Composer, pianist, and educator James Adler had a magnificent new CD, “Homages & Remembrances,” released this season by Albany Records and, on November 12 at Yamaha Piano Salon, he officially launched the CD with a virtuoso recital made up of most works on the CD, along with assorted other pieces. Not included here was the largest-scale work on “Homages & Remembrances,” Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.”
Adler began by remembering Paul Turok with the late colleague’s dark and haunting “Passacaglia,” which seems redolent of the passage of time. Turok’s widow, Susan, was among those present for this tribute. Adler played his own “Prelude and Toccata,” from his “3 Piano Transitions,” not included on the CD, capturing the excitement of his 1982 move from Center City, Philadelphia, to Charles Street, in New York City, as well as the spirit of the lively nighttime street traffic along nearby Christopher Street, in the Village that never sleeps.
The Maestro saluted his late older brother, best friend, and mentor, Dr. Norman T. Adler, first with Claude Debussy’s “Deux Arabesques,” the andantino con moto, at once flowing and pensive, and the allegretto scherzando, liltingly evocative of the countryside, works which his brother introduced him to and for which he brought along Norman’s copy of the score. These introduced a featured work, the heartfelt “Elegy for Norman,” for which flutist Cain-Oscar Bergeron joined Adler, its “Lamentation” wistful in its mourning, recalling the journey up to Norman’s burial place in the Jerusalem Hills, and its joyous “Celebration,” based on the traditional Israeli melody for the prayer “L’Chah Dodi,” a fond and refreshing greeting to the Shabat (Sabbath) as a new bride. Adler played another memorial work, Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps Artistic Director Henco Espag’s “Herinneringe” (Remembrances), remembering Manus, Espag’s late brother, its sweet opening giving way to a jazzy variation on its theme, with a soaring one as an interlude.
Turning to earlier repertory, Adler offered a rhapsodic Prelude Opus 23, Number Six, of Sergei Rachmaninoff, not from the CD. Adler’s final programmed selection here, played near the beginning of the CD, was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Sonata Number Nine in D Major, Köchel 311, and made the piano sing as if the sonata were a Classical opera in miniature. Adler invested the allegro con spirito with all the anticipation found in an overture; realized, in the andante con espressione, the tears beneath the lightness of a gentle heroine’s less-than-serene meditation; and made the rondeau’s summing up into a finale in which all the disparate threads of the plot resolve, all voices have their say, and order reigns.
For an encore, Adler revisited his “Two Dances in One (Calypso cum Cakewalk),” also from “3 Piano Transitions,” evocative of the Caribbean, and like the “Prelude and Toccata,” found on his Albany Records CD “James Adler Plays Syncopated Rhythms.”