Concert review: Garrick Ohlsson opens Keyboard Concerts, and somehow the skies seem more blue

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I really fell in love with this piece, one of Beethoven’s late-period works — and one in which he got downright experimental with rhythm and melody. (In liner notes for a recorded version, pianist Jeremy Denk — who will be returning to Keyboard Concerts later in the season — uses the terms “proto-jazz” and “boogie-woogie” to describe the piece). Hey, I even think I heard a motif that suggests the opening notes of “The Addams Family,” though the fact that I had seen the Good Company Players production of that musical the night before might have influenced me.

At one point in the sonata’s second movement, Ohlsson mesmerized me with an extended trill. It reminded me of a seething, agitated beehive in which individual notes try to break out of the swarm and dominate, but can’t help but be sucked back into the power of the whole.

Related story: Garrick Ohlsson kicks off a celebration season for Fresno State’s prestigious Philip Lorenz International Keyboard Concerts series

In the concert’s second half, Ohlsson performed Szymanowski’s Sonata No. 3. This piece gave us mountains and valleys of punctuated dissonance and accessible melodies; I was reminded of a city’s jagged skyline, or perhaps the way a dream zips to and fro with an abruptness — and even capriciousness — that seems perfectly reasonable when you’re ensconced in the dream itself.

Ohlsson is not a showy performer in terms of his physicality at the keyboard. The most interesting visual with him is his breath. He breathes with great determination and seriousness; when he exhales just as a piece begins, it’s as if he’s launching something. In the Szymanowski, however, Ohlsson offered a rather rowdy romp on the keyboard. “We have a piece missing here — I broke a spring,” he off-handedly told the audience afterward.

Finally, we reached the Chopin part of the program. After the jarring musicality of the Szymanowski, it’s almost like the four Chopin works (two etudes, a nocturne and a ballade) floated above us. Smooth, whipped, airy, almost confectionary in tone — Ohlsson didn’t appear so much to strike the keys as smoothly paddle through them. At the end of the Nocturne in C minor, the ending was so soft, so profound.

In all, it was a ravishing performance — an afternoon that emerged as beautiful inside as out. Cheers to Keyboard going live once again.

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