An unexpected mix of classics
Barnatan to deliver a chamber music program you won’t soon forget
As the Vancouver Recital Society’s spring parade of pianists continues, Inon Barnatan comes to the Chan Centre to play one of the most promising programs of the season.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1979, Barnatan was first heard by the VRS audience back in the last days of the Vancouver Chamber Music Festival in 2006.
He’s been back with pleasing regularity since, and his career has gone into high gear: after a stint as the inaugural artist-in-association of the New York Philharmonic, Barnatan has just been named music director of the posh La Jolla Music Society Summerfest. Lucky citizens of the San Diego region.
Vancouver knows something about Barnatan’s abilities to put together interesting chamber music programs from the Schubertiade Festival he curated here in 2016.
At first glance, Barnatan’s solo piano program is a seemingly perplexing assortment of pieces from Couperin to Thomas Adès. Actually, it’s a particularly taut example of the programmer’s art, as well as the pianist’s. Barnatan essayed something similar in his Darkness Visible program and recording several years ago, and we can anticipate another afternoon which creates unexpected, illuminating juxtapositions.
“In this particular case, my idea grew out of wanting to create a suite, the way the baroque suite came to be,” Barnatan said from his New York home.
“The suite was the earliest instrumental music — which grew out of dance at the king’s court — and then became a set form: prelude, allemande, courante, saraband, an optional dance, then a gigue.
“Composers have continued to use this form right up to the 21st century, a way of nodding at tradition while breaking it. So I wanted a group of pieces which would exemplify that genre. The first half of the program is a formal suite, and the second half a set of variations on the suite,” Barnatan said.
Couperin rubs up against Ravel; Handel and Bach are juxtaposed with music by Barber and Ligeti; and there are variations by Johannes Brahms and contemporary Brit Thomas Adès. It all amounts to a wordless dialogue
about the ideas of the suite and variations, Barnatan said.
“The Adès, for example, has nothing obvious to do with the suite, but the music has a very strong baroque sensibility to it. I didn’t realize at first that it was part of his recent opera The Exterminating Angel.”
Other pieces exemplify inter-historical cross-fertilizations.
“There is a strong Couperin influence in the Ravel, and also in the Adès. So even though the pieces I chose are extremely diverse, I hope they will coalesce in performance into a kind of whole,” he said.
This proposition will be demanding for both performer and audience, Barnatan admitted.
“The first half is meant to be performed without applause until the intermission, but I’ve found that I sometimes need to leave a little more space between the pieces to allow them to resonate fully. Part of the fun of playing this is judging how to move from one of the component parts to another for a specific audience. The dialogue between the composers is what I find really exciting — when you hear Couperin next to Ravel, and Ravel next to Adès.”
While Barnatan is no polemicist, he believes we need to think about music in new ways.
“I find the way we listen to music very regimented. Concert programs are just Beethoven, or just piano music, or just jazz.” Barnatan loves mixing it up. “I think there is something very different about hearing a Mahler song cycle next to a Schumann suite. This gives me as a programmer a rich canvas to work on.”
For a pianist with an incomparable wealth of material and a wide and eclectic repertoire, there’s just one unexpected problem: “When you put a concert together, there is the problem of all the stuff you are choosing NOT to perform as well as the stuff you are going to play,” Barnatan said.
Expect to be amazed.