Cornish College here in Seattle was able to bring us a program of the music of Cornish favorite son, John Cage, and others, in PONCHO Concert Hall last night. The extraordinary Margret Leng Tan was the lone performer of the evening. Tan is an accomplished (the program notes bill her as the ‘foremost’) interpreter of Cage’s early prepared piano music and now specializes in the small but interesting repertoire for toy piano; Cage’s ‘Suite for Toy Piano’ was the main musical prize of the evening.
The performance began with a very short film called WORXOK by someone simply named Trimpin, with the bell-like sounds of toy piano for accompaniment. Someone appeared to hold some kind of screen in front of the projector lens to create a diffuse visual effect. Shots passed of dogs, and of old women grooming themselves. The effect was somewhat mystifying, though the music was pleasant.
After the film, Tan took the stage, clad in an aqua, Chinese-cut blouse, and played Cage’s 1940 ‘Bacchanale’ for prepared piano–famed as the first such work, and first performed right there in PONCHO Hall as accompaniment to a Syvilla Fort dance number. Tan, here on spiritual home turf, played with the casual ease of a student alone in a practice room.
As with much early Cage, the piece substitutes for a lack of harmonic interest with drum pattern-like ostinati. The effect is successful in general, though the preparation of the piano necessarily reduces, quite substantially, the dynamic range of the instrument, and thus makes more difficult the task of producing a convincing climax–a noticeable failure in the ‘Bacchanale’ through no fault of its interpreter. Yet compared to Cage’s later, far more ‘avant’ works, it is the early prepared piano pieces that are aging best, and for which he will likely be remembered longest.
Tan plays in what I call the Juilliard style of modern pianism–something difficult to define, but characterized by a too-dry, too-articulated, too emphasized approach to the playing of runs and other fast figurations; something mechanical, and a tendency to atomize long musical phrases into short, three or four-note units. It is, of course, not limited to alumnus of that school, but I have come to associate it with Juilliard. In Tan’s case, it may come from all the practice on the toy piano, which requires a very deliberate touch. Her ear for sonority, however, is wonderful. She was perfectly made to play the music of such composers as Cage and Crumb, who specialize in timbral subtlety.
The Suite for Toy Piano, in five short movements–a centerpiece of Tan’s repertoire–was great fun. One movement employs an idea in which each hand plays a mirror image of the other; a final movement gives the audience one of the only conventionally tuneful moments in Cage’s entire oeuvre.
Of the remaining works, all receiving their Seattle premiers, first was a Toby Twinning arrangement for toy piano of the Beatles tune Eleanor Rigby. The arrangement is heavy-handed for the tiny piano–with the loud noise of its action and the complexity of its metallic sound, the spare textures of the Cage come off, where the Romantic density of the Twinning work approaches undifferentiated noise. This noise and the dynamic limits of the instrument remind one of harpsichord, and one thinks that the solution of the Renaissance composers–counterpoint, rather than harmonic interest and density–might serve the instrument better.
Next was ‘Chooks’ from ‘Old McDonald’s Yellow Submarine’ by Erik Griswold. The short, fun piece uses fast, open chords on the toy piano alternating with quick hits to the woodblocks; simple and crowd-pleasing. Next a tarantella: ‘Mirabella’ by Stephen Montague. Again, the work is too densely chordal to sound on the noisy instrument. The harmonies are Italio-Spanish modal standard. The piece is essentially a showpiece and as such has some nice moments, the final bars particularly.
Last we hear Twinning’s 1995 ‘Satie Blues’ for piano and toy piano, played by one performer, one hand on each instrument. The work is a melancholy meditation with toy piano generally taking the lead, and ‘adult’ piano (as Ms. Tan calls it) in accompaniment. Mr. Twinning seems to be a composer somewhat in the modern Hollywood mold. Mild triadic modal harmonies succeed one another under pleasantly evocative tunes. Less successful, though, was his attempt to use tremolo passages on the toy piano as transitional material, which gave a jarringly clangorous effect. The work was perhaps the most conventionally pleasing work of the evening, though a bit of a downer to end on.
After Tan’s show we watched Evans Chan’s documentary, ‘Sorceress of the New Piano: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan’–an occasionally interesting two-hour commercial for the performer. But if that’s what it takes to bring such artists here from New York to play such interesting repertoire, then I for one am willing to sit through the commercial. The Seattle Weekly ran a kind of running gag throughout its classical event listings this week about the presence of Mozart on nearly all the programs. A sadly valid observation, but one not applicable to this event–consisting as it did of only one dead composer, who died less than fifteen years ago, and the rest still alive and kicking. So general kudos to Cornish and to Margaret Tan.
Evans Winner
Seattle Washington
January, 2006