San Jose Mercury News , CA
Jan 10 2005

Iranian composer adds zest to performance

By Richard Scheinin

San Jose’s Jon Nakamatsu has a way of mixing the tried and true with
the truly unusual. For a couple years now, the pianist has performed
stirring and almost entirely forgotten music by Josef Wölfl, the
Austrian composer who was a friendly rival of Beethoven’s in their
day. Now Nakamatsu has found another worthy candidate for stardom:
Loris Tjeknavorian, the living, Iranian-born composer of Armenian
descent whose piano music is drenched with ethnic rhythms and
alluring melodies — and is pretty much never performed in this
country.

Saturday night at Le Petit Trianon in San Jose, Nakamatsu offered a
bracing recital — his first here in a year — in which wild card
Tjeknavorian sat comfortably amid the tried and true.

There was Chopin, whose 19th-century mazurkas and polonaises opened
the gates to Tjeknavorian-style ethnicity in modern music. There was
Liszt, who built on Chopin’s bejeweled harmonic world. And there was
Rachmaninoff, who flew off in all sorts of crazy new harmonic
directions. His “Variations on a Theme by Corelli,” the best part
of Nakamatsu’s program, runs a Spanish folk melody through 20
outrageous turnarounds.

The recital, part of the Steinway Society’s ongoing series, began
with yet another famous incorporator of folk music: Scarlatti. The
Italian loved Spanish song, rhythm and guitars, blending them into
his nearly 600 Baroque-period keyboard sonatas, many technically
bold. Nakamatsu chose four for the program, which repeated Sunday. He
performed them with an idiomatic clarity that captured the trilling
metallic brilliance of the harpsichord, Scarlatti’s instrument.

Next came the Rachmaninoff, which elaborates on the Corelli theme
known as “La Folia.” Rachmaninoff took this Baroque borrowing of a
Spanish folk melody and ran it through his visionary blender. And
Nakamatsu — voicing each chord just so, infusing the music with
crisp rhythms — stamped each variation with personality: marching or
galumphing, pouncing like a panther or lolling about like an
elephant. Poor “La Folia” seemed to have wandered into a strange
harmonic universe, pointing to jazz, Sondheim, even a Beatles ballad
or two.

Chopin followed: First, a liquid nocturne, then a steely scherzo with
daunting double-octave sequences and clashing rhythms.

After intermission, came Tjeknavorian. It turns out there’s a story
behind Nakamatsu’s interest in this music: His lifelong teacher,
Marina Derryberry, attended conservatory in Tehran with Tjeknavorian.
In 2001, Tjeknavorian conducted at the San Francisco Opera where, for
the first time in decades, he and Derryberry met. Nakamatsu attended
the reunion and soon came under the composer’s spell.

Saturday, he played five of seven dances from Tjeknavorian’s “Danses
Fantastiques,” all evoking, Nakamatsu said, a “sense of heritage —
the spirit of Armenian music.”

The first three dances were understated. There were swirling figures
over a virile, ostinato bass line. There was a haunting modal melody
set to chorded accompaniment. It sounded like a mother’s hummed song
to a child and had an unresolved ending; perhaps the child fell
asleep.

One dance kept three serpentine lines moving: the ostinato, the
melody, and a descending chromatic sequence. The music was at times
trance-like, then grew flashier, full of rippling pools of
ultra-Romantic melody, á la Liszt.

And it was with Liszt that Nakamatsu closed the program. Truth be
told, midway through the Mephisto Waltz No. 1, a brutally taxing
piece for any pianist, I began thinking that unceasing virtuosity
isn’t always exciting. I would have preferred to hear a couple more
dances by Tjeknavorian. Maybe next time.