June 06--David Fray closed the season of piano recitals at Orchestra Hall on Sunday afternoon with a program as intelligently selected as it was expressively played.
Unlike many of his countrymen, the gangly French pianist has declared an affinity for the great tradition of Austro-German music, and on Sunday he traced the line from Johann Sebastian Bach to Johannes Brahms and Arnold Schoenberg, adding the Gallic intellectualism and wit of Pierre Boulez along the way.
The seriousness of this enterprise was, however, balanced by a finely controlled emotionalism that showed itself stronger in quiet music than in passages of virtuoso display. In short, Fray presented himself as a poet.
His Bach has attracted attention, often being wrongly compared with Glenn Gould's. Where Gould's was angular, spiky and parched, Fray's -- in the first eight Preludes and Fugues of Book One of "The Well-Tempered Clavier" -- was smooth, flowing and multicolored.
A superficial resemblance extended mainly to the visual, in Fray and Gould's extreme bend over the keyboard and preference for homely chairs over piano benches. But one of Fray's persistent mannerisms also had a musical counterpart in an experiment on a late Gould recording.
Gould had decided to change the listener's perspective of music by moving the piano farther away as he was playing. Fray's equivalent, doubtless coincidental, move was to insert sudden drops in volume that became ever more hushed over several measures. The effect suggested gradual withdrawal, as Fray seemed to move toward a cloistered place inside the music in order to commune with himself.
This certainly gave variety of touch and color, though in the Bach it began to sound imposed. But Boulez's "Notations" and Schoenberg's Opus 11 Three Piano Pieces have many abrupt shifts in volume, and the latter repeatedly demands sounds two or three degrees above audibility. So here Fray's poetizing arose directly from the composers, humanizing scores that easily sound dryly intellectual. His subtly expressive Schoenberg was, in fact, a triumph.
Three capriccios and four intermezzos make up Brahms' Opus 116 Seven Fantasies. Fray's delicacy served the latter best. Tone sounded pushed to the limit when thundering, and it splintered at the close of the last capriccio. The second and fourth intermezzos, however, had the beguiling gentleness that is Fray's strength.
His encore was the Bach-Busoni "Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland," dedicated to the memory of Boulez and moving in its tender sobriety.
Alan Artner is a freelance critic.
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