Pour Jouer – Virtuoso Piano Works

In her own way Maria Gabriella Mariani has created a multi-dimensional art in which words, music, and life mingle and merge. Hologram (Ologramma) from 2014 is a fitting title for the major piano work on the program, but it also applies to how the overflowing imagination of this Neapolitan artist works—fragments, themes, ideas, and perceptions expand into gorgeous music that cannot bear to be self-contained. “Hologram” serves as a metaphor for seeing a world in a grain of sand, or in this case, a melody that expands not simply into 17 variations and a finale. Mariani’s imagination has much more to explore in the initial theme, and a 24-minute Improvisation follows. She describes this as either a “super variation” or a cadenza that happens to come after the finale (this gesture must be unique in music history).

To describe the extravagance of Hologram one thinks back to Alkan, Godowsky, and other post-Lisztians for whom too much was barely enough. In that vein, Mariani’s use of virtuosity is almost entirely unbroken—a cascade of notes builds an interwoven design as complicated as a Persian carpet. The underlying theme, which is sensuous and seductive, suggests a background in Mediterranean folk dance, from the tarantella to the fandango, that adds depth to the overlapping variations and the moods they evoke. The listener is appealed to through a constant rhythmic pulse that feels alive, and Mariani’s harmonic language, founded on recognizable common chords, scales, and arpeggios, has the benefit of sounding at once generous and beautiful.

There’s a long tradition of pianists composing their own display pieces, but Mariani is unusually autobiographical even by those standards. No composer I’ve ever encountered packages a CD with a book written by them, as Mariani has done. Her website describes the contents of Imperfect Consonance (Consonanze Imperfette) as a dialogue between the author as a mature musician and Emi, her younger self, whose passion for music overwhelms everything else. The mature Maria speaks of subjects like the travail of competitions and the obstacles placed before women who pursue a career in music, looking back on Emi’s total immersion in music and what she has had to learn over the years.

I haven’t heard the CD that goes with Imperfect Consonance (in Italian, as in English, consonance is a musical term but also has the general meaning of a harmonious agreement), but the mood and atmosphere created by Hologram open the door to an unbounded imagination devoted to personal expression. The second work on the program, Sonata Pour Jouer from 2011, also plays on words in the title—in French “pour jouer” can mean simply “to play” or “for playing,” but with implications about playfulness, playing a role, and dedicating oneself to the playing of music. Mariani applies these meanings, and dedicates the work, to Aldo Ciccolini, the late French-Italian pianist who was her teacher.

The sonata is in the conventional three-movement form of Allegro-Andante-Allegro, but rather than rigorous classicism we get Mariani’s personalized technique of continuous variation, as I’d describe it, which moves rapidly from idea to idea, in a general pianistic sound world that recalls Prokofiev and Ravel—one hears alternating staccato mottos, bittersweet melody, and neoclassical echoes of a piece like “Mouvement” from Tombeau de Couperin. Events are gathered in circular overlapping and recollection. The finale is reserved for the showiest display of virtuoso technique. The result is entrancingly inventive, overflowing, and, as before, gorgeous.

On her website Mariani offers excerpts from her performance of Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes, and I would call him her closest kin in music history, because he was also literary and devoted to personal expression, and motivated by passions that refused to be constrained by conventional forms. Despite harmonic reflections of Schumann that I hear, Mariani has created her own musical world, and the pleasure of entering it as a listener comes from her generosity and gift for beauty. The piano’s recorded sound is close and full, adding to the drama of Mariani as performer.