The celebrated Italian pianist, Giuseppe Scotese, returned to Dartmouth yesterday after a two year absence, to perform a short concert as part of the Vaughn Recital Series. Dartmouth is the first stop of a two-week tour which will take him down the Eastern Seaboard from Boston to Washington.
Over the years, Mr. Scotese has made a reputation as one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary piano music. His repertoire includes many pieces written expressly for him by important Italian and American composers.
Wednesday's concert appropriately showcased Scotese's ability to perform a wide range of twentieth century music. Demonstrating a technical mastery and an impeccable understanding of musical structure, Scotese presented a coherent and entertaining interpretation of a very difficult program.
The concert opened with Scotese's own revision of "Sonata in C minor" by the Italian Baroque composer Giovanni Platti. Originally composed for harpsichord, the work suffered slightly in transferal to the modern concert grand on which it was performed. The extensive ornamentations did not sound as cleanly as they should have; Scotese, though a very exact player capable of inserting a sense of space between notes, might have executed a lighter touch in order to coax the sounds from the instrument. His recording of the work, notably, suffers from no such imperfection.
The remainder of the compositions were written within the last twenty years. Scotese's inclusion of a Baroque work on a contemporary program reflects a recent interest in drawing explicit parallels between eighteenth century works and those of our own. Composers throughout the century, from Ravel to Babbit, have turned to the music of middle- and late-Baroque, with its impeccable structural integrity, for inspiration.
The works of two acknowledged contemporary masters dominated the concert. The first, Elliot Carter's 90+, had been given its premiere performance by Scotese in the early eighties. An intensely difficult piece, it juxtaposes the rhythmic pulsing of dense note-clusters with a decidedly arrhythmic series of notes emanating from the chords. The "Francoise Variationen (36/42)" by celebrated serialist Franco Donatoni, presented here in its world premiere, provided an equal challenge. Its schizophrenic character derives from the coincidence of two rhythmically opposed serialized lines, whose frenetic rise up the keyboard at times seemed to lose control of itself. Scotese's playing found an ideal home in these two pieces, whose elusive rhythms he navigated with a fierce intelligence.
Works by two young Italians Paolo Arca, and Matteo D'Amico, both students of both Donatoni and Irma Ravinale, rounded out the program. Arca's "Bagatelle per pianoforte" was a fascinating mix of twentieth-century styles, its sections varying in character from the semi-tonal world of Impressionist harmonies, to a polytonal playfulness invoking Satie, to an incredible rhythmic charge reminiscent of Schoenberg's piano music, all of which were performed with aplomb.
Scotese concluded with three of his own studies, easily the most enjoyable of the concert. Together they make an intriguing concert piece, each exploring contrary motion more extensively, culminating with "Mirrored Flight" in which right and left hands race up and down the keyboard in perfect opposition. In these compact pieces, Scotese achieved a sonic intensity and technical clarity capable of transcending the most difficult musical challenges the contemporary repertory has to offer.
