CMA President, Jonathon Gerson, New Mexico
Smith is the rare artist who can coax an entire orchestra’s worth of timbres and colors out of what is, fundamentally, a percussion instrument.
Chamber Music Albuquerque presented pianist Dan Franklin Smith on December 5, 2010, in a brilliant program of Spanish and Latin American music in the intimate Sims Auditorium on the grounds of Albuquerque Academy. The broad-ranging program included works of Turina, Mompou, Granados, Villa-Lobos, Piazzola, and, of all people, Andre Previn, as well as pieces by such lesser-known composers as Infante, Vianna da Motta, Campos-Parsi and Surinac. This well-conceived program presented a substantial overview of the main currents in the Spanish and Spanish-influenced piano repertoire.
The instant that Mr. Smith touched the keyboard to begin the Turina Sonata Sanlucar de Barrameda the entire audience sighed with pleasure, knowing immediately that it was hearing performance of a very high order indeed. The word “touch” is very much to the point: Mr. Smith is the rare artist who can coax an entire orchestra’s worth of timbres and colors out of what is, fundamentally, a percussion instrument. To hear Mr. Smith play a familiar piece like the Granados La Maja y el ruisenor on the piano is to hear it as if in a Ravel orchestration.
The excellence of Mr. Smith’s performance was not limited to the sensual. In the Infante El Vito Mr. Smith displayed to great advantage his ability to play music of stunning technical difficulty with Pollini-like clarity, all without breaking a sweat. Perhaps the most telling detail of Mr. Smith’s virtuosity is the extraordinary degree of relaxation he maintains in his shoulders and arms as he performs the most fiendish of works. He showed no sign of tiring through the lengthy program, and ended with the crowd-pleasing Three South American Sketches of Andre Previn.
The demonstratively appreciative audience was rewarded with Gottschalk’s Danza Cubana as an encore, a double act of appreciation by two North American pianists, separated by a century or more, grabbing hold of a piece of the Latin American musical tradition and playing it to the hilt. It was both delightful and awe-inspiring.
—Jonathon Gerson, President, Chamber Music Albuquerque