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Textura

This solo piano recording from Divine Art is commendable for sterling performances but even more imaginative programming. On Songs of Love, Jenny Q Chai couples works by Johann Sebastian Bach and Robert Schumann with one by Charles Ives.

Based in both Shanghai and California and currently a piano faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, Chai shows herself to be a solid interpreter of works from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries on her fifty-one-minute recital. While her renderings of the Bach and Ives compositions are wholly engaged, Chai’s connection to Schumann’s is perhaps the strongest, not so much for musical reasons but a personal one: she was introduced to his music by her first teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music, Seymour Lipkin, with whom she studied from twelve to nineteen. A dedicated Beethoven interpreter, he took her on as a student, despite having no openings in his schedule, and guided by him, she learned Schumann’s Kreisleriana when she was eighteen and performed it at her graduation recital. He also encouraged her to explore the music of contemporary composers, among them Elliot Carter and Henry Cowell.

Given that, as Chai herself opines, “Everything comes from Bach,” it’s apt that the album should begin with the “Aria” from Goldberg Variations. Her controlled, thoughtfully paced, and delicate treatment amplifies the poetic tenderness of the material, not to mention its timeless beauty and ruminative character. Chai then tackles “The Alcotts” from Ives’s “Concord” Sonata, a selection consistent with her choice of album dedicatee, Lipkin: as Ives’s piece opens with a quote of the beginning of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, “The Alcotts” pays further tribute to Chai’s former teacher. In its hushed, almost hymnal opening part, the 1921-published setting perpetuates the delicacy of the Bach setting; at the two-minute mark, however, the writing begins to reflect Ives’s idiosyncratic sensibility when hammering chords and flirtations with dissonance are followed by a lyrical episode that’s equally blues-tinged and salon music-flavoured. Unpredictable to the end, the material proves arresting for weaving many disparate strands into a nine-minute expression.

At album’s end, Schumann’s 1838 fantasy cycle Kreisleriana, Op.16 takes its name from musician and conductor Johannes Kreisler, a character created by German author E. T. A. Hoffmann. Structured in eight parts, the work follows the towering “Äusserst bewegt” movement with “Sehr innig und nicht zu rach,” whose swooning motif sings for ten enrapturing minutes. The movement’s hardly a one-dimensional exercise in repetition, however, as the theme’s subjected to multiple treatments, here voiced contemplatively and there swiftly. The work’s Romantic side rises to the surface for the rambunctious “Sehr aufgeregt,” playful “Sehr lebhaft,” and two “Sehr langsam” movements, one lyrical and the other stately. Chai’s technical facility is called upon by the challenging roller-coaster “Sehr rasch” before the work ends with the majestic “Schnell und spielend.” For those intent on doing so, there’s more than enough evidence to argue for the presence of Schumann’s “Florestan” and “Eusebius” personas in the work. Regardless, Lipkin would no doubt approve of what his one-time student has created in all three of the composers’ cases and be honoured by having been memorialized so fondly.