A dreadful instrument threw pianist Andreas Klein off his game Monday night in a high-end program of Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven in the UTSA Recital Hall. The buzzes, dropouts and other signs of delinquency were so alarming in the first half that I asked UTSA music department chairman Eugene Dowdy if he had any idea why Klein had chosen to play that instrument. (It was a Yamaha, but the maker wasn't the issue.
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Well, apparently UTSA couldn't do any better. Dowdy said he's trying to raise money for new concert pianos. But he added that part of the problem is poor temperature control in the recital hall: Wide variations in temperature wreak havoc on pianos.
Klein's program was intriguingly constructed. The first half paired Mozart's Sonata in B-flat, KV 570, with Schubert's Sonata in B-flat, D. 960, part of the great triptych of sonatas he composed a few months before he died.
After intermission, Klein played Mozart's Fantasy in C Minor, KV 475, and Beethoven's valedictory Sonata in C Minor, Op. 111.
With the exception of the Mozart sonata, these are all very strange works, each one hard for pianists to hold together as a unity, and hard for listeners to hear that way.
To a considerable degree, their essential strangeness has been mitigated in modern performance by the fruits of generations of analysis and tradition, which have established a rough consensus about how they go.
The combination of Klein's choices and the piano's recalcitrance had the salutary effect of yanking these monumental works out of their comfort zones.
In the Schubert, Klein brought an extreme tempo rubato and some odd voicings to the first movement, but he played the elegiacal slow movement with a directness that seemed deliberately to constrain emotion.
There was a pock-marked surface to the whole that undercut the sonata's beauty but made it sound all the more startling and real.
Much the same could be said of Klein's Beethoven, though by then the pianist had somewhat adapted his technique to the instrument's difficulties.
Klein gave full vent to the explosive, surreal wildness of the first movement and several of the second movement's variations.
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