Pioneering Pianist Nancy Garniez Explains Her Commonsensical, Paradigm-Shifting Discoveries in Tonal Refraction
Nancy Garniez’s latest achievement is a groundbreaking discovery in the field of sonics as they relate to memory and performance, which she calls Tonal Refraction. The iconoclastic, individualistic pianist has built an unselfconsciously brilliant career spanning both the worlds of classical and the avant garde. She’s commissioned new works from notable composers like Ursula Mamlok and several others. She continues to coach both professionals and casual players. Her blog is infused with a crushingly sardonic wit, and her commentary on the state of classical music is spot-on. She also happens to be mom to Rachelle Garniez, the multi-instrumentalist chanteuse and Jack White collaborator who might just be the most consistently brilliant songwriter working in any genre today. But ultimately, Tonal Refraction may be Nancy Garniez’s most lasting legacy. In anticipation of presenting her findings at the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in Seoul, Korea this summer, she graciously took some time away from her teaching and research to answer a few questions.
Nancy Garniez: If I have learned anything from Tonal Refraction it is that the race to produce quantities of notes with minimal attentiveness, risks distancing players from any sense of real satisfaction in their music making, whether amateur or professional. I am now teaching players of all instruments, all levels, how to adjust their attention to include the elements that trigger the strongest, most reliable responses: I call it Music Inside and Out.
Lucid Culture’s Correspondent: My rudimentary understanding of Tonal Refraction, as you describe it, is that in this new system pitches are associated with color rather than musical notation in order to better enable performers to hear what they’re playing or are about to play. What’s wrong with standard notation? Is color really more memorable than, say, that leger line above B that says “middle C?” Could it simply be that some people respond to color better than notation – or vice versa?
NG: It is perhaps better to think of Tonal Refraction as a process rather than as an alternative to standard notation. The process begins with the individual matching her feeling about a specific pitch to a color, tuning it, as it were, in this visual medium. Sometimes it is a favorite note, sometimes a problematic tone in a specific composition. Usually -but not always – the people involved have no previous association of color with sound. So it is important that the color is generated by the maker of the Refraction, not given as part of a method. In this sense it is a reverse notation since the color corresponds to a level of emotional response based entirely on experience of actual sound rather than being an equivalent to standard notation.
LCC: How about people like me who come from the world of improvised music where the cues are typically audio rather than visual?
NG: I have not worked with people like you, probably because the audio/visual coordination in your case – and Rachelle’s! – is so entirely different from that of a person who is reading music.
LCC: Throughout history, there have been umpteen methods for notating sound, although I’m not aware of color being one of them. One method that comes to mind is the shape-note system popular in the US in the late 1700s and early 1800s. What do you think of that?
NG: These are all evidence of the complexity of rendering the auditory in some other means to facilitate memory or execution…there will always be experimentation along these lines.
LCC: Why Tonal Refraction and not Tonal Reflection? Or is that just a matter of semantics?
NG: The word “refraction” is taken from Proust, who uses it to describe what happens to sensory memory when it is altered by layers of subconscious emotion, association, etcetera. I find it extraordinary that, upon Googling Tonal Refraction, I discovered “refraction” on page 38 of a theory treatise, Tonality and Transformation, by Steven Rings, University of Chicago. He uses the word in ways quite parallel to mine, though not with the literary association, rather with the prismatic image of the coloring of tone by experience. His work is based on the same thinker who inspired and informed my entire life as a teacher, Viktor Zuckerkandl, a psychologist, philologist, musician, who was at the Institute for Advanced Studies back in the 50’s, and whose book Sound and Symbol goes into these intricacies thoroughly, brilliantly, and hopefully, from the standpoint of how to make a meaningful life teaching music.
Incidentally, he met Robert Hutchins on a trans-Atlantic sailing and taught music at St. John’s College in Annapolis – thus he was passionate about music and the human race, not the conservatory subspecies. The second volume of his work is called Man, the Musician.
LCC: One thing that struck me immediately about Tonal Refraction is that it emphasizes the individual. After all, we all perceive sensory input differently, whether that’s audio or visual or tactile or any other kind of stimulus. How specifically is Tonal Refraction tailored to individuals?
NG: Here you are right on the money. The idea of my putting forth my own Tonal Refraction of a composition is not to stimulate your disinclination to go along with it, but rather to come up with your own images in both sound and sight.
LCC: What specifically does Tonal Refraction empower a musician to do that can’t be achieved through simple practice, or exercises, or ear training?
NG: I am amazed at the changes this technique has wrought in my listening, my playing, my teaching. The use of a code of related colors suggests interest in overtones as well as discrete pitches. And I haven’t even mentioned the grid: Tonal Refraction uses two potent elements: First, color for pitch relatedness: I can tell right away by the individual’s selection of colors whether or not she hears tones in relation one to another. Sometimes the power of color to show this is overwhelmingly clear in a way that has nothing to do with music theory or ear training. In one stunning instance, pointing out to a professional pianist how arbitrary his colors were for the C major scale began a conversation about how he hated overtones (they are, after all, inconsistent and therefore quite dangerous on the piano). Having never been taught to be aware of them he blanked them out with audible humming while playing. He no longer does so.
Second, the grid for tonal space decisions – that’s the vertical axis – plotted over a visualization of a time constant, which is the horizontal axis. As an example of tonal space, you might take the opening notes of Fur Elise: Beethoven alternates E and D# several times, starting with the E. These tones are so close together as almost to sound like a single tone with a wide pitch band. I would probably visualize that by changing color within one horizontal bar. But on page 2 the alternation begins with D# and the tones (D# / E) are clearly marked as separately articulated pairs, thus increasing the distance between them, as I understand that marking. I would indicate that by showing them adjacent horizontal bars. In other words, whereas they would be played on the same piano keys in both cases, the auditory distance would not be equivalent and I could emphasize that in my visualization.
;LCC: What is the physiological basis for Tonal Refraction?
NG: I am sure there is one and have perhaps found people to investigate this further. It is a matter of response in time. Musicians experience time in minuscule increments; during countless milliseconds we make more decisions than we can possibly track. Some of these decisions are based on emotional reactions to sounds themselves, as opposed to the composition as an entity. We know about this because of such responses as unbearable muscle tension, the humming I described above, focal dystonia — all of which I have “treated” using Tonal Refraction.
One of my former students, a neuroscientist, has connected me with a colleague, Daniella Schiller, who is working on the neuro-physiological fear response: animals, including humans, respond to fear physically before they are aware of the cause of their fear–it is so immediate a sensory event. Dr. Schiller, having tried Tonal Refraction, agrees that there are profound similarities between these types of event except that music unleashes a veritable torrent of response.
When I first began working with Tonal Refraction a student showed it to a colleague at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who referred me to the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function at Beth Abraham Health Services in the Bronx, a facility for treatment of long-term neurologic disease. Dr. Concetta Tomaino, the Music Therapist with whom Oliver Sacks worked for decades, set me to work with several patients. I undertook this experiment as a volunteer and, after three sessions, achieved results “unlike anything we have seen in music therapy.” in Dr. Tomaino’s words.
Preferring the artistic life I did not continue in that setting.
LCC: Was there a particular problem or issue that sent you off on the road to Tonal Refraction? What initiated this journey of discovery and where did it lead you?
NG: I fell in love with the sound of the piano at age 3 or 4; it was a neighbor’s piano across the hall from our apartment. I had never seen a piano or heard anyone play one. It invaded my imagination; I loved the sound. We moved away, the choir director made my father buy a piano, and I began lessons at 7. It was a huge disappointment – no magic! So I played incessantly but never practiced. Until Mozart. That book of sonatas contained sounds that matched my feeling for the instrument — not all the sounds, just some, here and there. Of course, the discrepancy was baffling and I could not articulate it. For complicated reasons I was unable to pursue the standard training and career of a pianist, though it is the only thing I ever really wanted to master. Then, at age 57 a new invention of physical therapy gave me, for the first time in my adult life, unfettered use of my left arm, so I programmed a solo recital to include the Mozart that had so puzzled me at age 12. In the middle of the night I awoke sure that now I could SHOW people what it was about that music that had stayed with me so clearly. And thus it happened–out of the experience of childhood. It is one of the reasons I take teaching children so seriously.
LCC: Can I play devil’s advocate again and ask if Tonal Refraction has the potential to do much good, why hasn’t it already been adopted in the music education community? Or has it? Are there other people doing what you’re doing, or on the same track at least?
NG: Parental pressure for short-term achievement is calling the shots with increasing authority these days. Competition is all. The commitment to it is deeply entrenched.
LCC: Can I play devil’s advocate again and ask why, when we have Youtube and Soundcloud and a gazillion other places where we can learn stuff by ear, and if we get lost we can rewind, do we even need written notation? After all, an awful lot of people who play music, some of them very well, can’t read it…
NG: I refer back to my story of discovering those particular sounds in Mozart. I had no clue who he was or what it was but I knew I was not alone in the world. Had the music not been printed for me to stumble across all by myself on my piano none of the above could have happened, though I deplore the reliance of the classical music community on visual analysis rather than on auditory vitality – the recording industory has also been subservient to that order of priorities.
LCC: As you know, in Hindu mythology, certain pitches as well as certain colors are associated with the various chakras in the human body. I’m not aware of what if any mathematical correlation there might be between sonic and spectral frequencies in that system. Is there one in yours? In other words, does the correspondence between pitches have a mathematically corresponding color shift?
NG: These are issues that Zuckerkandl treats very beautifully. My work relies on the variability of acoustical events and the perception of them. In this respect it is not attractive to most theorists seeking mathematical formulas, though I feel the work is inherently mathematical. My brother, a mathematician, saw that right away, though he knows nothing about music.
LCC: I should say “congratulations” for being selected to present your findings at the upcoming International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in Seoul this coming August. What specifics are you going to unveil there?
NG: Thanks!! No one is more surprised than I at the proposal having been selected. The proposal seems to address many of your questions quite directly: “The study aimed to determine whether individuals could be made aware of their involuntary experience of tone relatedness, demonstrated by Viktor Zuckerkandl (Sound and Symbol) to be integral to the musical life of persons with or without training; and, if so, whether it would make any difference.
Seventy-two individuals, including professional musicians, amateurs, listeners, and children, were seen for three weekly sessions of 1 ¼ hours. Session I: Each was asked to identify a tone that had particular meaning for them, then to choose out of hundreds of colored pencils a color to match that tone. Proceeding then to relate that tone/color either to a scale, or directly to the tones in a specific composition of their own choosing, the individual drew the tones on a grid, as if depicting vibrations. With the horizontal axis of the grid corresponding to time measured objectively, the vertical axis registered degrees of rise and fall as perceived by the inner ear, i.e., subjectively, often deviating significantly from standard notation. Continuing to depict the composition the individual worked in silence, relating to the score without relating physically to an instrument or actual sound. Session II: A continuation of the work. By Session III 67% of individuals already registered a clear response, generally manifested in improved reading; and better, more confident coordination in instrumental or compositional performance. Of this group 13% presented acute physical or psychiatric symptoms; with the exception of only one individual in this sub-group, the results were dramatically restorative.
For 30% of participants the process seemed to have no evident relevance while, for 3%, the first two sessions evoked such psychological pain as to preclude completing the study. Representative samples of work from all three groups will be shown. This research has direct implications about relating visual to auditory experience. Whereas failing to account for the difference between fully resonating sound and the discrete symbols of standard notation risks alienating the reader from innate musical sense, a system that translates auditory experience into visual terms may restore the connection.”
LCC: Being familiar with your blog, I’ve noticed that you have a prophetic streak. You’ve been a champion of live performance and live recording versus studio recordings, and you’ve also gone to bat for community-based performances and ensembles, both ideas which have validated themselves in recent years. To what degree, do you think, or would you venture to say, is Tonal Refraction an “I told you so” moment?
NG: It’s good of you to say that and thanks for reading the blog. After a while I got used to being a bit ahead of the pack, having noticed already in the 50’s that recordings and television were going to pose problems in terms of attentiveness and sound quality, which influenced my approach to programming. My teaching has always been experimental, including some far-out work in ensemble and in piano at Mannes Preparatory Division until the influx of Eastern Europeans in the 80’s wiped away all trace of what was creatively American in approaches to music education. I had to stop even pretending to accomplish anything against the Sovietization of classical music. Alas. But I still have acive contact with some extraordinary young musical minds. Most of my support has come from your generation and younger with the exception of a few highly perceptive artist teachers here and there.
LCC: Thanks for the enlightening chat! I’d like to remind those of you in New York that Nancy Garniez also puts on a very enlightening piano salon in a welcoming, intimate Upper West Side space: the current focus of these early evening house concerts is Beethoven sonatas and the fine points of the composer’s rhythms. Details may be found here.
Haskell Small Plays a Shattering, Haunting Program on the Upper West
[republished from Lucid Culture’s sister blog New York Music Daily]
More musicians should do what Haskell Small does: he plays what he likes, and brings it to life, sometimes quietly, sometimes somewhat more boisterously, putting his heart and soul into it. He gravitates toward music that’s on the quiet and rapturous side: his performance of Federico Mompou’s Musica Callada here last year was absolutely riveting. Friday night on the Upper West Side, Small revisited that theme, bookending an absolutely shattering performance of his own suite The Rothko Room with music of Satie and Alan Hovhaness.
Kicking off the evening with Satie’s first suite for piano, Four Ogives, set the stage perfectly. The title refers to church windows; with a delivery that managed to simultaneously embody stateliness, a warm gospel tone and an understated tension, Small left no doubt that by 1886, when Satie wrote this, he’d already found plenty to be vexated about. The evening’s piece de resistance was Small’s original work, an uninterrupted theme and variations based onboth the life of Mark Rothko as well as an immersion in the Rothko paintings in the Phillips Collection’s Rothko Room in Washington, DC. Centered around a mournful bell-like theme that immediately brought to mind Mompou, Small worked dynamics that ranged from minute to occasionally jarring, through an unexpected boogie-woogie flavored passage and another, longer, bitingly animatedly interlude that strongly evoked Small’s early mentor Vincent Persichetti. The depiction of a late-career resurgence for Rothko brought back a hopeful, once again gospel-tinted ambience, but that quickly dissolved into an increasingly spacious, imploring and then utterly defeated series of motives. Small quoted Rothko beforehand as declaring that the only emotions worth depicting are doom and suffering, then made good on that statement.
The pianist picked up the pace after that with a series of ruggedly pastoral solo works by Hovhaness, illustrative of that composer’s fixation with mountains (he saw them as transitional from material to the spiritual, halfway between earth and sky). The Lullaby from the piano sonata Mt. Katahdin (a peak in Maine which barely qualifies as a mountain) took shape as a steady, morose dirge, contrasting with the tricky tempo and cruelly challenging staccato octaves of the Macedonian Mountain Dance, a Balkan boogie of sorts. Small made a different kind of challenge, the contrast between low-register, resonant malletwork inside the piano and the steady righthand melody, seem easy.
“Now for some rock n roll!“ Small grinned, winding up the program on a defiantly celebratory note with the Hymn to Mt. Chocorua., from Hovhaness’ 1982 sonata portraying the New Hampshire hill where the Indian warrior it’s named for reputedly lept to his death rather than surrendering to the bounty hunters who’d chased him to the summit. With its blend of traditional Armenian kef music and savage, Lisztian block chords, it was quite a change from the mystical, somber mood Small had brought to life so vividly earlier, an atmosphere he returned to with the encore, a tender, lushly spacious version of Arvo Part’s minimalist classic Fur Elina. Small’s spring tour featuring these works continues on April 11 at the Rothko Chapel in Houston.
An Auspicious Survey of the Ages by Pianist Mackenzie Melemed
It’s always a good sign when a pianist’s best-performed pieces onstage are by Chopin and Rachmaninoff. Last night at the sonically superb auditorium at Temple Emanu-El just off Central Park, Mackenzie Melemed played a diverse program spanning from baroque to modern and excelled at all of it. There are other good eighteen-year-old pianists out there; what distinguishes Melemed from his peers is how attuned he is to emotional content. That, and blazing technique.
Melemed bookended the highly ornamented animation of Bach’s Aria Variata alla Maniera Italiana, BWV 989 with opening and concluding statements that were downright elegaic. After making his way through the alternately elegant and torrentially waltzing initial movements of Beethoven’s Sonata in A Major, Op. 26, Melemed sensed the proto-Chopin in the murky third movement and brought that plaintive foreshadowing into the dirge. And he gave a saturnine, deeply felt reading to Brahms’ Four Piano Pieces, Op. 119. These are late works, in fact the last that the composer wrote for solo piano, a bittersweet over-the-shoulder narrative that finally reaches to a heroic overture, giving Melemed a chance to air out a blazing fortissimo. Obviously, there are dynamics in all but the Bach that suggest specific emotions. But Melemed clearly didn’t just have those works in his fingers (he played from memory); they were in his head.
A brisk, precise take of a Scarlatti sonata was the curtain-lifter. Melemed established a similar upward trajectory after the intermission with a matter-of-factly crescendoing and eventually wrenching, emphatic take on Liszt’s Funerailles, then four Rachmaninoff Etude-Tableaux. These little preludes are brief but extremely challenging: Melemed charged through diabolically difficult, lightning-fast chromatics, a vivid two-handed conversation or two, stygian spaciousness versus twilit glitter and seemed to be having a ball – you would too, if you had the technique to play them. He wound up the concert with similarly acrobatic romps through Avner Dorman’s recent, equally knotty, picturesque Three Etudes. Melemed speed-painted Sundrops Over Windy Water, let the spacious, jazz-tinged block chords of the Funeral March linger and concluded with Snakes and Ladders, a showstopper with its rumbling low lefthand, crazily dancing motives and machinegunning chromatics. Sensing that the need for more fireworks was in order, he encored with a magnificent, express-train coda, Chopin’s famous Winter Wind Etude, Op. 25, No. 11.
The Sunday concert series here features a lot of similar first-rate, up-and-coming talent. The next concert is January 19 at 3 PM with pianist Hannah Sun.
Three Intriguing New Releases Span the Decades
The intriguing, crisply performed new album, Airy: John McDonald Music for Violin and Piano is just out from Bridge Records with the composer at the keys along with Joanna Kurkowicz on violin. It’s a series of mainly short, wary, acerbic, sometimes atmospheric, sometimes incisive works written between 1985 and 2008. A handful of them are etudes. Minimalism is the usual but not always defining idiom here. Moments of virtual silence are pierced by anxiously leaping motives; subtle humor occasionally breaks the surface.
The duo open with a graceful, austere waltz interrupted by a fleeting. macabre piano cadenza. The second piece has calm violin contrasting with menacingly Schoenbergian piano, meant to evoke the nocturnal alienation of a Samuel Beckett poem. A Brief Pastiche of a Theme by Schoenberg is aggresively lively and rhythmic, punctuated by moments of stillness lit only by pianissimo overtones from the violin.
Four Single-Minded Miniatures range from tensely dancing, to bell-like and funereal, to a pillowy/jagged dichotomy and a bit of a fugal interlude between the two instruments. After a blip of a Mad Dance, there’s Lily Events – a Suite of Seven Little Studies, a wryly furtive, cinematic suite: they go slowly out into the water, pick the plants vigorously, wash the mud off and then retreat to a dry place. What anyone actually does with the lilies is unknown.
Kurkowicz negotiates the tricky tempos, understatedly edgy riffs and hypnotic ambience of McDonald’s Sonata for Solo Violin with a steady focus and deftly subtle variations in tone and dynamics. A Suite of Six Curt Pieces parses a Satie-esque creepiness more methodically than jarringly. which segues well into Lines After Keats. The album’s title track reverts to the occasionally turbulent juxtapositions of the opening piece.
Bridge Records, who put this one out, also has two very enjoyable, relatively new releases featuring the clarinet. The first is one of the label’s many archival rediscoveries, a reissue of the Stuyvesant Quartet‘s 1947 recording of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet with the crystalline-toned Alfred Gallodoro as soloist, in addition to two lively 1951 recordings of Mozart D major string quartets, K. 499 and 575, respectively. Active on and off from 1938 until 1965, the Stuyvesant Quartet was notable for being one of the first all-American string quartets (the old-world name is both completely honest and a bit disingenuous at the same time). The remastering – from pristine original vinyl – doesn’t lose the wonderful natural reverb of the church on the Westchester/Bronx border where the Mozart was recorded. It makes you wonder how many people might have seen a copy of the original Philharmonia record at a yard or library sale and passed up what’s probably now worth hundreds of dollars. And a somewhat more modern new release, the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra‘s recording of Carl Maria von Weber’s Clarinet Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 plus his Concerto for Clarinet conducted by Martin West, with Alexander Fiterstein as soloist, merges a velvety lushness with an agile, aptly dancing quality.
Haskell Small Delivers a Shattering Performance of Mompou’s Musica Callada
Federico Mompou’s Musica Callada, true to its name, is very quiet, but it’s murderously difficult to play. Not because it requires great technique, but because it calls for an extraordinary command of minutiae – the subtlest gesture on the part of a pianist brave enough to tackle it can make a mountain of difference. Friday night in the Lincoln Center neighborhood, Haskell Small went deep into the suite with a nuanced command and relentlessly intense commitment and turned in a performance that was often nothing short of harrowing.
Mompou wrote the series of twenty-eight more-or-less miniatures in four “books,” beginning in 1959 and concluding fifteen years later, when the composer was eighty-one years of age. Mompou’s obvious reference points are Satie’s Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes – but with more dynamic variations, and less of a lingering, macabre sensibility – and Messiaen at his most otherworldly and haunting. Small explained beforehand that Mompou described the suite as “airless,” but it’s less a study in stillness than in the anguish of wanting to break a spell. There’s also a prayerful aspect to this music, but in Small’s hands it was an imploring, get-me-out-of-here kind of anguish, similar to the quietest works of Jehain Alain.
Mompou’s father ran a bell foundry, which might be the original inspiration for the eerie, sustained close harmonies that define the work. Small approached them with a minutely varied rubato which mightily enhanced the suspense and element of the unexpected that pervades these pieces. He cautioned the audience to pay close attention to the occasional tortured explosions of sound, making them count far more loudly than he actually played them. As the bit of an opening overture quickly morphed into lento creepiness, Small built tension with a knife’s-edge intensity that never wavered. The alternately atmospheric and sudden, twisted motives of the middle series of pieces in the second book was a highlight, as was Small’s favorite of the entire suite, the next-to-last segment which in many ways sums up the entire work with its plaintive, acidic, bell-toned angst. It concluded at last with a hymn of sorts, but even that never quite let go of the pervasive longing. The crowd, silent throughout the performance, waited until it was certain there would be no more and then slowly began their standing ovation. Small is also a composer, and will play a follow-up to this concert featuring his own similarly-tinged works at Christ & St. Stephen’s Church on 69th St. between Central Park West and Columbus Ave. at 8 PM next March 28.
Daniela Liebman Makes a Stunning Debut with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony
The big story at the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony‘s performance at Carnegie Hall this past Sunday was pianist Daniela Liebman‘s debut. But the orchestra did their best to pre-empt that. They exploded with their introductory piece, Dvorak’s Carnival Overture, more curtain-burner than curtain-lifter. Maestro David Bernard conducted from memory, as he did with all but one of the works on the program. He’s a lot of fun to watch, a very kinetic presence, big smile stretched across his face, bouncing on the balls of his feet. The work has the same romping energy as the composer’s Slavonic Dances, but with considerably more dynamics, done plushly, with pinpoint precision and an unexpectedly delicate balance between the brass and strings for such a robust piece of music.
If the thought of an eleven-year-old tackling Shostakovich in front of a sold-out house makes you wince, you’re not alone. What’s the likelihood that a young middle-schooler, with her limited life experience, slight build and small hands, would have the stamina and technique, let alone the emotional depth, to deliver anything more than a rote version of the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 102? This isn’t Shostakovich the outraged witness; this is the 20th century’s greatest musical ironist at the peak of his sardonic, puckish, satirical power. Shostakovich wrote it in 1957 as a showcase for his pianist son Maxim, obviously something of a parody of the sturm und drang of the traditional High Romantic concerto form. But the simple fact that Daniela Liebman would choose this darkly amusing piece, with its seething anti-fascist subtext, over, say, something more straightforward by Beethoven or Brahms or Mozart, says a lot. And she seemed to intuitively grasp it, playing with a deadpan intensity and just the hint of a wink, whether adding a touch of evil when the dancing first movement morphed into a coldly marionettish mockery, or with a coolly singleminded focus as the piece playfully slid into 7/8 time in the final movement. Shostakovich himself had a hard time getting his own hands around several of the rising unison passages that occur about midway through, but Liebman pulled them off with aplomb. Depth is not a quality that only older people can access, and Liebman left no doubt that she is a deep soul. She also loves the spotlight, treating the crowd to rapidfire, triumphant solo versions of Vitaly Fillipenko’s cruelly difficult, staccato Toccata as well as a Chopin etude, earning more than one standing ovation in the process.
The closing work on the bill was Tschaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture, which Bernard and the ensemble immersed in a dreamy unease that never quite relented, an apt illustration of the doomed lovers, through long crescendos to a stormy dance, an absolutely lustrous brass interlude and a series of big Beethovenesque endings. This was a world-class, majestic performance.
The orchestra also played a steady, Teutonically matter-of-fact version of the Brahms Violin Concerto. Featured violinist Jourdan Urbach got an old-fashioned standing ovation after the first movement, but to be fair, the solos from the oboe and then Alix Raspe’s harp a bit later on were every bit as compelling. The Park Avenue Chamber Symphony’s next concert is February 22, 2014 at 8 PM at All Saints Church, 230 E 60th St (between 2nd and 3rd Aves) featuring Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2, Samuel Barber’s Knoxville Summer 1915 and Dvorak’s Dance Suite for Orchestra.
A Powerful, Purposeful New York Concert by Pianist George-Emmanuel Lazaridis
Monday night at Merkin Concert Hall, Greek pianist George-Emmanuel Lazaridis played a powerful, determinedly intuitive performance of Schubert and Liszt plus his own works, which were the most interesting and dynamic of all the pieces on the bill. Lazaridis showed off world-class technique but also world-class touch: the murmurs carried just as much weight as the crushing cadenzas.
He opened with Schubert’s “Wanderer” Sonata, which as he played it didn’t wander at all: this was an epic with a clear trajectory and denouement, through the cruelly difficult, machinegunning counterpoint of the big block chords on the opening allegro movement, a vividly cantabile take of the adagio and then a dazzling climb to the big, Beethovenesque payoff at the end. Lazaridis’ unwaveringly decisive central tempo and matter-of-factness gave him a strong central anchor for Schubert’s colorful digressions and ornamentation.
He closed the program with Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor, S. 178, which is sort of Liszt for people who don’t like Liszt. He began and eventually ended with an almost rubato approach to the composers’s lingering, minimalistically rapt themes, saving plenty of firepower for the characteristically Lisztian, wide-angle pyrotechnics. But the highlight of the bill was a trio of segments from Lazaridis’ own Trojan Cycle. The concert’s emcee explained beforehand that the suite is not meant to be a blow-by-blow portrayal of the Iliad but an exploration of its characters’ emotional currents, particularly their overwhelming sense of doom. This came immediately to the surface on the enigmatically brooding Achilles Mourning, where the warrior sees his own end and everyone else’s around him coming up over the horizon. Artfully blending twelve-tone acidity and moodily narrative neoromanticism, it set the stage for Andromache, which in many ways was a history of the piano beginning with Schumann, through Alban Berg and Schoenberg and then back in time again, a hauntingly surreal portrait lit up with all sorts of unexpected rhythmic and dynamic shifts. The final piece was the Battlefield Toccata, which segued aptly with the Liszt: it was the most cinematic, and explosive, of all Lazaridis’ original works on this bill and a tantalizing encouragement for the packed house to go looking for the rest of the suite. This concert was presented by the Hellenic-American Cultural Foundation; if the rest of their programming is like this, it’s worth seeking out.
Karine Poghosyan Illuminates Inner Journeys at St. Vartan’s
Last June, pianist Karine Poghosyan played an insightful, fascinating, emotionally gripping program of rarely-played works by her Armenian compatriot Aram Khachaturian at what’s become her more-or-less New York home base, the sonically superb St. Vartan’s Cathedral in Murray Hill. Poghosyan has such technical skill that the question of how she would tackle any program is reduced to that one word: how? She’s a passionate advocate of Khachaturian’s music, and shone just as much light this time out on a bill focusing on inner journeys and struggles from composers considerably better known here.
She played from memory, opening with a liquid, legato version of Liszt’s solo piano arrangement of Schubert’s Ave Maria. In her hands, it became a love song, a glimmering lullaby of sorts as she caressed its gently lingering tonalities. For the second piece, Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in D Major, she was joined by the sensationally precise, inspired ten-piece string ensemble the St. Vartan Chamber Orchestra (Annette Homann, Sabina Torosjan, Gabriel Giles, Muneyoshi Takahashi and Roan Ma on violins; Kristina Giles and Catherine Wynder on violas; Seulki Lee and Edward Kim on cellos and Bradley Lovelace on bass) for a kinetic, equally attuned performance. This interpretation of Bach didn’t necessarily swing but, wow, they made it dance. And early on it was a danse macabre, bristling with minor-key chromatics through the opening allegro and what became a matter-of-factly wrenching adagio that followed. And yet the ensemble seemed to be having a great time with it. Poghosyan isn’t the kind of pianist who keeps her cards close to her vest: throughout the triptych, there were what seemed dozens of “yessssss” moments flickering across her face and between the group members, which all paid off with the concluding allegro movement and its indomitable sense of triumph. That she’d put this piece at the center of the program speaks for how thoughtfully put together it was.
Poghosyan went back to contemplative mode for Liszt’s Spolizio, from his Years of Pilgrimage suite, following its winding but methodical trajectory from rapt to heroic, and back and forth: the push-pull of the dynamics became a cinematic song without words. She closed with Liszt’s “Dante Sonata,” and maybe surprisingly, maybe not so surprisingly, she eschewed the temptation to follow its demonic chromatics and crushingly difficult block chords into grand guignol. Instead, this journey through hell and heaven was a travelogue, Poghosyan sometimes seeming to prefer illuminating its more obscure spirals and vistas rather than the obvious themes. And this approach worked like a charm because it gave her what amounted to unlimited headroom when she finally dug in and roared through the coda. It’s rare to hear Liszt played with such sensitivity. These concerts at St. Vartans are not frequent, but when the church has them, they’re excellent. There’s an intriguing program on November 20 at 7:30 PM with violinist Nune Melikian and pianist Raisa Kargamonova playing works by Babadjanian, Khachaturian, Markov and Kreisler; there’s also an as-yet unnamed “superstar” organist playing the high-powered digital organ here on March 26 of next year at the same time.
Pianist Karine Poghosyan Plays a Rare, Stunning All-Khachaturian Program
At one point early on during her Manhattan concert last night at St. Vartan’s Cathedral, a grin suddenly lit up pianist Karine Poghosyan‘s face. What she didn’t realize was that she was telegraphing a punchline. Aram Khachaturian’s music is deep, and rich, and full of life, and sometimes humor as well. This particular jestful phrase, familiar as it is to the pianist, still obviously tickles her. It’s rare to see an all-Khachaturian program in this country, let alone one of Khachaturian piano music. On the 110th anniversary of the composer’s birth, it’s impossible to imagine that he ever might have wished for a more passionate or powerful advocate than the Yerevan-born, New York based Poghosyan.
Playing from memory, she inhabited the music in all its stormy, turbulent depths, shattering staccato and ravishing sensuality, bringing her own unselfconscious sense of fun. Poghosyan’s technique is world-class, matched by a sense of dynamics that served her magnificently during this hourlong roller coaster ride. There were points where her crushing lefthand threatened to dislodge the piano’s wheels. Yet during her own tender, lustrously nuanced arrangement of the Lullaby, from Gayaneh (the ballet whose final movement is the famous Sabre Dance), she wound it down with a pianissimo that was so gentle and yet unwavering that it was as if she had placed a mute inside on the strings. And for all the pyrotechnics and foreshadowing and inside-out knowledge of the music, Poghosyan’s personal style is disarmingly honest: the audience knows exactly how she is feeling, and sometimes where the music is about to go, from just a look at her face. Whatever the score called for, she was on a mission to bring it to life: the wry depiction of a stern parent telling a child to lie down and GO TO SLEEP early in the Lullaby; several instances of uh-oh-we’re-about-to-go-over-the-cliff; and the occasional triumphant “yesssss” moment after she’d tackled a particularly knotty, rapidfire passage and made it look easy.
She began with an arrangement of one of Khachaturian’s better-known works, the Adagio from Spartacus, another ballet. A High Romantic heroic theme in a series of disguises, it’s classic Khachaturian, lush with swells and ebbs, wistfulness and pathos juxtaposed against the composer’s signature, disquieting close harmonies. Poghosyan negotiated the machinegunning, insistent chords, gritty pedalpoint and and Stravinskian bluster of the Poem (a strikingly forward-looking if deliberately ostentatious work written when the composer was 24) and the considerably more lyrical Toccata from five years later. After the Lullaby, she launched into the piece de resistance, the 1961 Piano Sonata, which was a revelation: challenging as it may be, it’s hard to believe that such a powerful piece isn’t played in concert more often. Poghosyan brought out a lingering bittersweetness early on in the opening Allegro movement that recurred with a nocturnal gleam in the second and then disappeared in favor of the sabre-toothed, interlocking chordal fury of the concluding movement, where for once she gave not the slightest hint of how enigmatically or unexpectedly it would end. Maybe she was hoping it would never end and she would keep having fun – although by the time it did, she was out of breath.
The audience responded with two standing ovations, so she gave them her arrangement of the Waltz Masquerade, reinventing it as a more of a sweeping, nostalgic ballad than heroic overture. Poghosyan is back at St. Vartan’s (34th Street and Second Avenue) at 7:30 PM on September 25 on an orchestral bill featuring music of Bach and Liszt.
Lucid Culture 