Ariela Bohrod: Elegance Personified

The first word that comes to mind when describing Ariela Bohrod's play is 'flow'. When she played the required Prelude and Fugue in her solo recital (from J.S. Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier", all of the notes just seemed to naturally flow into one another. She didn't hesitate, she didn't rush overmuch; things stayed at a nice, even tempo. Even when the piece started giving her bucketloads of notes, Bohrod kept the lid on things and kept her play orderly. It was less of a mad dash to the finish than a carriage ride in the country.

Bohrod, a sixteen-year-old native of Madison, WI, followed up the Prelude and Fugue with Lowell Lieberman's Sonata No. 1. In her pre-piece talk, Bohrod emphasized the "creepy" nature of the piece, a sort of atmospheric voodoo composition that seemed to fill the concert hall with fog and rotting trees. It started out slow and expressive, then leapt into Presto and cycled back and forth thereafter. There was a bit of skullduggery with the pedals, notes held too long or not long enough that produced weird humming noises, but Bohrod shook that off and kept on going. Where the third movement was very deliberate and introspective, the fourth was fast and complex. Only at the end did she really get loud; for the most part it was tempestuous, yet controlled at the same time.

In the Chopin nocturne that followed, Bohrod seemed to shine in a more melodious piece. Where the Liebermann was atmospheric and "creepy" for the most part, this piece was much more gentle. Closing the program was another Chopin, the Scherzo No. 3; this Bohrod described as "Jekyll and Hyde", contrasting sharp, "punchy" Hyde-style bits with lyrical, expressive Jekyll passages. The piece required considerable skill in melding the two styles into each other, and Bohrod succeeded brilliantly; the punchy bits flowed into melodies and the melodies became more and more pugnacious. The last few bars featured plenty of crash-bang-look-out-below chords, but the material still flowed very well.

Perhaps even more than Yang, Bohrod was extremely comfortable on stage; she used the words of a teenager but spoke like an adult. It was apparent that she really loves the music she plays, giving scores of small details and smiling when she outlined the more technical points of each piece. On the piano, her movements were smooth and controlled, flowing from one gesture into the next. "The word that comes to mind is 'elegant'," said my notes, and I think they are correct. Well done.