For a pianist who has made much of his reputation playing the music of Milton Babbitt, the program Robert Taub has selected for his Temple Square recital Tuesday (see adjoining Concert Calendar) looks almost classical: Beethoven, Brahms and Berg.
A better indication of what he has been up to lately, if not the total range of his sympathies, can be had by way of the three CDs listed above.The first documents his 1989/1990 performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra of the Vincent Persichetti Piano Concerto, a firmly enunciated account of this 1962 opus that does as well by its lyric elements as by its more aggressive qualities.
Both are present in the opening movement, where the pianist responds in virtuoso fashion to some considerable muscle-flexing by the orchestra. At the same time the music's American origins are apparent in the almost Gershwiny playfulness of the solo writing and the air of nostalgia pervading the Andante.
Dutoit, for his part, brings more warmth to the orchestral part than Muti in the accompanying Symphony No. 5 ("Symphony for Strings"), darker and more serious but no less appealing, at least to me. Both are vintage Persichetti, even if more emotion might not have been amiss in the latter.
A few weeks later Taub was also one of the pianists who took part in the world premiere of Mel Powell's "Duplicates: A Concerto for Two Pianos," a piece that went on to win the 1990 Pulitzer Prize. That event has likewise been documented, this time by Harmonia Mundi, as part of an all-Powell CD scheduled for release the first of next month.
Given Powell's background, as a former pianist and arranger for Benny Goodman, it comes as something of a surprise to find the Persichetti is in fact the jazzier of these two concertos.
Powell's, by contrast, is almost free-floating in its impressionism, form as such taking a back seat to an almost Messiaen-like exoticism as the two pianists play both with, and often around, each other.
The result, as Alan Rich's liner notes point out, is a kind of "perpetual cadenza" whose free association of ideas reflects a good deal of intelligence and imagination but at the same time leaves me comparatively cold. Well-played though, with Alan Feinberg presumably at the first keyboard and Taub at the second.
The accompanying "Setting" for two pianos (this time with different pianists) is virtually the concerto in miniature - i.e., around six minutes as opposed to 30. The effect, however, is a mite tougher, as it is in "Modules," an "Intermezzo for Chamber Orchestra" whose expansion of its principal motives is additionally blessed by some very alive wind and percussion writing.
Which leaves us with the above-listed Scriabin CD, the final installment in Taub's three-volume survey of that composer's piano sonatas. The upshot is a remarkably disciplined view of this music, as close as any pianist in my experience has come to "sensible Scriabin," if that does not seem a contradiction in terms.
For there is much about Scriabin that is not sensible, as the Chopinesque elements of the early piano works give way to a superheated impressionism that puts even later Debussy to shame. And that, of course, is what his most ardent fans delight in.
What Taub has given us, by contrast, is what might be called Scriabin for non-partisans, those who do not find their disbelief suspended by the likes of Horowitz, Berman or even Ashkenazy. Thus his is a contained account of the Second Sonata as opposed to Ashkenazy's, which lets the music expand intoxicatingly. Likewise the Seventh and Eighth, less impassioned than some but impressively controlled in terms of weight, color and temperament.
As with the earlier volumes in this series, I expect many will find Taub's view incomplete, and it certainly is less engulfing and atmospheric than some. Unlike many of them, however, he never loses sight of the music's strength, or those qualities that give it as secure a place in music history as the more concentrated essays of Babbitt. Or Beethoven, for that matter.