Concert: Night Flights
The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 12, 1999
“she played this varied and demanding program with aplomb and no little technical flair while keeping the focus on the music itself… [it] was solid, musical and infused with a sense of derring-do.”
Bringing a good bit of flair to music dedicated to the night:
Pianist Jeanne Golan has sought a niche in a crowded world by designing programs about time or, in her recital Sunday at the Ethical Society, about evening music. The New York-based pianist used the recital as a forum for the premiere of Daron Hagen’s Qualities of Light, and surrounded that piece with nocturnes by John Field and Samuel Barber, and night-shaded music by Granados.
It was her local debut, and she played this varied and demanding program with aplomb and no little technical flair while keeping the focus on the music itself. If some test of mettle were needed, she ended her program with the Barber Sonata, the final movement of which tests and certifies a player’s speed and perception.
The Hagen piece, in three sections, is far from a sentimental musing on stereotypical night sounds. It expands on a line made of widely spaced intervals, probes internalized images through a long, unhurried bass melody and finds some idea of night terrors through big clangorous playing at the ends of the keyboard. A big chordal section late in the work reminds listeners of Mozart in that the dynamic levels, chord by chord, are sharply contrasted. The progress of the three sections — “Dusk, Built Up Dark, and Gloaming” — supply an atmospheric form for a work that speaks clearly and often songfully about night.
Golan prefaced the piece with three Nocturnes by John Field and one by Barber. Field’s vision, in pieces that draw their drama and emotion through harmonic shifts, helped to point out the pianist’s lyrical gift and ability to clarify the core of music often surrounded by ornament and flourish. She played pieces in E-flat and E minor, and a cheerful A-major Nocturne with a pert ending. Barber’s Nocturne unfolded in her playing as Chopin magnified enormously, seething with emotive layers. She played Granados’ Maiden and the Nightingale with her trademark lyricism and admirable sense of pace. The imagery seemed vivid in her playing, even to the ending in which the bird sings so prettily.
Barber’s Sonata closed the night journey. In that, she moved through the work’s many voices, creating a performance to match its hyperambitions. It all went clearly, ending with that flying fugue, in which her playing was solid, musical and infused with a sense of derring-do.
by Daniel Webster