Peter Child: Reviews: Revoicing Echoes
Composed 2005.



Guest of honor plays the part with grace

The Boston Globe, January 16, 2006
by Richard Dyer

David Deveau and friends
Presented by Bank of America Celebrity Series/Boston Marquee
at Jordan Hall Saturday night.

David Deveau has been an active citizen of our musical community for more than 30 years, busy as a pianist, teacher, chamber musician, and impresario. Saturday night Bank of America Celebrity Series/Boston Marquee honored his achievements by commissioning a new work from Peter Child and by presenting him in a program designed to display the range of his interests and accomplishments.

The guest of honor, looking genial and relaxed, offered three contrasting solo works. Webern's Variations are spare but full of implication; Deveau played them with the rhythmic and dynamic precision they require, but also with exceptional variety of touch and color. Deveau's approach to Liszt's suite ''Venezia e Napoli" was unassuming, sensitive, and dramatic. He rose to the virtuoso challenges but presented them as part of the evocative substance of the music. The ''Tarantella," for example, is usually played as a spectacular but pointless exercise in rapid-fire repeated notes; Deveau used that technique to suggest the sound of mandolins.

Child's ''Revoicing Echoes," like the Liszt, is a trilogy of related pieces. ''Adirondack Air" begins with a simple two-part invention on a mountain folk song; the harmonies become more complex and underlie the next piece, ''London Bells," in which the mood becomes even more unsettling. By the reflective third piece, ''A Glass, Darkly," the music is no longer tonal. The work is an ingenious encapsulation of the history of harmony, and Deveau played it with sympathy and flair.

Some of Deveau's prominent musical friends -- and frequent participants in the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, which Deveau runs -- paid tribute by joining him for the rest of the program. A witty and surprising Haydn Trio in C opened the program, with Deveau gamboling over the keyboard in the congenial company of Andres Cardenes, the elegant concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and Jennifer Culp, the musically alert cellist of the Kronos Quartet. For an arrangement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto for piano and strings, made by Beethoven's copyist with emendations by the composer himself, these players were supplemented by musical luminaries Irina Muresanu (violin), Marcus Thompson and Roger Tapping (violas), and Max Zeugner (bass). The sound of the arrangement is captivatingly transparent, and Deveau played the solo part, including some new flourishes Beethoven added, with a chamber musician's interactions, tonal luminosity, and personal zest. The standing O called for an encore, so another of Deveau's friends, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, made an unbilled appearance, playing ''Amazing Grace," the sentiments of which neatly summed up the spirit of the whole evening.