FRASER’S NEW PIANO TECHNIQUE FASCINATES

     An evening of Romantic Russian Piano music at Hamilton Public Library Auditorium
 

Pianist Alan Fraser first came to Hamilton’s notice in 1996, when he was one of the virtuosi Alan Walker gathered up for the second of his memorable Liszt Festivals in this city. He came from Serbia, where he went after graduating with his master’s degree from Montreal’s McGill University in 1990. Fraser continues this association with the world-renowned Kemal Gekich and Gekich’s former teacher, the Russian-trained Jokuthon Kadirova-Mihailovich.

What these artists are trying to achieve is nothing less than to synthesize the three main schools of 19th century piano technique –Russian, French and German – add such modern marvels as scientific neuro-kinesthesiology – how the body works most naturally, to us lay people – and fuse it all into a new school of piano playing that will define the 20th century.

Pianists crammed the library. June Caskey of the Caskey School of music, which presented the concert, videotaped Fraser’s every twitch for future workshop and instruction of her pupils. Fraser’s contribution to this endeavour is has study of the Feldenkrais Method which aims to improve neuro-muscular-skeletal function and allows the bones to do a lot of the work we usually make our muscles do, to their harm and our fatigue. Whether it all works or has a future, I’ll have to leave to the technicians to decide. But Fraser tossed off an enormous program of Skryabin (Sonata in F sharp minor and Vers la Flamme) and Rachmaninov (Sonata No. 2 Op. 36) with three Nikolai Medtner Folk Tales and Mili Balakirev’s Dumka, without seeming to turn a hair.

Unfortunately, though Fraser produced power and splendid breadth and range, the piano he had this night was not the concert grand he needed. Thus at the climax of each episode, he sounded as if he was trying to achieve something unattainable rather than scaling the summits. It is abundantly clear, though, that Fraser is a formidable artist.

At Vallisa: The Discovery of Pianist Alan Fraser

MUSIC: A NEW THERAPEUTIC CURE FOR IGNORANCE

 He came last summer to Italy when still nobody knew of him. Alan Fraser, born in Montreal (Canada), already five years an inhabitant of Yugoslavia, sat at the piano in shorts and T-shirt and proceeded to make magic with a somewhat decrepit Steinway. He was immediately engaged by local talent hunter Vito Paternoster, artistic director for the ‘Sound Atmospheres’ series in Vallisa’s 95/96 season, who was impressed not only by his valuable pianistic experience but by his lengthy and varied life journey which has included extended stints as vocal soloist, composer, and musical therapist who has employed a special method for the improvement of neuro-musculo-skeletal function in his piano technique and pedagogy.

Alan Fraser returned in tails for his recital in Bari, an event attended by the Jugoslav consul for Italy and dedicated to the just-signed peace agreement, long-awaited on the Adriatic where ideological, cultural and ethnic clashes still cause anxiety.

In the first work of the concert, a Chopin nocturne coloured with contrasts of joy and sorrow, Fraser excellently broadened the flow of the work, aided by the hall’s generous acoustic. Contrasts continued with the serenity and sorrow of Liszt’s Sursum Corda, delivered with an apparent external freedom and inner religious humility. In Liszt’s Second Ballade he avoided diffuse emotional indulgence but tended instead towards a sublimation of sentimentality, spinning a melody of long singing tones tinged with sweetness and a speaking quality.

In Skryabin’s lively poem Vers la Flamme (1914), a Utopian protest against the decay of western civilization, the piano no longer produced subtle bronze and earthy colours but heavenly rumbling and fine, elusive, scintillating echoes which tumbled down with an air of mystery reminiscent of his tenth sonata.

Fraser also played three Fairy Tales of Medtner, an excellent Russian pianist who died in London in 1951 and whose style barely respects the classicists, being more dry, cold and contrapuntal than harmonic. The concert concluded with a captivating, enthralling interpretation of Rakhmaninov’s Second Sonata in which classical form contains melodic development with Romantic motives.

Auditorium Vallisa: A Canadian Artist’s Success

FRASER'S PIANO SOUNDS A CONCERT FOR PEACE

 To dedicate a concert to a peace barely signed in former Yugoslavia (a stone’s throw from here) in some aspects might appear to be an empty rhetorical gesture. But for the numerous in attendance, the event organized under the auspices of the Vallisa Auditorium’s season and attended by Yugoslav consul Lyubisha Petrovitch was special, significant, and most of all because of the invited guest, Canadian pianist Alan Fraser. One might ask, why would a Canadian care about the war drama which has shaken the Adriatic? Someone like Fraser really does care, so much so that he chose to make his base for concertizing and teaching none other than Novi Sad, Yugoslavia. He also took special care in choosing works which could serve, through music, to return us to life, through the idea of the clash between opposite tendencies: devilish and angelic, good and bad and finally warlike and peaceful.

To emphasize these aspects of interpretation Fraser began the concert by making several essential points, guiding the audience to pay attention to certain extra-musical suggestions. With Chopin’s Nocturne op. 49 #1, Liszt’s Ballade #2 and Sursum Corda, Fraser proved to be a technically gifted pianist, strong in his interpretations, able to elevate the sonority of the interpreted works through careful attention to colour. In the latter part of the concert he presented Medtner’s Fairy Tales and Rakhmaninov’s Second Sonata with equal effectiveness. Toying with his substantial virtuosity he suffused in ecstasy the souls of his audience who, of course, demanded and were rewarded with two encores.