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Grand Statements, Intimate Forces: the Return of Live Concerts

Writer's picture: Larry WallachLarry Wallach
Two concerts at PS 21, Chatham NY
Miranda Cuckson, solo violin, August 28, 2020
Conrad Tao, solo piano, September 4, 2020
Miranda Cuckson
Miranda Cuckson and Conrad Tao held the stage at PS 21 on two successive Friday nights as part of a series of (mostly) contemporary music concerts at the open-air stage in Chatham NY, on August 28 and September 4. Both performers captivated their audiences with superb focus and transcendent technique, conveying a fierce commitment to contemporary repertory that gained force by virtue of the context of the pandemic. Played to masked listeners seated in a distanced pattern, the intense performances knitted musician, audience, and composers together into a powerful matrix of expressive power and imaginative adventure.

Cuckson’s program (Friday, August 28) meaningfully juxtaposed J. S. Bach’s Sonata no. 2 for solo violin with works by Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, and Mario Davidovsky. The gap of 250 plus years between the Bach and its companions seemed irrelevant, owing to Bach’s concentration of materials in space and their extension in time, both of which felt contemporary in the context of the music of his later colleagues, who almost seemed to have consciously chosen to respond to the challenges he set forth (and very probably did: anyone composing for solo violin cannot avoid a background awareness of Bach’s examples). Especially in the extended fugue which concludes the work, Bach and Cuckson were intent on going far beyond any expectations based the trajectory of the initially stated material. Indeed, transcending expectations could be taken as a theme for both concerts.

Alone among the contemporaries, Carter’s tribute to Aaron Copland seemed
epigrammatic and understated both in gesture and structure, seeming to be over almost
before it began. Atypically for Carter, the gestural dialogue felt restrained, perhaps
reflecting Carter’s estimate of Copland’s balanced temperament, inherited from their
common mentor Nadia Boulanger. A sense of restraint was felt in a different way in
Boulez’s Anthème I; while we expect stylistic challenges and adventures from this enfant
terrible of modernity, what we got seemed surprisingly retrospective, while in no way
failing to display the freedom of imagination and resourcefulness of technique
characteristic of the composer. Two elements made for surprising familiarity: a central
pitch, D, and a recursive structure clearly related to the rondo. In Boulez’s later manner,
and in contrast to the spikey pointillism of works such as ‘le marteau sans maître,’
Anthème I flowed in decorative figures and flourishes, almost like the foliage in a
Watteau painting but full of subtle dramatic surprises. Cuckson’s elegant bow arm was
called upon to render a spectrum of encounters between horsehair and strings, from
fluid melismatic writing to spiccato and cross-string techniques, all connected by a
graceful and subtle forward lyrical pressure. This was Boulez as a light-fingered
magician, pulling elegant rabbits out of his beret.

The capstone of the program, wisely repositioned to conclude it, was Davidovsky’s
Synchronism no. 9, a work that has become a modern classic and challenge for up and
coming violinists with which to prove their chops. I heard and reviewed Curtis
Macomber’s masterful rendition at the Bard Copland Festival in 2004 (Davidovsky had
studied with Copland at Tanglewood); at that time Macomber had walked on-stage, and
began playing into the empty spaces of Sosnoff Auditorium which transitioned from
resonating the acoustic sound waves of the beginning to offering electronically
enhanced resonance and then on to spatial expansion and lively dialogue with the
human performer. The impact was stunningly dramatic.

At PS 21, the acoustics of the open-sided shed along with Cuckson’s more subtle (or less
muscular) approach provided a different experience, as if the violin were the living
concertmaster of an electronic ensemble, one voice out of many in Davidovsky’s
interplanetary chamber ensemble. The overall effect was no less thrilling, nor did it
evince any less mastery of the instrument and the formidable performing challenges of
fitting together with the electronic track, both in its demands on intonation (the violin
has to adjust to the equal-tempered tuning of the synthesized pitches) and timing (the
solo violin sections that are constructed to sound improvisatory have to fit into narrowly
defined time-frames). Cuckson was able to fit seamlessly into the demands of the
electronics while sounding like she was in complete command of them. In a work that
one might imagine being similar from one performance to another, Cuckson was able to
shed significantly new light. The bookends of Bach and Davidovsky threw into relief the
contrasting roles of the violin: from multiple voices concentrated within the instrument
to an instrumental voice stimulating a multitude of external, responsive voices.

Conrad Tao
Conrad Tao’s program consisted of one programmed work and one encore. Each
carried forward the theme of ‘out of the one, many.’ Tao is one of the contemporary
masters of that massive modern piano classic, Frederic Rzewski’s 1975 “Thirty-six
Variations on ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated,’”1 the Chilean protest song
that has been taken up by political demonstrations around the world. (It has been
recorded by twelve different pianists including the composer.) This work has been
compared to Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” owing to its sprawling structure which follows a rigorous formal pattern. In Bach’s cases, it is ten groups of three variations each, beginning and ending with the ‘theme’ (Aria). For Rzewski, it is six groups of six variations, also framed by the theme. Each work constitutes a kind of technical-stylistic encyclopedia of musical forms and languages. For Rzewski, the obviously tonal theme (D minor) is subject to an almost unlimited number of processes that transform it, including both tonal and atonal ones, that echo many of the developments in piano music of the 20th century; along with Bach and Beethoven, the names of Charles Ives and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen come readily to mind. To elements of extended techniques
 
1 "¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!"
 
(such as whistling and banging on the piano lid) Tao adds improvisation to his
performance, thereby evoking both Henry Cowell and John Cage. Overall, Tao
approaches this work not only with his characteristic transcendent technique, but also
with the fertile and active imagination of a composer; he has embraced this work as his
own. (Early in the pandemic, Tao broadcast a performance of this work from his
apartment on Zoom; unfortunately it was cut short by a technical glitch.)

The expressive profile projected was not only a musical tour-de-force, but (presumably
true to the composer’s intention) a powerful expression of protest, originally against
Pinochet’s repressive dictatorship, but with multiple resonances in this era of divisive
politics, institutional decline, Black Lives Matters, and COVID-19. Tao’s rendition of this
potentially bleak scenario is leavened by the vitality and creativity of his performance,
protest rendered transcendent by a vision of unlimited possibility and potential, a vision
of human multiplicity as a rowdy, sometimes cacophonous, but ultimately harmonious
set of shared ideals.

Tao concluded with his own arrangement of an arrangement: Gyorgy Kurtag’s version
of the opening Sinfonia from Bach’s Cantata 106, “Actus Tragicus,” also known as
“Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit,” an early funeral cantata scored originally for
recorders, viols, bass and organ. Kurtag had arranged it for his two-piano team of
himself and his wife, and Tao boiled it down to a single piano, although it sounded as if
he were playing all the parts originally assigned to four hands. This piece shows Bach at
his most gorgeously lyrical, performing a solemn but emotional ritual with poise and
deliberation. After the bedazzlement of Rzewski, it came as an “Amen” of quiet
reflection that sent us into a night-time of stars and cricket-song. Tao’s performance
was in enough demand that additional performances had to be scheduled; Zoom is
great, but it is no substitute for actually being there.

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© 2024 by Larry Wallach.

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