Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Last Night in LA--The Sound of Art

Vicki Ray is one of the special talents of the L.A. musical world: pianist on the faculty of CalArts, pianist with California EAR Unit and Xtet, soloist and collaborator. She is one of the founders of PianoSpheres, our most important series of piano concerts, established with the instigation of the late, great Leonard Stein to present new and rarely heard music. Her PianoSpheres concert last night at Zipper Hall in the Colburn School was titled �Visual Music� to form associations with the �Visual Music� exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art, next door to the Colburn, just down the street from Disney Hall. (I�ll comment on MOCA�s exhibit in a future post.)

Ray gave a sparkling concert with music about art or about artists by a variety of European and American composers. The concert began with one of its major works, �Concetto spaziale, attese� (1997) by Nicola Sani , a work written for piano and tape to describe in music the works of Lucio Fontana, paintings in bright color in which the canvas is torn by long gashes. When I was listening, the images which came unbidden to mind were Piranesi�s strange, dark etchings of imaginary dungeons, areas of dark corners with stairs rising only to find more darkness.

This was followed by a set of shorter works about art or artists. First up was Louis Andriessen�s �Image de Moreau� (1999), a visual impression of painter Gustave Moreau (if you think that minimalism in music, even elaborated, matches Moreau�s art). John Zorn�s �dead ringer� (1982) was a musical cartoon comic, sometimes simple, sometimes slapstick. �Imaginary Scenes� (1995) by Toshi Ichiyanagi was another impressive work, with atmosphere and color. Then Kevin Volans, Irish out of South Africa, gave �Notes d�un peintre� (1987) in which you look with your ears at a painters notebook in which experiments come together to form an image. In this case the experiments were small fragments of sound, considered, then re-worked. The final work in the set was the oldest, �P�gase� (1946) by Andr� Jolivet. The Pegasus of the title was one of a set of wire sculptures given the composer by Var�se; Messiaen praised the work as �admirable � the noblest, loftiest, most personal one Jolivet has ever written�.

For me the high point of the concert came right after intermission with the premiere of a new work by David Rosenboom , �Twilight Language� (2004). The work has four parts and a Twilight Language Theme; each part is intended as a musical meditation, and each is based on a specific visual image, two from tenth century Tibetan paintings. The titles of the parts present the themes of the meditation; as example, on of the parts is �Simultaneous Absence of Silence and Sound�. Apparently the score gives the performer considerable freedom in assembling and interpreting the written components of the music. I would like to hear the work again, soon, and then hear it again by another performer so that I could hear another approach.

The concert ended with Poulenc�s �le Travail du Peintre� (1957), a duet for piano and tenor; Jonathon Mack, lyric tenor with the LA Opera and on the faculty of USC, provided the song. Poulenc wrote several works to poems by Paul Eluard; the last of these was a set of seven poems on key artists of the Paris avant garde of the twenties: Picasso, Chagall, Braque, Gris, Mir�, Villon. In three of the segments, Poulenc captured my mental images of works of the particular artist; in four, Eluard did the better job, but that may well be because we have so much more understanding of the meaning of words rather than the meaning of sound.

posted by Jerry Zinser 3/16/2005