APA presents Sara Davis Buechner: A unique journey through music and life

Buechner confirming score affinity.

Way back in 1981, in the infancy of the American Pianists Association, then based in New York City and called the Beethoven Foundation, three pianists shared the top prize. One of them then had the identity of David Buechner. 

But in a process she has since described and talked about in detail, Sara Davis Buechner started and completed a transition. As a transgender woman, Buechner has built a substantial teaching and performing career.

On Sunday afternoon, in an engagement former APA artistic director Joel Harrison described as long overdue, Buechner played a recital that confirmed the early promise of her artistry, this time under the auspices of the APA in its longtime hometown, Indianapolis. 

A large crowd assembled at the Glick Indiana History Center to express its enthusiasm at what the recitalist had to offer. It was an unusual program leaning toward the lighter side. In its diversity of technical and expressive demands, the music was substantial enough to represent her interpretive breadth and just about as much charm and wit as she put into her remarks from the stage.

A feeling for Baroque "terraced dynamics" applied to the piano animated the start of the Minuet from "Berenice," a Handel transcription by one of her teachers, Mieczyslaw Munz. With its tastefully applied gingerbread figures near the end, there was a nice segue into Mozart's Sonata in B-flat major, K. 333. The tonal palette showed variety, and her taste for  resonant acoustics reminded me of her early Mozart disc, recorded in the unparalleled warmth and clarity of Tarrytown (N.Y.) Music Hall for Connoisseur Society (1994).

Whenever Mozart's muse seems to change direction or emphasis, Buechner was there. The chromatic passage in the slow movement was effectively heightened for contrast. The remarkable third movement made its entrance soft-spoken, then got brighter without glare. That finale's dramatic flourish near the end, so characteristic of the composer in his maturity, came center stage with plenty of style. 

Always on the lookout for underrepresented repertoire, Buechner brought the performance up to intermission with Five Spanish Pieces by Federico Longas, a 20th-century Spanish master of conservative bent. Her mastery of resonance is worth a mention here, even though it involves only how she treated the pause between the second and third pieces: hesitating just enough before releasing the sustaining pedal, then timing the silence proportionately before launching into the folk-like "Catalana."

The suite concluded with "Aragon," Longas' version of the bravura characteristic of the region's signature dance form, well-known from the aragonaises of Bizet's "Carmen" and Massenet's "Le Cid." Her performance drew an instantaneous pre-intermission standing ovation from the audience. 

The second half launched amiably into Buechner as composer, with "A New York Sketchbook." The three short pieces covered a lot of ground, from the inviting "Riverside Park: Sunday Morning," through "Waltz for Aline," her tribute to a friend who lived on West 72nd Street (a few blocks south of my first home on West 77th), to the raucous glow of "El Paseo del Bronx" (The Bronx Step), where the Dominican and Puerto Rican cultures of her neighborhood then prevailed. She now lives in Philadelphia.

To end with, the recital went back to a major composer, George Gershwin, represented by something characteristic but not so well-known, his early acoustic recordings and piano rolls of pieces he worked out in his head before they ever saw print. I liked the way his melodic flair sang out in this performance. And Gershwin's characteristic accents, linked to syncopated rhythms of the popular music then emerging in Harlem, were neither overstated nor veiled in bashfulness.

Buechner's cheeky manner came out in spoken form one final time before she pretended to be reluctant to play an encore ("it's not in my contract") then presented Chopin in his most modestly pastel manner with a "contredanse." It was a case of not allowing the encore to contradict the engaging manner of anything in the printed program, but to confirm it all as graciously as possible. She was clearly ready for her first martini.