Renowned pianist Dr. Charisse Baldoria recently wowed a discriminating audience with a solo pianist recital to open the MCO Summer Arts Festival 2008. Baldoria showed off her talents last April 2 at the Francisco Santiago Hall. The evening was a treat of highly intelligent playing, superb keyboard technique and pleasant stage presence with Haydn, Ravel, Scriabin and Brahms as main courses. The artist also gifted the audience with two desserts or encores: Buencamino’s Mayon and De Falla’s Fire Dance Ritual from El Amor Brujo.
The whole recital was an exposition of the intentio autorum. Baldoria did the composers justice, making their ideas heard with her prowess, putting her intense and controlling personality, which reveals a highly gifted analytical intellect, at the service of the creators’ ideas. Each Baldoria concert or recital is a learning experience. Baldoria’s academic approach is aimed not only to give pleasure to the audience but to likewise give them insight. Hers is a pianism of imparting the ideas of the great masters.
Haydn’s Sonata in E Major, composed in 1766, was somewhat transitional. All of Haydn’s Piano Sonatas, written before 1760, were not meant for virtuoso display. They were meant for pleasure and playing for amateurs. Later on, Haydn began writing pieces with technical challenges. This Sonata combines this and technical difficulties. Baldoria’s intellectual approach revealed all these but with a flourish especially at the embellishments making a seemingly simple Sonata a work for virtuosos.
Baldoria’s rendition of Ravel’s Miroirs drew mixed reactions from this reviewer. Ravel wrote these pieces in a meditative spirit, making them reflect images of reality. Baldoria’s technique is perfect for these pieces. However, she seemed to be too much in control especially in the flexible rhythms of Noctuelles. Voicing, fingering, phrasing and rhythms were too picture perfect, delineated and pronounced. And the Oiseaux triste was not that triste or sad. La vallee des cloches was slightly too fast, but the resonances were there, even hinting dissonances. Baldoria’s hand positions were elegant and flexible enough to evoke the echoes in a valley of bells. But in Alborada del gracioso, Baldoria captured the lightness with masterful flourish. Truly, a heartwarming rendition, with a touch of a naughty quirk, revealing freshness in the pianist’s approach.
Baldoria’s Scriabin (Piano Sonata No. 2 in G Sharp Minor), combining Chopinesque Romanticism and somehow French Impressionism, was clearly an obscure mystical text. Baldoria made the piano sing mystically, evoking the Russian composer’s fascination for theosophy with the alternating crescendos and decrescendos, which evoked, more than waves, but the ups and downs of the spiritual life.
Brahms (Fantasien Op. 116), a la Charisse Baldoria, was a rollercoaster ride between Capriccios and Intermezzos. Baldoria masterfully initiated us into these different emotions, even leading us from rage to profound abysses, sad minor keys to bravura. Baldoria’s academic approach allowed her to heroically describe the heroic up and downs of these brief pieces, pointing out lyricism amidst the diverse voices.
To end the evening, Baldoria presented something Filipino (Buencamino) with its impressionistic colors, dominated by a technique that resoundingly captured the famed volcano’s temper and unpredictability until finally subduing the impressionistic colors with romantic nostalgia. As an added bonus, revealing her penchant for things Spanish, Baldoria treated the audience to her rendition of De Falla, with somewhat too perfect rhythms, voicing and phrasing. Baldoria wanted things to be in control in a piece that evokes calling out to a deceased lover through the fire dance ritual, a rite of exorcism, which calls for a spontaneous and carefree rhythm and frenzy of love. De Falla became logical that summer evening with Baldoria’s execution. Nevertheless, it was still beautiful in its own right, but it was beauty dominated or tempered by reason.
Watching Charisse Baldoria, also an accomplished pedagogue, play is always a treat of sublime beauty and temperate intelligence. One sees a struggle wherein she comes out victorious. The piano, approached with her intense and concentrated facial expressions, flexible finger and hand positions, restrained arm lifting, and expressive bodily movements, is a battlefield with each piece as a battle cry, signaling her inevitable triumph. Her playing is gradual in the sense that it gradually leads the listener to a definite climax amidst many peaks, in the same piece with many hidden rhythms, claiming to be the culminating point. Dr. Baldoria not only masters each piece. She also becomes the highly intelligent exponent of the composer’s ideas, with dominance and control, funneling the beauty of each work through her cerebral technique and analysis, with the heart (though somewhere else) put in its proper place, making her truly a formidable medium of the great pianistic ideas.
Three cheers for Charisse Baldoria! Not only a very highly intelligent pianist, with superb technique, but pianism at the height of intelligence! She will conquer more stages and audiences. And she makes it all seem so easy.