephoned to "offer a recital" in celebration of the institution's 50th anniversary.

It was readily accepted, said Williams, who went on to invite the audience to other imminent anniversary functions at the school. They include two faculty recitals, one featuring jazz, on October 1, and the other classical music, on November 6.

Williams' welcome and introduction over, Robertson began with the Bach/Busoni Chaconne in D minor. (A chaconne, the printed programme noted, is "a set of continuous variations on a short repeated bass line, along with its implied harmonies.")

Robertson's style of playing quickly became evident. With his head slightly bowed, the pianist was assured, firm and focused on the keys of the sonorous grand piano. Except at the end of pieces, there were no flourishes of the hands.

Nor were there smiles, nods or even glances at the audience - as in the Liberace style of performing. Robertson clearly wanted one to focus on the music, not on him.

Though serious, the pianist was certainly not solemn or rigid. The selections did not allow that. All contained many moods and called for both sensitivity and flexibility.

Useful information on many of the pieces was to be found in the printed programme. It noted, for example, that the virtuoso pianist-composer Ferruccio Busoni was famed for his transcriptions of Bach's organ works, and particularly for his transcription of the Chaconne in D minor (from the Partita No. 2 for solo violin), which was done between 1891 and 1892 while Busoni lived in Boston, Massachusetts.

Robertson's second item, Beethoven's Sonata in E major, Op. 14 No. 1 (composed in 1799), was followed by a version for string quartet three years later.

Interestingly, we learn from the notes, "This is the only piano sonata that he [Beethoven] arranged for string quartet, and he did so in spite of the fact that he wrote that there was at the time 'an unnatural mania so prevalent for transcribing even pianoforte compositions for stringed instruments'.

"He firmly maintained that only Mozart and Haydn could do that successfully and, of course, he himself, in this particular case." The anecdote gives an insight into the composer's famously self-confident and rebellious personality.

Bright passages

The "seemingly simple" sonata is full of bright passages, but with its three movements (Allegro, Allegretto and Rondo-Allegro commodo) it is, of course, more complex than Chopin's Ballade in A flat, Op. 47 which followed. That joyful, melody-filled work ended the first half of the recital.

The second half was devoted to Franz Liszt. The propgramme notes inform (or remind) the audience that it is the 200th anniversary of his birth, that he was both admired and reviled by supporters and detractors but, as a matter of fact, "he transformed the piano technique of his time, created the solo piano recital, and championed the works of his contemporaries and predecessors and ... as a composer, he was also an innovator and a pioneer of the language of 20th century music".

The first Liszt piece, Legend No. 2 (St Francis of Paul walking on the waves), is based on the story of St Francis being refused passage across the straits of Messina by a ferryman who quipped: "A holy man like you should be able to walk on water." St Francis, along with his companion, then proceeded to do just that.

One hears the storm the men encountered on the water in the piano's rolling lower notes, and then, in the cheerful higher notes, the calm that followed St Francis' rebuke of the high waves.

Liszt's Valse Oubliee, which followed, made one feel like dancing. The third piece, Sonetto 12 del Petrarca, has an ethereal quality.

Robertson chose one of the complex (and originally "fiendishly difficult," but later simplified) Transcendental Etudes for his final piece. The Etude Transcendental X in F minor is a multi-layered piece with a very modern, almost avant-garde feel to it. Robertson played the muscular work with the appropriate power and, not surprisingly, received strong applause.

The applause, plus a few cheers and cries of "More!" continued after he left the stage, but he returned only to give another dignified bow and receive a gift of a book on Jamaican art and a CD of folk songs.

As the audience filed out, Robertson was left deep in a technical discussion with Williams and EMC Board Chairman Paul Issa about the acoustics of the auditorium.