Kiskachi brings dazzling virtuosity and show-biz pizzazz to Capriccio Baroque
Harpsichordist Anna Kiskachi performed a recital for Capriccio Baroque Saturday night. Photo: Carolyn Winter/CB
Harpsichordist Anna Kiskachi mashes up musical styles in her programs with the glee of a kid making Barbie play with Captain America to fight a dragon. Yet she has the intellectual rigor, technique, and passion to make her flights of fancy as captivating to the audience as they clearly are to her.
On Saturday night at Live! At 10th and G, Capriccio Baroque presented Kiskachi in her latest program, “Stravinsky Goes Baroque.” It comprised three dramatic acts that began with a passacaglia, ended with her own transcription of a Stravinsky ballet, and featured unexpected narrative twists and turns in the middle.
The stage was set for drama with two harpsichords placed facing each other, and an ottavino on a table between them, allowing Kiskachi easy access to all three from one bench. LED candles flickered from the steps to the stage, and the hall’s lighting shifted theatrically throughout the concert.
In the Passacaglia from George Frederick Handel’s Suite No. 7 in G minor, which opened Act One, Kiskachi dazzled with clean articulation of the dense textures, yet kept the harmonic underpinnings clear. She played the suite’s Sarabande second, although it comes before the Passacaglia in the actual suite. The slow movement worked as a restful interlude before William Babell’s arrangement of the aria “Vo fa guerra” from Handel’s opera Rinaldo.
Babell poured on keyboard-spanning runs and fusillades of chords for this song of heading off to war, which Kiskachi played with a boisterous energy that got a little wild at times, foreshadowing the transcriptions to come.
The Ricercar a 3 from Johann Sebastian Bach’s A Musical Offering felt severe coming after that display, Kiskachi taking a deliberate tempo and highlighting the chromatic fugue subject whenever it occurred.
Yet Bach’s occasional dissonances sounded like an appetizer for the second and third sections of The Rite of Spring (with just a few bars of the opening to set the stage). Kiskachi created a stunning variety of color in her arrangement, evoking the orchestra while creating a unique sound on the harpsichord. She whipped the famous repeated chord in “Dance of the Adolescents” into a frenzy, faster than most orchestral recordings and with an imposing harsh twang. The little melodic fragments that dot these sections felt like brief breaths of fresh air before entering the maelstrom once again.
The second act featured François Couperin and the theme of masks. After a somber performance of Couperin’s Passacaglia in B minor, Kiskachi had a great deal of fun with the composer’s set of twelve miniatures based on the color of the “Domino” outfits masquerade ball-goers wore to conceal their faces. Here, Kiskachi mixed in the ottavino, sometimes playing the melody in the right hand on the ottavino and the bass in the left on an adjacent harpsichord to add texture as well as show off a little. She sighed theatrically before limning the remote harmonies in “The Apathetic,” made “The Flirtatious” a coquettish fancy, and brought a bone-dry humor to “The Aged and Outdated Wealthy.”
The dark rush of “The Frenzied and Despairing” made a natural transition to Kiskachi’s version of the Russian Dance from Petrushka. The piano transcription of this dance is famously difficult, and Kiskachi upped the ante by playing her arrangement blisteringly fast, a thrilling ride bursting with color.
The passacaglia beginning the third act came from György Ligeti, with a bass subject that sounded like slightly out-of-tune bells tolling in a distant cathedral and a slow, steady buildup of counterpoint on top—all of which proved haunting, in Kiskachi’s performance. The chill segued into Kiskachi’s transcription of the “Cold Song” from Purcell’s opera King Arthur, about the reluctance of winter to awaken. She made the aria a harpsichord showpiece, including a passage in which she played both harpsichords at once, facing the audience with arms stretched out to either side and a smile on her face.
This led to the “Lullaby” from Firebird, hushed and coaxing, before Kiskachi exploded into the ballet’s “Infernal Dance.” Kiskachi once again unleashed a dazzling array of colors with incisive playing, including one section where she repeated chords so quickly and aggressively the result sounded like a boiling cauldron. The final sweep up the keys felt like a catharsis.
Kiskachi played two encores. Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer’s “La Marche des Scythes” got a heavy dose of playful humor. A transcription of Anatoly Lyadov’s “The Music Box,” which Kiskachi played with the ottavino on her lap, made a charming sendoff to a riveting evening.
Capriccio Baroque presents Jory Vinikour playing sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti 8 p.m. June 28. capricciobaroque.org
