Merkin Concert Hall, closed for refurbishing during the first part of the season, had its official opening two weeks ago and quickly got back to the business of presenting chamber and new-music concerts. But on Monday it changed pace with a Grand Piano Marathon: a free concert of piano music, including contemporary works, classical scores and jazz, that began at 2 p.m. and finished at nearly 9. For most of the day the hall was packed, with a line outside that was only partly alleviated by a late-afternoon decision to put seats on the stage. Not until the final hour did the audience begin to thin out.
Jonathan Batiste performs in the Kaufman Center's "Grand Piano Marathon" in Merkin Concert Hall.
The program began away from the keyboard, when Face the Music, an ensemble of 15 students from the Kaufman Center’s music schools, performed — unleashed, really — Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique” for 100 metronomes (1962) in the hall’s mezzanine. The work involves letting the metronomes (set to different tempos) tick until they all run down, a process that took about 25 minutes and yielded constantly changing rhythms and textures.
Later in the afternoon Farrah Dupoux and Brian Ge, students from the center’s Special Music School, gave a vigorous, clear-textured performance of John Adams’s part-mechanistic, part-whimsical piano duo “Hallelujah Junction” (1996). The Minimalist impulse was plentifully represented elsewhere too. Michael Riesman, the pianist and conductor of the Philip Glass Ensemble, played his own transcription of three movements from Mr. Glass’s “Dracula” film score (1998). The keyboard reduction is cruder and less supple than the original, for string quartet, but it has an advantage in the work’s spikier, more chromatic sections, which strings render less strikingly.
Frederic Rzewski’s “Piano Piece No. 4” (1977) begins with a Minimalist gesture: a repeated note that morphs into a relentlessly pounding chord before abandoning the repetition and expanding toward both ends of the keyboard. Lisa Moore gave it an explosive, muscular performance and did much the same for Martin Bresnick’s “Dream of the Lost Traveler” (1997), a brawny work with a mystical core, courtesy of a Blake text (from “For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise”), which Ms. Moore sang.
The other contemporary score on the program was William Bolcom’s Ballade, with Ursula Oppens giving the premiere to close the marathon. This is Mr. Bolcom in his thornier style, rather than his more easygoing, eclectic mode. The writing is forceful, rich in syncopations and full of big, rumbling gestures that made Ballade seem an odd title. But Ms. Oppens played it with her customary eloquence.
The classical performances also included Rachmaninoff’s Sonata No. 2 in Igal Kesselman’s thundering, kaleidoscopic account and a set of Chopin (waltzes, mazurkas and a nocturne) in impetuous, somewhat rushed performances by Orli Shaham. The more involving of the jazz sets included an expansive, intriguingly chromatic work by John Medeski; a group of shorter, polystylistic pieces by Jonathan Batiste; and a few standards dazzlingly played by Lee Musiker.
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