Chetan Tierra Conquers Prokofiev
"Conservatories are crammed, worldwide, with aspiring concert pianists. Trying to break out ahead of the pack is a gruelingly competitive business: The winnowing process, unforgiving, keeps narrowing the field, as with aspiring astronauts or major league pitchers.
But Chetan Tierra, a 25-year-old pianist from Santa Cruz, plows ahead.
In fact, given his hotblooded performance Saturday night with the Santa Cruz County Symphony — a performance of a technically chilling Prokofiev concerto, which Tierra dispatched while fighting off a 103-degree fever — it's easy to understand why he keeps clearing competitive hurdles.
Last month, Tierra was selected as one of 30 young (meaning age 30 or under) pianists from 13 countries to compete in the upcoming Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas, one of the classical music world's main events. His selection couldn't have been better timed, as Tierra was already scheduled to perform Saturday at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, where the hometown crowd greeted him as if he were returning Ulysses.
Then he mowed down the concerto.
Prokofiev completed his third piano concerto in 1921, while summering in Brittany. Only 30, he had begun contemplating the piece a decade or so earlier, gradually assembling it from stray bits of material: memorable themes, a set of variations. Yet the final product, his most popular concerto, isn't a pastiche. It unfolds organically,a work with a crisp disposition, at times icy and sardonic, as Prokofiev often is, but also with a dark, transfixing beauty.
In the first movement, after a haunting bit of melody from the clarinet, Tierra started in, at first with crisp, tinkling passages, like silver spoons on icicles, then quickly trundled out the heavy ammunition, building percussively, unfurling two-handed ribbon runs and sequences of hopping, cross-handed chords. In the midst of his final scalar cannon shots up the keyboard, he had to do a midair recalibration, slowing down just a hair as the orchestra couldn't quite keep up.
Mostly, though, the orchestra, conducted by John Larry Granger, played incisively, in a bold, then delicate dialogue with the pianist. In the second movement, which runs a theme through a set of five variations, Tierra's drizzled rhapsodies crystallized into man-alone moments of meditation.
In the finale, there were eddies of notes, then ocean waves crashing in the bass register; remember, Prokofiev composed this piece as a showcase for his own bold playing. Tierra handled its challenges — leaping note clusters, pointillist flashes and tintinnabulating chords — with fire and polish. The audience gave him a standing ovation, and Tierra, who is winding up his studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music, played a pearly encore, Liszt's transcription of Schumann's song "Widmung" ("Dedication").
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