Word: gottschalk
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America's first world-class musician, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, built a precocious career on three isms: romanticism, pianism and giganticism. He had the dazzling keyboard technique of his European contemporaries, Liszt and Chopin, and a languid, aristocratic sexuality as well. Women vied for the white gloves he tossed aside before sitting down to play-and often for other favors afterward. His recitals, heavily laced with showpieces of his own composing, catered unabashedly to the florid, sentimental taste of the day. On occasion he disdained using one piano where ten or 14 would do. During the years before his death...
...mark the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth last week, what could be more fitting than for Pianist and Gottschalk Fancier Eugene List to take over Carnegie Hall for a "monster concert" in the master's manner? 40 PIANISTS! 400 FINGERS! 880 PIANO KEYS! said the posters. Actually, there were 41 pianists, all current or former students of List's in his more staid guise as a teacher (first at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music, now at New York University). Following a sort of platoon system, the performers came and went...
Less is more, said Mies van der Rohe. Oddly, at this concert, more was less. Pieces like Gottschalk's The Siege of Saragossa, a "grand symphony" for ten pi anos, or his arrangement of Rossini's William Tell overture for 20 players at ten pianos may have rung the rafters, but their massive sonorities tended to be mushy. The effect, especially when the scoring ranged into the silvery upper octaves favored by Gottschalk, was like a giant hurdy-gurdy...
...more pleasing were the duet arrangements of such exotic morsels as Le Bananier and Orfa. These performances, cleanly accented and subtly colored, gave a glimpse of Gottschalk's true originality as a composer. At his best, he adapted the Creole and plantation tunes of his native New Orleans, mixed them with the sinuous rhythms of Latin America, and produced piano works as fresh and insouciant as their titles were evocative: The Banjo, Bamboula, Souvenir de Porto Rico. On the strength of them, he stands as the precursor to the great line of American nationalists from Charles Ives to Aaron...
Listeners who went to the monster concert with purely musical expectations may have found it too much of a not good enough thing. But perhaps they missed the point. The evening, with its interlude of vocal selections and its entr'acte speech by Gottschalk Scholar Robert Offergeld, was intended as a nostalgic entertainment, a good-humored throwback to a more innocent age when the concert hall had to mediate between the salon and the circus. If Gottschalk's significance did not always come through clearly, his flamboyant spirit certainly...