This single track piece might be a piano concerto, or maybe it's apiece of chamber music with piano at its center, but to posit that what the other musicians accomplish is some sort of backdrop does their music injustice. Possibly, the piano is not at the center at all, and only its ready identification makes this February 2013 live performance seem piano-centric. Doubtless, these concerns were far from the minds of violist Johnny Chang, violinist Angharad Davies, pianist John Tilbury, electronicists Phil Durrant and Jamie Drouin, and Lee Patterson on amplified objects. According to the label website, the sextet was developing material they'd presented in the concert's first half, but the whole achieved is, to invoke the well-worn adage, greater than the sum of the parts.
John Tilbury's meditative, lush and usually spare pianism is just wonderful to hear, in any context, but somehow, it works doubly well in this instance. It's almost as if the other five players amplify and augment what he does, Davies picking up on a particular decaying partial, Chang sustaining a tone from a lower register, or one of the electronic wizards propelling a sumptuous low note onward. Listen to Tilbury's fifths at around 16:18, where the group seems to be playing related overtones, as Dieter Schnebel pulls associated frequencies out of Schubert piano sonatas for his own innovative rearrangements.
Yet, it would be untrue to imply that all was static. In fact, quite a lot of this music has a subtle rhythmic drive to it, as if many machines of varying sizes and functions were being set in motion throughout. One of these confluences occurs at around 18 minutes, and the varying speeds and rhythmic decays begin to be dispelled only after a few tones inside the piano some four minutes later. Unlike, for example, Stockhausen's "Telemusik," these decays don't seem to portend harm. Whatever occurs in the rhythmic sphere, there is a sense of unwavering light as the music progresses. As the dynamic swells toward the conclusion, the convergence of timbres is downright otherworldly, and it is no surprise that label frontman Reynell decided to release it all; we're the beneficiaries.
Comments and Feedback:
|
