Music review: Operatic escapades on the piano

Those composers took well-known operatic melodies by Bellini, Grétry, Donizetti, Salieri and Gluck and wrote variations on them for solo piano. The focus of the program was hearing the contrast between the two composers’ styles doing essentially the same thing but with a different approach. The Süreyya Opera House was full of fans on Feb. 6 to hear her delightful comparison journey.

Franz Liszt’s popularity soared in his day from these kinds of operatic paraphrases as pianistic showcases for himself, because they were so virtuosic and sounded like wild improvisations. Mozart’s century-earlier version of improvisation was the “variations” format that used the theme in several short settings. Mozart’s are less well-known but nevertheless worth hearing because of their charm.

Mozart’s “8 Variations on ‘Dieu d’amour’” from Andre Grétry’s “Les mariages samnites” began in an unassuming, almost childlike manner, that progressively grew in its inventiveness. This genteel composition, showing a mannerly restraint of the French variety, did little but give us a rather tepid template. Then, the first few notes of “Reminiscences of Lucia di Lammermoor” (an opera by Donizetti) suddenly plunged us into the kind of startling changes that Liszt provided for the musical landscape. The almost jazz-like and percussive opening, akin to a quirky operatic recitative, woke everyone out of their saccharine overdose on the white keys. Liszt dove quickly into a deluge of heady harmonies on the black keys, and soaked us with lush cascades of warm chordal sweeps of the keyboard. What an amazing difference a century made!

Back again to the 1700s, we heard Mozart’s “10 Variations on the aria ‘Unser dummer Pöbel meint’” from “La rencontre imprévue” by Christoph Willibald Gluck. This piece makes clever use of four descending notes in many different permutations. Following this, Mozart’s “6 Variations on ‘Mio car’ adone’” from Antonio Salieri’s “La fiera di Venezia” revealed how Wolfgang (and many other composers) stole from himself. He literally carbon-copied his own “Sonata No. 11, ‘The Turkish’” for this set of variations; he just changed the key for this version.

Üçbaşaran capped the program with Liszt’s knuckle-buster, “Reminiscences de Norma” on themes from Bellini’s “Norma.” The challenge here is one of sustaining a large dramatic scope from naked introspection to pompous grandiosity. In this respect Üçbaşaran succeeded. She ably executed the constant conceit of grandeur while giving attention to intimate moments without losing momentum. Generally speaking, it’s too easy (but arduous) to continuously pump out Liszt’s overblown blizzard of repetitious octaves and arpeggios just for flash value. The trick is to hook into Liszt’s darker side to tap into the source of his pianistic solar flares.

Üçbaşaran’s way with Mozart is to preserve the crystalline flow and maintain a pure transparency. That’s not to say a few notes weren’t dropped here and there, especially in the sections that tended to ramble and repeat themselves. But the choice of playing so much Mozart is indeed brave because it’s so naked; every note, so pristinely and mathematically chosen by the composer, plays its own critical role and none are hidden in the romantic blur that came in the next century.

Liszt has its own opportunities for misfires, though. The Liszt engine has booby traps because, for the most part, it’s designed to inspire awe from its blazing technical landscape. Some of it uses bravura for bravura’s sake, while other aspects are deeply perceptive. From this perspective, Üçbaşaran knew what she was doing. Her choice of the light-hearted romp for an encore, Liszt’s “Introduction and Polonaise” from Bellini’s “I Puritani,” displayed a piece with more integrity and less pomposity, but above all, it was a gift of pure joy from the pianist to her audience.

Remembering Benyamin Sönmez

The young Turkish/German cellist Benyamin Sönmez recently passed away at the age of 28 during a music rehearsal on Nov. 30. His passing was ardently remembered in a special concert at the Süreyya Opera House on Feb. 5. A long list of musician colleagues performed a memorial concert for the public and the Sönmez family.

Members of the Borusan Quartet, pianists Tuluğ Tırpan, Muhiddin Dürrüoğlu, Hakan Ali Toker, Cana Gürmen and Birsen Ulucan, violinist/violist Atilla Aldemir and violinist Ayla Erduran spoke movingly about Benyamin before they played selections that reflected their association with him. Sönmez’s brother Mehmet, a contrabassist in the Presidential Symphony Orchestra (CSO) in Ankara, didn’t speak, but played “Elegia” by G. Bottesini that spoke eloquently enough. A slideshow of family photographs, accompanied by a recording of Sönmez playing music by Bach, was a compelling centerpiece.

Additionally, the music of Vieuxtemps, Liszt, Bach, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Ahmet Adnan Saygun, even an arrangement of Zeki Müren’s “Aryılık Valsi” (by Toker) filled the hall with the kind of music that Sönmez himself might have played. Each selection seemed to evoke an aspect of the cellist’s personality: the darkness, the seductiveness, the stark simplicity with which he approached complex works, the hardships he endured in his short life, and the paradoxes that surrounded his dual identity as a Turk and a German. Sönmez’s tall and imposing Svengali-like presence, together with his commanding musical genius, earned him the moniker “The Sultan” from the great Russian teacher Natalia Gutman, whose pedagogical guidance helped forge his artistry and success around the world.

His father, Ünal Sönmez, spoke on the stage about his son and invited everyone to visit the family garden in Fethiye, where “you can plant a tree and name it after a composer.” I personally want to plant a tree there and christen it “The Sultan.”