Exquisite poetry on a new piano at Erasmus Huis

Exquisite poetry on a new piano at Erasmus Huis

By Gus Kairupan

JAKARTA (JP): You only have to press one key to know that the Yamaha S-6 piano at Erasmus Huis, officially inaugurated recently, is something special. Its sonority and tone quality are ravishing, and of a type that may well be unequaled in Jakarta. Yamaha probably has the lion's share of the piano market in this country but none, I dare say, come anywhere near the quality of Erasmus Huis' new piano. Or pianos.

You see, the Dutch Cultural Center early last year launched a drive to purchase a new grand piano, and the enthusiasm was so great that the collected contributions from Indonesian and Dutch companies and individuals were more than enough to buy two pianos. So, besides the exceptional new grand piano, Erasmus Huis also has an upright and the quality of the latter is equally impressive. No other piano in this city, Yamaha or other, sounds as beautiful as either of these two. It hardly needs mentioning that they are in good hands -- the quality of Dutch care and maintenance assure their future.

When you have a piano like Erasmus Huis' Yamaha S-6 and want to introduce it to the music-loving segment of the public, it is no less than appropriate to have a top-ranking pianist to play it. Such a one is Rian de Waal, internationally acclaimed as the Netherlands' most outstanding pianist.

There is little need to list the competitions and prizes he has won, or the major orchestras he regularly performs with, or the compositions dedicated to him, or the recordings he has made. All this, although very important, recedes to the background if only because music is an art of the moment, of the period that it is happening. And the period of about two hours that Rian de Waal filled last Tuesday and Wednesday was a listening pleasure that one does not often come across in Jakarta.

Changes were made in the program on the evening of Jan. 16, the first part of which turned into an all-Liszt section. I admit to having had some slight misgivings about this because I am not a great fan of Liszt, although I appreciate the enormous contributions he has made to music. But maybe this is because pianists, local or otherwise, tend to concentrate on the compositions of Liszt's earlier period which are so full of pianistic pyrotechnics and wizardry as to make one wonder whether he had put them in just to show off. The piano, in his days, was a relatively young instrument, and Liszt was unquestionably the greatest performer of music for that instrument. No wonder he did not lack what today would be called groupies (his good looks were a big asset, too), though one should in no way put the likes of countess Marie d'Agoult and princess Caroline Sayn-von Wittgenstein on the same level as the grimy teenyboppers of today.

What Rian de Waal played that evening were compositions of a much later period and included Funerailles, Benediction de Dieu and three song transcriptions, Dante Sonnet, Widmung and Fruhlingsnacht. The originals of the last three were written by other composers. I forget who composed the Dante Sonnet, but the latter two are lieder written by Robert Schumann. The word sonnet is the operative word here as it points squarely to poetry. So do lieder which are actually poems by such great literary figures like Goethe, Hofmannstahl and Rilke. With these compositions Liszt appeared to have turned his back on pianistic fireworks.

Rian de Waal opened the recital with a transcription of an organ prelude and fugue by J.S. Bach which exhibited the new grand piano's amazing capacities, as well as his marvelous control and shaping of colors. The deep sonority of a single sustained note in the bass, with three different melodic lines floating effortlessly on top of it, is proof of de Waal's genius. De Waal used to be an organist, but if he is very much at home with the mathematical precision of Bach, he is just as adept at the poetry that shines through the countless piano compositions of the 19th century. He also played Chopin and showed with the Barcarole that to this greatest of all piano composers, rules were meant to be broken, and that good taste and continuity were all that mattered.

But it was the Liszt compositions, bereft of often excessive sounding decorations, that were the most impressive pieces of the evening. I still have some reservations regarding Liszt -- except when his compositions are performed by pianists like Rian de Waal.