Within Reason: Jeannette Fang on Liszt, Living Composers, and Letting Go

Cadenza: Jeannette Fang, Unaccompanied

By Danny Cardwell · Allegheny Mountain Radio

In a concerto, the cadenza is the stretch where the orchestra goes quiet and the soloist is left alone. There’s no one to follow and no one to cover for. For a few minutes, it’s just the player, the instrument, and whatever they have to say.

It’s a fitting name for a recital series. It fits even better when the pianist spends most of her year doing the opposite.

Jeannette Fang has been a regular voice on this station. She’s come into the WCHG studio to talk about Garth Newel’s Pub Series, about the shape of a chamber music season, and last December about sharing the New Year’s Eve stage with her brother, Stephen. As pianist and one of the artistic directors at Garth Newel Music Center, she spends a great deal of her life listening to other people. Chamber music asks that of you. You blend, you balance, and you hold back so the violin can come through.

At the end of this month, she gets to stop holding back.

Jeannette’s Cadenza piano recital runs Friday, October 23, and Sunday, October 25, in the Manor House at Garth Newel. It’s the second program in a new series of virtuoso piano recitals. Michelle Cann opened it this summer, and I was lucky enough to be in the room for that one. Ieva Jokubaviciute will close it in April.

“I relish the opportunity to do a solo recital,” Jeannette told me. “I mostly do chamber music, right? But I started out as a soloist, and it’s always something that I get to fully let go on. I don’t have to worry about sound. I don’t have to think about being too loud. I can be as loud as I want.”

She paused, and smiled.

“Or within reason.”

The recital is in the Manor House rather than Herter Hall because of a renovation underway at Garth Newel. Anyone who has driven up that hill lately has seen what she called “a lot of destruction and construction.” She was quick to reassure the regulars.

“It’s actually not a huge project,” she said. “We’re updating our kitchen, we’re updating our facility in the hall. And don’t worry, it will still look the same. It’ll still have that same barn feel and that rustic intimacy.”

Much of the work is practical. There are new windows and updated spaces, and the kitchen is being redesigned so dinner service flows well enough that Garth Newel doesn’t have to cap how many people it can feed. It’s the kind of work every old building eventually asks for, and a building that started life housing horses has surely asked many times.

For now, the hall is unavailable. The Manor House holds about half as many people, so the recital will be played twice.

At the heart of the program is the Liszt Sonata in B minor, a piece Jeannette had never learned until she programmed it for this recital.

“People consider it the greatest thing that Liszt ever wrote,” she said. “Some people consider it probably the apex of the Romantic piano virtuoso literature. Which is to say that it’s got all the things you want when you go to a concert. All the fireworks, all the grand statements and drama and power and passion. It’s monumental.”

I asked her a question I’d been wondering about since June. Is it hard to follow Michelle Cann? Do you have to leave the piano hotter than you found it?

She didn’t hesitate.

“The benefit of being a pianist is that there’s so much of the repertoire that you can be very different than the previous pianist,” she said. “Michelle has a very specific style. She does that better than anyone else, and there’s no other pianist like that, and one does not need to compete with that, because that’s a different thing. What I program is what I like.”

That’s the real promise of a series like this. You aren’t hearing three people play the same game. You’re hearing three different temperaments, each alone with the instrument.

What Jeannette likes runs well past the nineteenth century. I’ve talked with her enough over the years to know she holds deep respect for the composers who laid the foundation. She is just as committed to the ones still writing. Two of the pieces on this program are by living composers. One is Black Earth by Fazıl Say, the Turkish pianist and composer, whose writing leans toward popular song, jazz, and improvisation. The other is by Karen Tanaka, a composer based in California, whose work borrows from techno, EDM, and dubstep.

“The reason I like working with composers is because they are really giving you a perspective, and a reaction to the world today,” she said. “I like a lot of high energy. I like to feel like a rock star at the piano instead of, you know, just trying to do everything right.”

There’s a freedom in that, she explained. Music that has been played for two centuries comes with a weight of expectation about how it ought to go. Music written last year doesn’t.

“That’s why I like working with composers that are still creating today, instead of having been kind of museumified,” she said. “You can have a perspective and an interpretation that is still pulsating. You’re making it happen in the moment.”

That may be the best description of what a cadenza is supposed to be.

Jeannette Fang’s Cadenza piano recital is Friday, October 23, and Sunday, October 25, in the Manor House at Garth Newel Music Center in Hot Springs. With seating at about half the capacity of Herter Hall, space is limited. Tickets were still available for both performances at the time of our conversation. Reserve yours at garthnewel.org.