simple songs and wild variations
by Douglas Messerli
Vicki Ray (piano), Rivers of Time, with Carole Kim (visuals) / Los Angeles, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts
Theater), the performance I attended was on January 16, 2019
Last night’s piano concert by Vicki Ray, quite
simply, was one of the best concerts of contemporary piano music I have ever
attended.
Ray, whose performances I have always admired, was at her very best,
particularly in the first piece of the evening, “Sometimes I Feel Like My Time
Ain’t Long” by Los Angeles composer Ben Phelps. The composer begins his work
with a song sung with piano accompaniment from a wax cylinder recording that is
part of the Library of Congress’ Alan Lomax Collection, a song recorded by
Lomax in a Clemson, South Carolina house sung by Brady Walker, William Grant,
Mary Lee, Thomas Trimmer, and Phil Butler. The simple gospel piece crackles and
wavers in its tones on the recording, and Phelps uses those elements in his
eight variations on that original tune to create an outstanding exploration of
tonal variation.
Gradually, as the work moves forward, the very complexities of this
seemingly simple tune grow into more and more complex arpeggios, as we begin to
realize through the piano’s variations of pitch that time is both limited and
complex: what seems like the momentary becomes suspended in space, and the long
musical intervals appear to be far-too-brief passages. It is a work that forces
one to consider even the nature of music itself, as you settle in to the various
variations of the tune. I could almost have listened to this dialogue between
the original 1939 recording and the experimental “takes” on it for an entire
evening. And I think the audience was stunned into silence when the work
finally came to a close, since it might have almost spun out into an entire
symphony for piano only. For me it was truly awe-inspiring, and I could not
imagine how the concert might even continue after the intermission.
During the break I turned to my seated neighbors, who with my questions,
reported that they’d traveled through the rainy night the long way from
Ventura, having even become lost on their trip. Fred and Carolyn (I never got
their last name) were friends, evidently, of the second composer, Daniel Lentz,
who now lives in Santa Barbara, and to whom the couple introduced me after the
performance.
Lentz’s work, “River of 1,000 Streams,” which presumably involved
electronic intervention, was a bit like a contemporary version of the cascading
refrains of Smetana’s The Moldau, but
without that earlier work’s sentimentality. Here the repeating refrains were
overlaid by the layers of electronic tremolos in a way that did not so much
imitate the water’s flow as it moved through the countryside, but, through
Ray’s virtuosic playing resonated throughout the Redcat theater, almost
matching the rare Los Angeles downpour outside.
If
the earlier piece was a kind of echo and variation, this work, although I might
argue it is somewhat similar in structure, builds its chords from the bass to
the high soprano keys of the piano, roiling up another kind of “stream” from
the bowels of the instrument into its final piercingly high screams. Once
again, Ray was a significant on-stage force, someone from whom hardly anyone
might wish to remove their eyes.
Of
less interest, accordingly, were Carole Kim’s visual contributions—a screen
behind the piano and a kind of multi-colored wall to the left of the piano, at
the right side of the stage to the audience. Kim’s black-and-white and
sometimes colored prism-like images combining crystalline-like structures with
undulating amoebic-like figures were quite often fascinating, but seemed, at
least to me, to have little relationship to the compositions.
Spotting Ray’s companion, Tom Frick, in the lobby, I greeted him and was
delighted to be introduced to the pianist’s justifiably proud mother.
Los Angeles, January 17, 2019
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2019).
No comments:
Post a Comment