PianoLab

The Lab, Light Square, Adelaide
Thu 17–Sun 20 Nov

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

I was in Adelaide last weekend with my friend and colleague Humphrey Bower for PianoLab, a micro-festival devoted to the art of the piano, which was hosted at The Lab, a venue on Light Square that incorporates LED screens across three walls.

 

The festival was curated by pianist, writer and director of the Elder Conservatorium of Music, Anna Goldsworthy, and featured an eclectic mix of performers and genres, including local music students, scholar-musicians, interstate and international pianists playing repertoire ranging from Mozart to jazz, improvisation and other contemporary idioms. The performances also varied in terms of how they used the LED screens (with visual content provided by resident Lab technicians Allen Macintosh and Frazer ‘the Wizard’ Dempsey). 

 

The first recital I attended at midday on Friday was The (Absolutely) Final Meeting of the Satie Society by composer, performer, writer, critic and Head of Sonic Arts at the Elder Conservatorium, Stephen Whittington. This charmingly illustrated lecture-performance featured pieces by Satie juxtaposed with projections of artworks by his contemporaries the painter Henri Rousseau and the photographer Eugène Atget, as well as related musical items by Mompou, Duchamp, Cage, and living composers Philip Corner, David Kotlowy, Howard Skempton and Whittington himself. The latter delivered unassuming, matter-of-fact, no-nonsense and perfectly judged renditions of the works in question interspersed with similarly deadpan verbal commentaries. My favourite items included some rarely heard pieces from Satie’s ‘Rosecrucian’ period juxtaposed with an equally haunting series of Atget photographs of a vanishing pre-World War I Paris; Whittington’s Custom-Made Waltzes written in homage to Satie and Rousseau and accompanied by vivid projections of Rousseau paintings including The Snake Charmer, The Country Wedding and The Sleeping Gypsy; Mompou’s evocative Jeux d’enfants accompanied by Rousseau’s strangely adult-dwarf-like portraits of children; Duchamp’s Erratum Musical and Cage’s similarly aleatory One accompanied by photos of Duchamp playing musical chess with Cage or smoking a cigar in front of his readymade urinal masterpiece Fountain; more Rousseau paintings featuring out-of-proportion and anthropomorphic dogs and cats accompanied by Satie’s equally bizarre Preludes flasques pour un chien (‘Limp Preludes for a Dog’) and David Kotlowy’s Well-Fed Preludes for a Cat; and Satie’s cartoon-like sketch of himself accompanied by the uncharacteristically maximalist mockery of his Embryons déssechés (‘Dessicated Embryos’). All in all it was an illuminating musical and visual tour of a vintage and variety of French modernism (and its Anglophone aftermath) characterised by calculated naiveté, subversive wit and (in the case of Satie, Rousseau and Atget) a deep vein of melancholy. 

 

That evening at 6pm I was present for Nocturne, a recital by Anna Goldsworthy and Humphrey Bower of Chopin piano works and excerpts from George Sand’s novel Lucrezia Floriani accompanied by a montage of images from Delacroix’s double portrait of Chopin and Sand. This hybrid multimedia performance was inspired by the artist’s account in his letters of a reading by Sand of the novel-in-progress in the presence of Chopin and Delacroix during which the latter recognised that the novel’s protagonists were based on the composer-musician and his cross-dressing novelist-lover. Herself dressed in a man’s suit, Goldsworthy gave sumptuous renditions of Chopin Nocturnes and Preludes as well as a playfully extemporized Barcarolle, while Bower in a woman’s dress read excerpts from the novel from his iPad. This took things to a level of auto-fictive perversity that even Sand would have baulked at (as perhaps dear reader you do too).

 

Things got progressively queerer and more hybrid later that evening with Pieces for Piano and Body, a recital by pianist and performance-maker Dan Thorpe of contemporary works by women, trans and non-binary composers that involved a more visceral interaction between performer and instrument as well as a more interactive relationship between musical score and onscreen content. NYC-based inti figgis-vizueta’s A Bridge Between Starshine and Clay saw a progression of ascending or expanding and descending or contracting notes/intervals/chords simultaneously translated onscreen into an ever-shifting rainbow of rising, falling and overlapping bands of colour. The graphic-notated scores of British composer Sarah Westwood’s more introspective Of Minerals and Ventricles and Melbourne-based Cat Hope’s brutal Chunk were even more directly represented onscreen by abstract ideogram-like figures from Westwood’s score and a computer-program-generated real-time visual mapping and rendition of Hope’s that looked like a jagged abstract 3D landscape being flown over at high speed. West Australian vocalist/writer Sage Harlow’s Other(ing) was accompanied by a pre-recorded video of the pianist’s hands spanning intervals on a keyboard (as a teenage virtuoso Thorpe like Schumann and Scriabin suffered a self-inflicted hand-injury). Finally Philadelphia-based Sam Erin Erulis’s DIAPHRAGM involved live-feed video coverage from iPhones hastily hand-rigged by Thorpe onstage as well as pre-focused cameras on tripods while the pianist grappled with a score to be ‘played’ while making as little sound as possible, as explained in a short instructional video by the composer that preceded the work. These pieces demanded more and more from Thorpe physically and cognitively; as well as imaginatively and emotionally from those of us who rose to the challenge.

 

The next day I returned to The Lab at 3pm for Dance to the Music, an engaging recital by Melbourne-based pianist, teacher and Associate Professor at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Stephen McIntyre. The program focussed on works associated with nature and dance, featuring alternately robust and tender accounts of Schumann’s Waldszenen (‘Forest Scenes’), scintillating renditions of three waltzes and a polonaise by Chopin, two sultry Brazilian Tangos by Ernesto Nazareth, and a climactic version for solo piano of Ravel’s La Valse which was even more delirious than the orchestral version. The onscreen visuals were more modest than on the previous day, displaying a slide show of digitally rendered artworks featuring picturesque forests, hunting scenes, haunted ruins, dancing and ballrooms. 

 

This was followed at 6pm by Scriabin: Transformation, a chronological survey of the composer’s oeuvre from the early Piano Sonata No. 1 Op.6 to the later Sonata No. 10 op.70 by Adelaide-based Russian pianist and Lecturer in Piano at the Elder Conservatorium Konstantin Shamray, who played entirely from memory and riveted us with his technique and sensitivity as well as delighting us with his humble and almost childlike onstage persona. Lighting by resident Lab technician Oscar Lewis was focused on Shamray’s hands, his long fingers probing and dancing across the keyboard to coax a seemingly endless variety of colours from every note. Background visuals reflected Scriabin’s own interest in synaesthesia and use of stage lighting for his own concert performances. Here the Romantic Chopin-inspired 1^stSonata was illustrated by more figurative digital effects resembling demonic faces, while the later Symbolist and Schoenbergian-sounding works were accompanied by more abstract visual patterns.

 

Finally on Sunday I returned to the Lab for a closing recital by Finnish virtuoso Paavali Jumppanen featuring Mozart’s early Sonata in F Major K.280 followed by Beethoven’s late ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata Op.106. In terms of onscreen content this was relatively conventional, with digitally rendered marble busts of Mozart and Beethoven appearing against backgrounds respectively showing a Viennese concert hall and a stormy landscape. Musically I found the Mozart a little hard-driven, but Jumppanen came into his own with the ‘Hammerklavier’, especially in the final movement with its titanic triple fugue and sense of architectural and tonal disintegration, which eclipsed anything in Dan Thorpe’s recital in terms of the physical and intellectual demands it makes on the performer and the listener. No wonder (as I learned from Jumppanen at the start of the concert) the first documented performance of the work was by Liszt in 1836, almost a decade after Beethoven’s death.  

 

Overall, I was captivated by the format of such a wide-ranging festival devoted entirely to a single instrument (in this case literally a single Steinway), and by the intimate ambience of The Lab itself. As for the use of the LED screens: I’m full of admiration for the Lab technical team and especially the work of Frazer Dempsey; and was intrigued if not always convinced by the content and role of the screens from one recital to the next. The images had a tendency to dominate the music and delimit its meaning, and sometimes I found myself watching a movie and listening to a soundtrack, or alternatively closing my eyes. The happy exceptions were when music and image were in a dialogue of equals, whether in mutual agreement, ironic counterpoint or even outright conflict. On these occasions both became part of a larger and more complex work. It will be interesting to see how the festival and the venue develop in future – and indeed what the future holds for concerts and recitals in general, multimedia or otherwise.

 

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PianoLab was at The Lab, Light Square, Adelaide, from 17–19 November. 

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen) in the late 1970s. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the paraphenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Paraphänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s student and literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the election of the far-right coalition federal government. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.