Imaginative piano recital conjures up Oscar Wilde
Tendler’s piece imagines writer as modern man
The composer also asks the soloist to recite, sing, whistle and breathe loudly in precise rhythms.
The timing was coincidental, but it could not have been more apt. On Friday, June 28 — the 50th anniversary of Stonewall and the beginning of Pride Weekend — pianist Adam Tendler devoted the bulk of his superb recital at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral to a performance of “De Profundis,” Frederic Rzewski’s virtuosic and soulstirring tribute to Oscar Wilde.
Extravagantly inventive, demanding and beautiful, the piece — a setting of excerpts from Wilde’s famous letter from Reading Gaol, where he had been imprisoned for “gross indecency” — can also be heard as a 30minute encapsulation of the gay rights movement. It embodies both despair and hope, touching on rageinducing injustices alongside the consolations of art and unshakable personal dignity.
To hear this piece at this fraught and dangerous historic juncture was to feel, in Wilde’s haunting final words about his own career, “what an appalling ending” and “what a wonderful beginning” — both sentiments intertwined to the point of inextricability.
There were other pleasures to be had in this alluring and thoughtfully programmed event. Helen Kim, the terrific associate principal of the San Francisco Symphony’s second violin section, joined Tendler for James MacMillan’s luxuriant, bittersweet duet “Kiss on Wood,” as well as Arvo Pärt’s ingratiating and overexposed “Fratres.” There were bits of experimental whimsy by John Cage and Joan La Barbara.
But it was Rzewski’s 1992 masterpiece, unsurprisingly, that left the most indelible impression. Every encounter with “De Profundis” is at once a terrifying joyride — a cry from the depths, as the Biblical title suggests — and a signpost toward some more generously empathic view of humanity.
Rzewski works toward those ends, in part, through an uncompromising level of technical bravura. The piano
part alone is daunting; but the composer also asks the soloist to recite, sing, whistle, breathe loudly in precise rhythms and slap his or her head and chest, all with a contact mike to capture the sounds. It’s the kind of thing they don’t regularly teach in conservatories (yet).
And these extended techniques pay off in darkly expressive ways. In the opening measure, to take just one example, the pianist rattles off a quick keyboard figure followed by a sharp intake of breath, the sound of a man waking up in a panic to find that he is indeed still in prison. A later episode where the pianist lowers the keyboard lid and taps or knocks on it turns into an elaborate mad scene; the soloist’s whistling and humming conjures up a protagonist losing, then regaining, a connection to the here and now.
Through it all, Wilde’s own words run like a florid stream of outrage, moral reckoning, reminiscences and selfpity. (In treating dispatches from prison, “De Profundis” is like a bookend to Rzewski’s great 1971 work “Coming Together,” based on the Attica Prison riot of that year.) A listener comes away with a portrait that, even with all the theatrical paraphernalia, is heartbreaking in its immediacy.
And Tendler’s magnificent performance only underscored that immediacy by giving it a naturalism and directness I’ve never heard applied to it before. Other performers, including Rzewski himself, often tend to adopt a dry, declamatory tone, letting the words speak for themselves.
Tendler, by contrast, dove fullon into the material. When he began to recite the first words of the piece, about five minutes in, he turned toward the audience and started speaking so conversationally I thought for a moment he was about to announce a technical glitch.
But no, this was Wilde conceived as a contemporary queer man, very much of Tendler’s age and general demeanor. His intimate phrasing, shaggy speech rhythms and vocal fry took Wilde out of Victorian England and deposited him right here in our own place and time.
Which, let’s face it, is exactly where we need him to be.