Preview

Antonio Pompa-Baldi to play

next Tri-C Classical Piano Recital

By Daniel Hathaway

Thanks to his first prize in the 1999 Cleveland International Piano Competition, Italian pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi has graced Northeast Ohio's musical life ever since, first as a member of the faculty at the Oberlin Conservatory, then at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he continues to teach along with his wife, Emanuela Friscioni (they were married two weeks before the Cleveland Competition, which occasioned their first visit to the United States).

Pompa-Baldi will play the third and final, free recital on this year's Tri-C Classical Piano Series at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday, January 29 at 2pm, an event co-sponsored by the Consulate of Italy in Detroit. We reached him by telephone to ask him about his program, which features music by two lesser-played Austrian composers in the first half.

“I am usually very interested in unearthing composers or pieces which for some reason fell through the cracks of time”, he said, referring to Carl Czerny's Variations on a Theme by Rode, op. 22, “La Ricordanza”, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel's Sonata No. 5 in f#, op. 81. “When I was a kid, I listened to Horowitz play the Czerny, but that was before the Internet, and I couldn't find a score. I forgot about it until I came to the US and it was very easy to obtain music. I played it many times in 2003-2004 and am now bringing it back. It's a delightful set and I have a lot of fun with it”.

Who was Rode and what was the Theme? “Pierre Rode was a violinist, but Czerny knew the theme because he heard a soprano named Angelica Catalani perform in Vienna. She was a little vain, and when she got applause during an opera, she would interrupt everything and sing her own variations on Rode's theme. Czerny named it La Ricordanza (“Reminiscence”) to recall Catalani's performance”.

“The Hummel is a monumental work I would not hesitate to define as 'a beast'!”, Pompa-Baldi continued. “He is a great composer not deserving of 'B' category status who represents a moment in time that was very important for the evolution of the piano and piano music.” Hummel was a pupil of Mozart and Clementi who was taken under Haydn's wing and went on to mentor Chopin. “The second movement of the Sonata will make everybody think of Chopin, though it was written in 1819 when Chopin was nine years old. Chopin admired Hummel and the influence is astonishing”.

Hummel composed ten sonatas but bestowed opus numbers on only six of them, three of which Pompa-Baldi has already recorded and has plans to complete the set. “The third sonata is very beautiful, but the fourth, fifth and sixth are another world, absolutely dramatic, beautiful and virtuosic, and they stretch the boundaries of sonata form”.

Pompa-Baldi will return to variations in the second half of his program with Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Corelli, op. 42, a piece he has recorded on his CD of works by that composer. “This was written at a stage in his life when he started using simpler means, but the emotional power is just as strong as his more thunderous and monumental compositions. This leaner style of writing for piano hasn't lost a bit of effectiveness. I love to see how Rachmaninoff changed but gained in the process”.

The pianist will close out his program with three movements from Liszt's first volume of Années de Pèlerinage, Vallée d'Obermann, Au bord d'une source, and Orage. “I know I'm coming a little late to the Liszt celebrations, but the whole set of Années has always been my favorite Liszt work, along with the Sonata. It took him twenty years to get to the final version — he had already written the first book when he eloped. Later he revised the pieces and added Orage, the only newly-composed piece among the nine in volume one. Orage follows Au bord perfectly — a bucolic, tranquil movement (but very busy for the piano), then a torrential rain. And I love Vallée d'Obermann, which is a description of geography as well as a state of the mind and soul”. To better understand it, Pompa-Baldi went to the trouble to read Etienne Pivert de Senancour's novel, Obermann, in the original French. “He's a great thinker but a poor writer — so baroque that it makes your head spin. But the music surpasses the novel. Obermann is questioning a deity, seeking eternity, while expressing great love for life and humanity. Liszt transforms his torment into universal love”.

As a parting question, I asked Antonio Pompa-Baldi what was going on in Italian piano music during the nineteenth century. “Not much! I've recently been playing Martucci, the Piano Fantasy, op. 51, and there are some wonderful things by Donizetti and Rossini, after he retired. But there is a hole between Scarlatti and Respighi. During the nineteenth century, any composer with any talent was going into opera, where the demand was high and composers could gain fame and fortune”.

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Published on ClevelandClassical.com January 24, 2012

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