Cameron
Carpenter’s concerts are always a surprise, but never more so than when the program
says, “Cameron Carpenter will announce the first half of his program from the
stage” and the second half lists only pieces that have never been performed in
the US before. (And he added a post-intermission encore to that.)
He began the
concert by walking on stage and, without saying a word, launching into the
Prelude from Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G
Major for Unaccompanied Cello, played on the pedals alone. This was not
simply an impossibly difficult solo for pedals; for this piece, he redefined “fleet
of foot.” The opening line is an arpeggio in three voices. Take a look at the
first three notes: a low G, a D four notes above that, and a B five notes above that:
Now consider
how you would play those distantly separated notes with two feet! Then add the other notes, and keep a brisk tempo. Impossible.
After
finishing the Prelude, he proceeded to play it again, this time “accompanying”
the unaccompanied piece with a full-on Fantasia.
He then
spoke of the recent sad loss of the San Francisco Symphony’s principal oboist,
William Bennett, in whose memory he then played one of Bach’s Leipzig Chorales,
Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, which
features a solo line that he played on the organ’s oboe stop. This was a “straight”
performance, note-wise, but exceptionally free and beautifully ornamented, as
an oboe player might play it. It was very moving.
This was followed immediately
by a ferocious Fantasia and Fugue in G
Minor (BWV 542). Completely over the top, as one expects from Carpenter. My favorite moment was in the pedal at measure 31 of the Fantasia, where
Bach writes a line that descends – logically – four octaves. Of course, there
aren’t that many octaves in the pedal, which contains only 32 keys, so in the
written score, you play one octave and then start over again from the top. But
for a given key on the organ, you can use a stop that plays the pitch for that
key (a so-called 8-foot stop), or the pitch one octave higher (4’), one octave
lower (16’), or two octaves lower (32’). So by starting with just 4’ stops and
then adding gradually adding 8’, 16’, and 32’ stops, Carpenter produced a
4-octave descent! It makes perfect sense. I doubt that he was the first
organist to do this, but it’s the first time I’ve ever heard it done, and I’ve
known this piece since I was a teenager.
Carpenter
did introduce the next two pieces on the program, the Chorale No. 3 in B Minor by César Franck, and the Variations on a Noel by Marcel Dupré,
which Carpenter described as a “fashion show,” which was both funny and apt.
This was a revelation for me. We’ve all become accustomed to organists’ taking
certain liberties with the registration, if not the notes, of Bach’s organ
music, since Bach rarely wrote what stops he expected the organist to use,
although every organist knows standard registrations.
But for French Romantic
organ music, we have much more specific information. Franck and Dupré wrote
registration-indications in the score, and the instruments for which these pieces were
written are still in use today. We have recordings of Marcel Dupré, and some of
us, myself included, were privileged enough to hear Dupré play in person. We
know the churches, we know the acoustics, we know “how they’re supposed to be
played.”
But Carpenter, succeeding in his grand quest to make us all re-think
this instrument and this music, did not follow these traditional registrations.
Instead, he picked new sounds, appropriate to Davies Hall and to the Ruffatti
organ, and surprised many of us. I’ve heard these pieces played countless
times; this was not better or worse; it was new, different, and delightful.
It reminded me of a performance I saw, years ago, of The Tempest at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in which Prospero
was Miranda’s mother. It changed
everything, and I’ll never think of that play again without remembering that
performance. Carpenter’s performance was like that.
After
intermission, we were expecting five pieces from Carpenter’s work in progress, Science Fiction Scenes, but he started,
again without commentary, by playing The
Academic Festival Overture by Brahms, as a sort of mid-concert encore. The five Scenes that followed have been performed only once before, in
Berlin. There were interesting themes in the first and fifth scenes, and a
perpetual-motion figure in the pedal of the third movement. The rest I didn’t find
very interesting as compositions. The program notes say, “Carpenter draws on
the vast emotional array not only of science fiction itself, but also of the
concept of large-scale epic music as essential to the cinematic science fiction
experience.” OK, if you say so. I heard harmonic wisps of show tunes, which was
jarring in a performance by the hard-edged Carpenter. But these are new pieces,
and perhaps this is what the Scenes
are about. Time will tell.
There is no
doubt in my mind, however, that Cameron Carpenter is one of the greatest
organists I’ve ever heard, and I’ve sat on the bench next to Marcel Dupré.
