Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Last Night in L.A. - Minimalism for Keyboards

The four pianists of PianoSpheres -- Gloria Cheng, Vicki Ray, Mark Robson, and Susan Svrcek �- presented a survey of minimalism for piano and organ, with works ranging from pre- to post-minimalism. It was a good concert of music by eight composers, with an encore from a ninth, all of whom loved sound and saw riches in chords. The concert was well-balanced, starting with Steve Reich�s deconstruction of a chord, in Four Organs (1970), to Louis Andriessen�s flag-waving Workers Union (1975), done on four grand pianos � from a Reich work in which the composer is in full control and the music is introverted and polite to an Andriessen work in which the notes are up to the players and the extroverted attitude is raucous and aggressive. Afterwards the woman sitting next to me told her male companion that it certainly made you think differently about a grand piano; good for her. The encore was a short work for four pianos by Morton Feldman, wisps of sound, which the group dedicated to their mentor, Leonard Stein.

Vicki Ray got poetry from Opening (1981) and Wichita Vortex Sutra(1988) by Philip Glass. Gloria Cheng played Ragtempus Fugatis(1994) by Terry Riley, and she and Ray played two pianos in Orpheus Over and Under (1989) by David Lang, one of his contemplative works. Susan Svrcek, who will be giving a recital of piano music by John Cage music in a month, played Cage�s beautiful In a Landscape (1948), making it quite comfortable with cutting edge works written 30 or more years later. Mark Robson played the Disney Hall pipe organ in Arvo Part�s Annum per Annum (1980) which seemed to use every pipe in the instrument in its final chord. (An assistant helped activate.) Svrcek and Robson played two pianos in the surprise of the evening, Colin McPhee�s Balinese Ceremonial Music (1934 � 1938). Sound clips are available here. This work may have been written for musicological purposes, to recreate the sounds of a Balinese gamelan group for a western audience who had never heard these sounds, but it certainly brought out how the interest in Asian philsophies and sounds were significant in the growth of minimalism.

Nine works. Were all of them �minimalism�? Does that question really matter?

Once again, the Philharmonic brought in a new audience to Disney Hall. For the PianoSpheres artists, with a series of five concerts a season, the audience was equivalent to three years of PianoSpheres concerts. How many of the nine composers of the evening would have been unfamiliar to the majority of the audience? Seven? How many of the four talented pianists would have been recognized by name by the majority of the audience? One? Memo to the Los Angeles Philharmonic management: keep up the good work.

Both of last weekend�s concerts are now available on iTunes, for $9.99 a concert, each including a file with the program for that concert. On Thursday, a glitch prevented downloading the Reich program if you requested a download from listing of all recent albums; however, by clicking on the album title and going to the album site, a full download was possible. That glitch may have been fixed by now. The download of the Andriessen/Part program worked from the general album listing. The sound is great. You may well hear an occasional page turning, but audience noises are rarely noticeable. I�m positive the balances are sometimes different than I heard them in the hall; the differences are probably the result of microphone placement, with weaker pickup in the center of the stage where the prepared piano in the Part and the clapping percussionists in Reich�s Tehillim were, for example. But quibble, quibble. The records are good music, with good sound, in good performances, and I for one am glad to have them to listen to several more times.

posted by Jerry Zinser 3/31/2006