News
BY JOHN FLEMING
Times Performing Arts Critic
What to play first? That's a question pianist Frederick Moyer has pondered in plotting out his recitals.
"I used to play programs, and go to programs, where the first piece would be kind of safe, easy to play, maybe slow, but as a listener it always put me to sleep," Moyer said last week in a phone interview from his home in Lee, N.H. "So a lot of times I'll start a program with something pretty difficult and fast to let everybody know that this is going to be a lively concert."
The Sonata in D Major by Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812) leads off the pianist's concert Sunday afternoon at the Museum of Fine Arts. It's an obscure work that illustrates another rule of program planning: Surprise the audience.
"If you start with something people haven't heard but you know they're going to like, then the feeling from the listener is, 'Wow, this is neat, I want to hear some other music I haven't heard before.' ''
And Moyer thinks listeners will enjoy the Dussek sonata. "There's a little bit of Beethoven with these vehement emotional outbursts, yet it's very clean, neat and tidy music, kind of like Mozart," he said. "There's not an extraneous note. There are lots of beautiful, heartfelt melodies. It's inexplicable why it's not played more often."
Unknown now, the Czech composer and pianist was a celebrity in his day. "He was the first of the 'glamor' pianists who made a living traveling around Europe," Moyer said. "He was the first one who played with his profile to the audience. Before Dussek, pianists played with their backs to the audience, but he was vain, supposedly, and wanted everybody to see his face."
Moyer's program does include some familiar selections, including an etude, nocturne and ballade by Chopin, as well as three Rachmaninoff preludes. Also on the agenda are two movements from Schumann's Sonata No. 3.
The concert finale is a version of Gershwin's masterpiece for piano and orchestra, Rhapsody in Blue. "A lot of it is verbatim from the piano solo part, but many places are consolidated where the piano and the orchestra are put together into this very tricky, difficult knuckle buster," he said of the 17-minute score.
Incidentally, don't expect to hear the peppy tempos often associated with Gershwin, based on early recordings and piano rolls of the composer playing his own works. Instead, Moyer chooses to heed the advice of a mentor, the late conductor and record producer Mitch Miller, who, in his early career as an oboist, performed with Gershwin.
"Mitch claimed that Gershwin didn't really play it that fast," Moyer said. "He told me that Gershwin had to play them that fast in order to fit them on a piano roll or a 78 rpm platter. I find that finding the beauty in every note necessitates taking it a little slower."
John Fleming can be reached at fleming@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8716.
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