It doesn’t get much more idyllic than enjoying a piano concert in a restored Frank Lloyd Wright House. Piano Perspectives, put on by Chatter PDX on August 23 at the Gordon House in Silverton, Oregon, offered a delightful afternoon of music in a historic architectural site. Preserved by the Gordon House Conservancy as a museum and education center, the site is the only Frank Lloyd Wright house in the state, and this event was part of a weekly classical concert series that blends music and spoken word to activate the space.
The pianists that afternoon, Monica Ohuchi and Brian Hsu, are both acclaimed Oregon-based performers and educators with a passion for sharing new and lesser-known works. Beyond performing premieres, Ohuchi is the Executive Director of Fear No Music, a nonprofit dedicated to public performance of modern and contemporary classical music, and Hsu is a founding member of Key to Inclusion, an intercollegiate initiative dedicated to promoting piano music by Black American and other underrepresented composers. Interestingly, Ohuchi shared that while she and Hsu met during their Julliard days, this event was their first time performing together.
As warm afternoon sunrays streamed through the open-air living room, bouncing off the amber beams made of Western Redcedar and illuminating the audience with dappled light, Hsu introduced the afternoon’s first number, excerpts from 6 Pièces Romantiques, Op. 55 for four hands. This piece is by French Romantic-era composer Cécile Chaminade, whose talent for composition was noticed at a young age, and she was one of the most famous composers at the time, writing countless works for performance in the home. Even though she was the first woman to receive the highest civil honor in France, her name has largely been erased from the standard repertoire, which is biased towards male composers and concert-hall works. The first piece, appropriately titled Primavera (“spring”), had a relaxed, spring-like melody, while the next was quick, aloof, and more dance-like. The pastoral third piece harbored a bold and playful surprise, like a funny joke in an otherwise ordinary story, and the duo perfectly executed the contrast between those two moods. In the fifth piece, they created a stormy and exhilarating intensity before moving on to the final excerpt of the set, a regal processional occasionally punctuated by chromatic scales, accented grace notes, and a weighty eighth-eighth quarter motif. The execution of that motif had the perfect balance of restraint and intensity. There’s not much space on the piano, but Ohuchi and Hsu worked masterfully together, easefully passing melodies and accompaniment back and forth.
The next couple of piano pieces were solos, with Hsu performing the next piece, Branche by Connor Chee. Chee blends Navajo vocables with classical piano compositional techniques, and this piece was one of several commissioned to introduce pre-college students to music by underrepresented living composers. The expansive, meditative piece conjured up the magnificence of light streaming through branches of a tree. Its tender melodies paid homage to the juniper tree, a symbol of purification and balance. Hsu’s sensitive delivery brought a quiet, devotional quality to the piece that invited listeners inward.
In stark contrast, Ohuchi performed BQE, a jazz-classical crossover piece by Hiromi Uehara named after the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Ohuchi recalled her time living in New York and her commute on that stretch of road, “which is the exact opposite of what we’re experiencing here,” she remarked. The piece is a relentless barrage of time signature changes and irregular rhythms. Ohuchi’s rendition captured the unpredictability of urban congestion while also helping the listeners make sense of the chaos. It’s not as destabilizing as Uehara’s performance. If Uehara’s interpretation is of being in one of the cars swerving across the expressway, Ohuchi’s was one of seeing the road from a bird’s eye view. This slightly more removed perspective allowed listeners to notice the rapidly changing yet cyclical patterns of traffic. There’s a passage with long, soaring lines, the closest thing to peace in the piece, and it was like experiencing the expressway in the middle of the night—less busy though still not empty. But the calm was short-lived, and soon the whir of the morning commute came back in full force. With jaw-dropping precision, Ohuchi whisked attendees skillfully through the thoroughfare without incident.
Chatter PDX’s programs often incorporate spoken word, and in this show, they featured Ingrid Wendt, an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” American Poetry Review, About Place, and more. She started with a piece from her book, Evensong, called “Sanctuary,” and it was about the joys of singing. The piece touches on the satisfaction of joining together in unison before dipping into more serious territory, and then finally coming back to honor the medicine of song. The line that stuck with me was “What is sacred space if not this shelter of song?” Wendt’s work is both existential and jovial, capturing the vicissitudes of life and the ways we make sense of it all. Another work, “What They Saw on Their Weekly River Walk, Taking Turns Pushing His Chair,” was a comedic poem inspired by a neighbor who saw a literal wild bird chase over the river. She took this opportunity to uplift the life and work of John Brehm, a Portland-based author who was, at the time of the performance, in the process of passing. She read some of his haikus, which approached weighty themes of aging and mortality with levity and acceptance. Both Wendt and Brehm hold heavy concepts with a light grasp, inviting listeners to soften themselves to the beauty and heartbreak of everyday moments.
After a poignant moment of silence, Hsu returned onstage to perform “Theme and Variations on an Amis Harvest Song” by Ming-Hsiu Yen. As its name suggests, the piece incorporates a harvest festival song originating from the Amis, the largest indigenous tribe in Taiwan. Sprinkled with dissonance, this contemporary classical reimagination of a traditional song was punchy and vibrant, capturing the bold colors worn in the festival and the energetic dances, made even more vivid by Hsu’s clarity and conviction.
Closing out the afternoon was “La Valse” by Maurice Ravel, a sonic chronicle of the rise and fall of the genre of the waltz, and also one of the most popular pieces in concert halls in the past few years as both an orchestral work and a (2-hand and 4-hand) piano staple. Of course, we were treated to the 4-hand version. The piece started with a murky primordial soup of low notes, out of which the faintest trappings of a waltz emerged and slowly began to find its footing. Even in these early moments, there was an undertone of uneasiness, which soon grew into strongly accented interjections. The dotted quarters and eighth note sequences gave the piece a harried, irregular quality, like a dancer stumbling over their feet to try to catch up to the music. As the waltz became more insistent, the duo did not hold back on using the full dynamic range of four hands on the grand piano. It was only this moment did I realize how much restraint the pianists had to not play at full volume in the previous pieces. They moved in perfect synchronicity to execute the rapidly shifting dynamics while also moving out of each other’s way just enough to use keys on the other side of the instrument. It was like watching a choreographed hand dance.
As the haziness of the beginning returns, the waltz almost faded into the distance, but before it fully disappeared, it came back in an increasingly frenzied quality, as if it were tired of itself and was trying to break free of the shackles of the form. As the distortions grew, so did the freneticism, until it practically became a parody of itself. Hsu and Ohuchi brought out the intensity and impatience of a piece that illustrates a genre barreling relentlessly to its demise. If BQE was stop and go traffic, this was a plummeting roller coaster. A gripping ride from start to finish, well deserving of the standing ovation that immediately followed. The caliber of musicians, the variety in the program, plus the acoustics and aesthetic delight of the space made for a marvelous afternoon of cultural appreciation and introspection.
