Some pianists show us how to play, or, more rarely, how to listen. Russell Sherman’s recitals in recent years do more — they model a way of living in the presence of art.
“There is an exhilaration, an intoxication, an ecstasy, associated with just hearing music in one’s head, in one’s heart,” Sherman once summarized, in an interview with the conductor Craig Smith. You can’t help suspecting that something of this core approach has allowed Sherman to soften the tread of the years and, now at 86, to continue performing extremely challenging repertoire at a very high level.
The pianist himself has long distinguished between two types of technique, the first being the manual dexterity required to navigate complex passages. By his own admission, many of his students nowadays possess this dexterity in greater supply than he does. But there is a second type of technique, one that focuses, in his words, on “the hand following the ear following the imagination, and creating those qualities of sound which are unique and distinct to that moment and to that piece.”
Sherman’s annual faculty recital at New England Conservatory on Sunday showed that his powers in this latter category remain undimmed. Indeed, in works by Schoenberg, Beethoven, Debussy, and Liszt, Sherman’s playing, while still demonstrating a formidable athletic prowess, also conveyed his abiding gifts of fantasy and insight, not to mention an enduring fascination with his signature repertoire: all qualities that only seem to grow deeper with time.
Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces (Op. 11) began the night, here hauntingly intoned in a reading alert to the music’s proudly modern edge but also to its backward glances. The opening movement of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata brimmed with a propulsive forward motion that at times edged toward a turbulence capable of obscuring more than it revealed. But the slow movement was an island of lyricism all its own, and Sherman drew out the gentle interrogative quality of its opening phrases. And in his hands, the arrival of the Rondo was a moment of rare beauty, disclosed with the type of simplicity of utterance that comes only after a life of great study.
Following a brief but characterful detour through four selections from Book II of Debussy’s Preludes, Sherman ended with a return to several of Liszt’s “Transcendental Etudes,” the very works that helped establish his career many decades ago. Here they were once more, a triumph of energy and insight, with the piano tolling like an orchestra. His reading also confounded whatever expectations one may have brought from careful listening to his recordings.
Indeed, Sherman still never interprets a work in the same way twice. And in this sense, the dots between approach and result connect. On Sunday, right through a final pair of encores, he seemed to be inviting you to do nothing more (or less) than share in his enchantment and in his gratefulness for scores that will, when a spirit is open to the music’s infinite possibilities, always be new.
RUSSELL SHERMAN
At Jordan Hall, April 3
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Jeremy_Eichler.