TULEVAISUUS | AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE - REVIEW

Mackenzie Melemed, now 30, had already performed 500 concerts by age 13, appeared on The Rosie O’Donnell Show, and was given an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2022. Based in Finland, he makes a striking debut CD with a program that pairs canonical piano works with contemporary responses to them.

So Stephen Hough’s Prelude and Fugue (Aeolian) comments on the Prelude and Fugue in B-flat minor from Book I of the WTC, Laura Kaminsky’s Threnody on Liszt’s Funerailles, and Avner Dorman’s Lament and Variations on Brahms’s Schumann Variations.

The program begins with the Bach. In the prelude, I like the way he treats the relationship among the voices. Because he allows the inner voices to take on greater importance in her approach, I sometimes have the feeling that these inner parts are conversing, as it were, with the topmost one. The fugue is even better; in addition to the clarity among all 5 voices, the expressiveness ranges widely—no black-and white Bach playing here. I particularly admire the way he gradually slows the tempo from its initial pace. The change happens in stages—one is hardly aware of it— yet it leads to an extremely satisfying climax. This is Bach playing at turns tragic, dramatic, plaintive, and reassuring. I’d like to hear him perform an all-Bach program, or many such programs.

Hough’s work is lyrical and unidiomatic; it is triadic, the dissonances coloring the fundamental harmonies rather than taking over. It subtly alludes to a few elements in the Bach, most notably the fugue, whose subject reverses the contour of the Bach one, and a fragment of the prelude’s theme toward the end. Other than that, the music is considerably livelier. Melemed’s performance responds to the many ruminations and fantasy-like changes of mood and character. Ultimately, though, the music doesn’t convince me and leaves me with a neutral rather than excited reaction.

Funerailles and the Petrarch Sonnet are the 2 piano pieces that opened the door for me, allowing me to grasp the beauty and significance of Liszt’s music. (I remember my musicology peers in graduate school at Eastman were quite dismissive of him.) I loved the intense lyricism, the wide-ranging but always coherent compositional design, and of course the thrilling virtuosity. Melemed brings all of this gloriously to his performance—the crisp bass octaves are so clean and fast that my wrists ache thinking about them.

Kaminsky’s Threnody...October 2024 places the Lisztian rhetoric of mourning in a contemporary context of unending global conflict; the date functions less as a specific memorial than as a marker of historical grief. The subtitle also echoes Liszt’s own (“October 1848”). The Liszt references are elegant and highly original—rich (though contemporary) harmonies, gestures that traverse a wide pitch range, and a feeling for sonority that complements Liszt’s manner. I like this piece a lot, and Melemed’s performance is stunning.

In the final pair of works, Melemed offers a sensitive and compelling account of the Brahms Variations on a theme from Schumann’s Bunte Blätter, composed in 1854, the year Schumann was committed to the psychiatric hospital in Endenich. It is a work that, as yet, I haven’t had much affection for. Although the short variations suggest something of the short character pieces that often appear in Schumann’s work—and indeed, Variation 9 includes a very characteristic Schumann figuration—it’s less interesting as a “Schumann homage” than as a document of Brahms in the process of becoming Brahms. Melemed responds well to the aphoristic character of some of the variations, for instance the expressive gear shifts from Variation 13 to 14 to 15. He makes me like the piece a lot better.

Avner Dorman’s Lament and Variations refers to the brutal Hamas massacre of Israelis in October 2023 and the terrible war that followed. The theme seems to refer to Schumann’s but somehow extends its details, transforming the expression into something much more contemporary and creating a poignant sense of that horrible day in 2023. (I like how the theme includes the classic descending bass associated with lament since the 17th Century.) The harmonic style is less dissonant than Kaminsky and somehow more coherent than Hough’s. Melemed is particularly effective here with the varied sonorities in the different registers of the piano, often occurring together or in very close succession. This piece is so good I’d like to play it, but I have a feeling it’s beyond my technique now.