The tribute to Satie, at about 18 minutes, was the longest piece on the program. The model here is not any of the composer's hit parade pieces, but instead the elegant and relatively little-known ``Socrate" and the Nocturnes. Much of the music consists of slow, quiet, two-part inventions in the right hand, supplemented from time to time by more in the left. Pauses are significant as the music gradually speeds up, developing a more complex textur , and a more playful mood.
The most extroverted and spectacular of the other pieces were Judith Weir's ``Strathspey and Reel" (an exercise in parallel motion with the hands an octave apart) and Andrew Toovey's ``To Sappho." For this, Finnissy pulled over his hands what looked like a pair of lime-green ankle socks, and rapidly pummeled the keyboard with open palms to alarming effect. Howard Kempton's ``Mickey Finn," Chris Newman's ``All Change , " and Claudia Molitor's meditation on a Tyrolean Christmas carol are slippery pieces that follow emotional rather than musical logic.
In Stevens's `` Elegiac Fugue , " masterly technique and strong emotion become one. And Lutyens's ``La Natura dell'Acqua" (``The Nature of Water") is a striking addition to the great tradition of splashing water music, spare yet evocative.
Finnissy is an amazing pianist, commanding a full spectrum of colors, textures, and dynamics which he deploys in a very subtle way, even when he is pounding the keyboard with green-socked hands. He offered a single encore. ``It's by Gershwin," he said, ``not me. It's `Swanee' -- or it was." Finnissy's transcriptions of Gershwin, folk songs, and operatic music are difficult but they are not display pieces. Instead they are interpretations. Since the time of Al Jolson , ``Swanee" has been sung as celebration. Finnissy's version, dense in counterpoint, rich in harmony, and ravishingly played, finds in it music of nostalgia, regret, and profound sadness.
