Solo pianist Zlata Chochieva has something in common with rock climber Alex Honnold. They don’t make it look easy; they make it seem inevitable. Their sense of freedom blossoms within the confines of music’s tonality and rock’s rigidity. When Chochieva presents an entire program of fantasy works for Friends of Chamber Music on Thursday, February 5, 7:30 pm, she will be “free soloing.”
“This program is about spontaneity and freedom,” she says. “It is also about structure, because it is easier to be free when you know where the boundaries are.” She calls the recital “Quasi Una Fantasia,” taking the name from the piece she will play by Beethoven.
Bartók will be visiting from Transylvania, Liszt from a lecture about Dante, Sibelius from his encounter with a conifer, Schumann enchanted by dreams and whims, and Scriabin bearing a fiendishly difficult riot of octaves for both hands. In such company, Bach wields the steady oar. Still, the Fantasia he wrote to lead us into a fugue reveals the master freed from the religious framework of his weekly labors. There is a stream of consciousness in the fantasy that shows us more about how he thinks and who he is than we are likely to find elsewhere.
A few concert pianists travel with their own instruments, but Chochieva looks forward to playing the Steinway in Gates Hall. “I like diversity when it comes to pianos,” she says. “I enjoy trying new sound palettes, experimenting, and discovering something new.”
Listen for her tonal response to the music and watch for her body language. “Of course, there are certain techniques for producing sound, but in the end, it is about your heart and your ears, and the way they react to the music. Just like your voice changes depending on what you are talking about, or who you are talking to.”
It will be a demanding program, and yet she finds freedom in it. Which brings to mind Alex Honnold. I regard his free solo of El Capitan in 2017, aided only by the stiffness of his shoes and the chalk on his fingers, to be the most astonishing individual achievement of my lifetime. Recently, Honnold spent an hour and a half free soloing the Taipei 101 skyscraper, a steel-glass-concrete structure that proved boring compared to El Capitan, the great wall of Yosemite.
Asked how he can trust himself enough to live as he does, he said, “If you spend your life practicing this particular craft, and you practice enough, eventually it’s not that hard.”
— Kim Millett
Zlata Chochieva, piano
Thursday, February 5, 7:30 PM
Gates Concert Hall, Newman Center for the Performing Arts
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