NEW YORK PIANO TRIO, Madsen Recital Hall, Harris Fine Arts Center, Brigham Young University, Feb. 14
Brigham Young University did the audience a disservice last night. For weeks, it’s been advertising this recital as specifically a Valentine’s Day concert. Well, it was Valentine’s Day, and this was a concert, but the congruity ended there. The recital was devoted to a selection of very modern music (all the composers are still alive, and four of the six were in attendance). But a host of well dressed couples sauntered into the recital hall with the obvious expectation of a sophisticated, romantic evening out. I’m pretty sure they were blind-sided. I hope atonality didn’t throw off anyone’s proposal plans.
The evening opened with Christian Asplund’s Hope #1. The performance actually began with the silence before the piece. I’ve never seen a group of performers so relish the quiet before and after each selection. Once they started playing, they made emotional and spiritual order out of the seeming chaos of the opening passages. It’s funny, as modern music gets increasingly more complex, a kind of childlike innocence and sincerity comes out of that complexity. The way the piano would dwell on a single note or lash out with a thundering atonal outburst reminded me of the acoustic curiosity of children. The trio showed incredible technical ability, but their command over their instruments increased as the night went on.
After Asplund’s piece, the three left the stage. After the applause, the audience began to whisper and shuffle their programs. Then the faintest sinusoidal tone started making its way from the stage. It grew louder, and then violinist Curtis Macomber emerged at the bottom of the stage, playing that same note on his E string’s harmonic. So began Steven Ricks’ fantastic Beyond the Zero. Macomber was accompanied by a pre-recorded electronic tape, and at first the recording sounded like so much electronic noise, like a thousand swarming beetles or a rushing waterfall. But gradually as the piece went on and Macomber used more and more diverse techniques, I realized that probably all the sounds in the background were originally from a violin. Sure there was undoubtedly quite a bit of editing that went into producing that track, but I wouldn’t be surprised if all of it started with an actual violin.
The program notes say that this piece was about going from life to beyond death, but at one exceptionally loud point I was wondering if the title was making reference to the zero decibel limit on a recording device. This was in the middle section, which (as the program notes might suggest) eloquently expresses the liminal anxieties of life in the face of death.
The violinist did a wonderful job. At the end of the piece, an engineer added artificial reverberation to the live violin playing. The effect was surreal and beautiful. This technique showed anew the ethereal beauty of the instrument, an achievement after all these centuries of violin music.
The last number before intermission was John Harvey’s eerie Piano Trio. Sometimes modern music (especially atonal music) gets accused of sounding the same, a generic “weird.” But specter like qualities of this piece were markedly different from anything else on the program last night.
My favorite passage was this spidery business around the bridge that kept popping up on the violin and cello. I’d be really interested to see the score. Macomber and cellist Chris Finckel played with an established rhythm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the notes were left more or less up to chance.
During intermission, I had the happy fortune of sitting next to a local composer, Joseph Sowa, who made the apt comparison between what he calls our current “wild west” of modern music and the early baroque period. Back then, there was a paradigm shift from looking at music linearly (i.e., counterpoint) to looking at it vertically (chordal harmony). Our current paradigm shift seems to be from notes to sound. Once the dust has settled, it will be fascinating to see what springs up.
After the intermission was Shulamit Ran’s Soliloquy. It had the most decisively tonal beginning of any of the pieces, but the strings were almost always playing minor seconds, which I guess is the “soundiest” interval there is. It’s funny how hostile the public can be towards new classical music but at the same time can be so accepting of the same dissonances in rock music. What are minor seconds but classical music’s version of a distortion pedal? Anyway, Ran’s piece was exotic and lyrical and a great way to launch the second half of the concert.
The next number was a great example of why there is no substitute for a live performance. Michael Hicks’ Empress of Japan has the cellist playing offstage. The composer’s own note speaks of the empress’ “self” dividing into two parts while “she constantly hears an invisible counterpart.” I assume the cello was this invisible counterpart. At the end, the violinist walks offstage to join the cellist. Sure, you could listen to a recording of this piece and it would be rewarding, but you would fail entirely to grasp the drama and message of the work. But if you got the chance to see the performance live, it would be something you would never forget. I’m imagining those bewildered Valentine’s couples who innocently stumbled on this concert. I can imagine one of them saying 20 years from now, “Do you remember that one Valentine’s Day when we saw that really weird concert? The one where the violinist got up and left just before the song was over?”
The last piece was Neil Thornock’s …and a bunch of other stuff. I thought this was the most fun out of all of them. For one, it began with pianist Stephen Gosling desperately and hurriedly trying to prepare his piano. I’m not entirely sure what he did, but all three of the performers had something jammed in their strings at some point. They produced these sounds that I could have sworn were not acoustic. It was incredible. I was also quite impressed with Finckel’s ability to throw his cello in and out of scordatura in the middle of a phrase. The premise of this piece was that, taking turns, each instrument would move from very high to very low; everything else was “a bunch of other stuff.” This “other stuff” involved drumming on the cello and plucking the exposed piano strings. The piano part was outrageously fun, often bordering on a kind of groovy jazz.
Throughout the whole piece, I was amazed at each performer’s technical ability and profound musicality. None of this was easy to play, but they weaved in and out of demanding false harmonics, seemingly random rhythms, and demanding leaps of intonation with what looked like ease. These three are masters at their individual crafts, and they have a great balance and chemistry among them.
I hope the performance inspired some of its unsuspecting victims to look further into the varied, wild, and wonderful arena of new music. After all, even Bach was new back in the day.