Ravel Revealed: Pianist Von Oeyen

Pianist Andrew Von Oeyen's nacreous blue eyes focused intensely on wringing music from the grand Steinway on stage at cozy, acoustically - live Spivey Hall in Morrow GA, near Atlanta last month. Playing his own transcription of Massenet's "Meditation" from Thais, fragrant chords billowing under a probing melody, he sometimes bent down to the keyboard as if he searched for just the right note to end the phrase. So many phrases had ended in silence that we weren't sure which note was last in the piece before he launched us into the different world of  "Le Jeu des Contraires" by Henri Dutilleux, a piece as gnarly as the first was gentle. Von Oeyen chased patterns of notes up and down the keyboard, smacking some down, teasing out others. Spikey and spicy, the piece was fun for its texture and color.

But the center piece of the concert was Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, written mid-way between Massenet's lush 19th century sound and the mid-20th-century atonality of Dutilleux.

Tombeau is a suite of six classical dances that I've known for decades only through the composer's orchestration of four movements.  When Von Oeyen played, I enjoyed hearing two of the movements for the first time.  The orchestral version dresses the music up in colors and textures; on the keyboard, Von Oeyen revealed the motifs that hooked movements together. and made visually clear the structure of the piece, how Ravel provided his pianist with islands of rest, where Von Oeyen could settle into an ostinato pattern, sitting up straight and looking comfortable, before he leaned into a new upwelling of notes, distinct as water droplets from a fountain.

The piece, begun as a tribute to the seventeenth - century composer, finished as a celebration of Ravel's close friends who died in the Great War.  While the notes often scintillate and skip up and down the keyboard, the composer layers some dissonance and deep hues in the harmony that hint that these aren't dances for now, but dances of memory.  The piece is non - stop pleasure, and may be my favorite of all music I know.  I'm grateful to Von Oeyen for helping me to hear it in a new way.

Von Oeyen followed up in the second half with Liszt's Sonata in B minor. For an encore, he played Robert Schuman and then a very Ravel - like version of Gershwin's "The Man I Love."