John Solari: Forceful, Fiery Young Pianist Plays Well in Mixed Recital at St. Paul's Church

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Yesterday was a pretty quiet day until about 3:30 p.m., when my husband Charles and I set out for St. Paul’s for what turned out to be a really stunning concert featuring solo pianist John Solari. I’d seen him there a couple of times before as an accompanist for saxophonist Benson Lee on February 25 and soprano Michelle Pérez on May 20, but last night he gave a solo recital consisting of a wide variety of pieces. He began with Five, a series of five pieces by Chinese-American-Canadian Dorothy Chang (b. 1970), the only living composer on Solari’s program. Five consists of five movements, “Ephemera,” “Toccatina,” “Reverie,” “Echoes,” and “Quicksilver,” and it was composed in 2012 on commission from pianist Corey Hamm. Solari explained that the piece was “a struggle between freedom and rhythm, between flexibility and rigidity. The first movement represents pure freedom, the second pure rhythm, and as they mix along the way it comes to a tragic conclusion, with a comedic sort of tinge” – a reference, he added, to the way the fifth and last movement, “Quicksilver,” “moves in fits and starts.” Chang’s piece didn’t seem to have any Asian influence, but the quieter parts evoked Debussy and the stormier parts sounded Bartókian to me, and Solari vividly presented the piece’s contrasting moods even though he didn’t give the spiel until after he played it, which gave his rap a sort of, “Oh, that’s what that was about” quality.

The next item on his program was Mozart’s piano sonata No. 8 in A minor, written in 1778 right after the death of Mozart’s mother, and a post about it on the “Fugue for Thought” blog (https://fugueforthought.de/2018/08/10/mozart-piano-sonata-no-8-in-am-k-310/) contains a quote from critic Blair Johnston, “One gets the feeling, listening to the Sonata in A minor, that Mozart had been stocking up on minor mode drama for some time when he wrote it. Its stormy music is a far cry from the happy-hearted, light-footed sonata fare composed up to that point.” It’s one of only two piano sonatas (out of 18 in all) Mozart composed in minor keys, and Solari played it brilliantly in the fast outer movements (it’s a pretty typically structured fast-slow-fast piece of the time) and really tore into the “Presto” (“very fast”) finale. Solari’s next pieces were a group of three of the Debussy piano preludes, all from his first book of 12 (there would be a second book later, also containing 12), and as with the Mozart he really tore into this music. A lot of pianists who play Debussy today turn him into a sort of progenitor of “New Age” music, playing him slowly and quietly. Not Solari: he picked three preludes, “Les sons et la parfums tourment dans l’air du soir” (“The Sounds and the Scents Torment in the Evening Air”), inspired by a poem by Charles Beaudelaire; “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest” (“What the West Wind Saw”), which Solari said was based on a French fairy tale; and the awesome “La cathédrale engloutie” (“The Sunken Cathedral”), about a French legend in which a sunken cathedral rises from the ocean once a year to remind the residents of an island kingdom of their sins. My first introduction to Debussy’s piano music was a four 78-rpm album by Oscar Levant called A Recital of Modern Music in which he played two pieces, “The Hills of Anacapri” and “Gardens Under the Rain” (“Jardins sous la pluie”), and though I’ve heard many recordings since (including the nearly complete set from the 1950’s by pianist Walter Gieseking), I noted that in “Jardins sous la pluie” Gieseking’s “pluie” was a drizzle and Levant’s was a storm. Solari’s approach was a lot closer to Levant’s than Gieseking’s; he tore into the west-wind prelude instead of making it just a light breeze, and “The Sunken Cathedral” was monumental. For his final group he picked two pieces from Schubert’s “Impromptus” – an E-flat allegro and a G-flat andante – and paired them with Scriabin’s “Fantaisie in B minor,” Op. 28. “The world still exists,” Charles joked after the Scriabin – a reference to the big work, Mysterium, which Scriabin was writing at the end of his life, which he intended would take seven days to perform and, when it ended, so would the world. (He only completed 45 minutes of it, which may be for the best.) This Scriabin piece was composed in 1900, between his third and fourth (of 10) piano sonatas, and reflected relatively early Scriabin before he went bat-shit crazy. The two Schubert pieces weren’t published until decades after his death in 1828; two of the eight impromptus were published in 1872 and the rest not until 1958. They contain some radical (for the time) harmonic modulations and clashes, and though they’re mostly nice, well-behaved early 19th century pieces there are certainly anticipations of later, more adventurous music. One reason Solari played the three pieces in sequence was he thought the closing of the second Schubert impromptu and the opening of the Scriabin fantasy sounded the same (there were certainly similarities but they didn’t seem all that close to me).

What I liked best about Solari’s recital was the sheer energy of his playing; though he presents himself publicly as a disarming young man, put him in front of a keyboard and he really “goes to town,” as they used to say. Music that would tempt other pianists to play quietly and relatively unemotionally spurred Solari into dense, intense readings; even the Mozart sonata sounded in Solari’s performance like Mozart was angry, not sad, that his mother had died and left him alone with that scapegrace father of his.