August 5, 2006 – Paris – Review: Bruce Brubaker plays Glass, Curran, Haydn

http://www.concertclassic.com/journal/articles/actualite_20060805_1433.asp

[English translation]

Inveterate champion of the music of our time, Bruce Brubaker studied the piano with Jacob Lateiner at The Juilliard School, which he later joined as faculty member in 1995. He is currently chair of the piano department of the New England Conservatory of Boston, and counts amongst his former pupils Francesco Tristano Schlimé, who evidently found memorable his courses in piano literature. With an encyclopedic culture and an assertive eclecticism, Brubaker advocates in particular the works of Adams, Glass and Cage, notably through two recent releases on the Arabesque label, one of which presents his own transcription of a fragment of Nixon in China. Opposing Haydn and the minimalists during a recital at the Salle Cortot, Brubaker offers a cottony and velvety Mad Rush by Philip Glass, playing with the felts more than the hammers to produce the continuous rustle on which leans these stark melodies.

The pallet is sumptuous for a page of repetitive obedience: the American excels in varying the colors around this melancholic, ashy gray. It is the clarity of lines which presides over the two Haydn Sonatas Hob XVI: 50 and Hob. XVI: 39. Diversity of attacks, analytical light, here is a solidly constructed Haydn; attentive to the complexion of both the sound and the architecture, Brubaker deploys volumes, lights and shades, carving each page like a glowing stained glass, an imaginary opera: sharp or caustic links, readily orchestral in texture, descents into the low register imbued with pedal and quasi sepulchral. Brubaker brings about each motif as if invested by a particular voice, a different instrument, plunging these scores in the maelstrom of the lyric universe. 

As an anti-Cesar, he "decompresses" these pages in all their dimensions, with the risk at times of being more discursive than singing, losing sight occasionally of melodic continuity in favor of architecture. But the adventure is largely worth the detour. It is curiously in contemporary music that Brubaker reveals himself at his most carnal with a superb Hope Street Tunnel Blues III by Alvin Curran (impeccable technique, mastery of the sound levels) and in an encore by Cage, a meditative, singing Dream, whose evanescence favors the blooming of the harmonics. A pianist whom one wishes to hear more often in the hexagon, as much for the inventory à la Prévert that constitutes his repertory as for the analytical power of his approach, served by a technique without fault.