The second Piano Month offering in the Noontime Concerts™ series (“San Francisco’s Musical Lunch Break”) at Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral featured a recital by William Corbett-Jones, one of San Francisco’s most distinguished pianists. He offered a straightforward menu of servings (this is a lunch break, after all) from the piano repertoire, whose main course was the Opus 58 sonata in B minor by Frédéric Chopin. This was a no-nonsense account of the sonata that placed clarity of structure above flamboyance of expression. Indeed, there was so much coherence to the interpretation that, were one exposed to too many of those pianists who indulge in virtuosic excesses, one might almost take the reading as modest. However, it was simply a matter of Corbett-Jones understanding where Chopin had set his priorities and then following through to make sure that they remained the priorities of the execution.
