Gloria Cheng opens the nearly all-British Piano Spheres program Tuesday night at the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall. In the first half, the pianist offered the US premiere of Bernard Rands’ 12 Preludes. An impressionistic 40-minute piano work, it’s the first of 15 premieres planned this season by the venerable recital series.
Before the performance, Bernard Rands, English-born and US-based since 1975 told the audience that he owed “much of what I am as a musician” to Luciano Berio, his mentor and friend. And a Berio-like sense of piano music history and lyricism pervaded Rands’ Preludes. Dedicated to the pianist Robert Levin, the score conjured a sound world that Debussy would recognize.
Whether in the fourth Prelude, Elegia (In memoriam Luciano Berio), the introspective eighth, Lamento, or the haunting concluding Notturno (In memoriam Don Martino), Cheng’s precision, warm tone and sensitive, resonant pedalling conveyed enough variety to put the largely elegiac piano work across.
After intermission, Cheng offered the U.S. premiere of Gavin Bryars’ “Ramble on Cortona,” lending coherence to the seemingly improvisatory 10-minute piano piece. Then Cheng announced a reordering of her program, saving the shorter dance pieces for the end. She gave a playful rendition of George Benjamin’s darkly comic “Relativity Rag,” or as Cheng called it, “the little rag that couldn’t.” Then Cheng caught the intimate, hallucinatory quality of grief without sentimentality in Oliver Knussen’s poignant “Ophelia’s Last Dance,”.
Delightful readings of Harrison Birtwistle’s “Betty Freeman: Her Tango,” and Samuel Barber’s “Hesitation Tango,” from his suite “Souvenirs,” followed. Her encore performance was Don Davis’ tongue-in-cheek “Illicit Felicity.”
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