piano recital: a review and an adventure

I attended a piano recital in San Francisco on Sunday. It just wasn't the piano recital I'd intended to go to.

The one I'd intended would have been Sarah Cahill playing music by Terry Riley in a meeting room of the main SF Public Library at 2 p.m. The occasion was to honor Riley's 90th birthday, which was last June. Riley was one of the founding fathers of the minimalist movement in the early 1960s, though he's reinvented himself several times since then, and Cahill is an indefatigable proponent of new and unusual music; she was, among other things, one of the tag team of pianists who played Philip Glass's complete Etudes some years back.

But when I got to the library I found the building closed due to a power outage. This, I eventually learned, had begun the previous evening, but I hadn't heard about it. This was irksome, especially as I'd checked the website that morning to confirm the concert was still on. The power outage was widespread, but in spots, and this particular spot covered just a few blocks around the library. Not a concert in sight.

But! Earlier, on my way to lunch, which I had at a Chinese place nearby but well outside the outage zone, I'd walked past a pizzeria which had, taped to its front window, a small notification of a concert of Bach on the piano, to be held at a church in the Mission District at 3 p.m. "Too bad Cahill's concert won't be over by then," I thought, but when I found the library closed, I simply changed my plans.

So instead of Riley I heard Bach's seven keyboard toccata suites (BWV 910-916) played on a Baldwin baby grand in a 19th-century Lutheran church across the street from Mission Dolores. The pianist, whose name was Michiko Murata, was really good. Too bad there were only about 20 people there to hear her.

She played crisply and emphatically, with clean separation of parts and with the call-and-response patterns so basic to Bach clearly enunciated. It was 90 minutes of the master of intricate counterpoint showing his chops, and with this clarity of enunciation it was sheer pleasure to hear.

Fortunately there was a brief intermission halfway through, and I returned from the long trudge to the men's room just in time to see Murata in the sanctuary's foyer, about to make her entrance. "You're back," she said to me. "I thought you'd left." This is something you can say when your audience is so small you can count them. "Oh no," I replied, "I've got to hear how this comes out." (With one of Bach's few excursions into the major mode, as it turned out.)