By Nick Ostrum
Minimalist solo piano can be a gamble. One cannot make up for weak or inexact vision through sheer density or volume. At the same time, uninspired detours are emphasized in their lonesomeness. Too much quiet or repetition can sound trite or just plain uninteresting. Techniques that can exercise incredible power in trios and quartets, moreover, can fall flat without accompaniment. (We won’t even broach the issues of the arbitrary tastes and wandering attentions of this listener.) A lot can go wrong, maybe even more than in most other settings. The composer and musician are certainly more exposed.
The first of four in a series dedicated to Smith’s solo compositions, The Plains consists of a single titular piece composed for and performed by the masterful Cheryl Duvall. The two - pianist and composer - have a close musical relationship. Smith had taught Duvall as an undergraduate. After graduating and presumably getting on her feet, Duvall started performing Smith’s work live and commissioning additional compositions. The familiarity shows. Duvall is confident and compassionate in her playing, and this style of music requires both. The Plains is alternately vast and precise, wandering (Smith’s well-chosen description) but forward-moving rather than meandering. At once the repeated chords imply suspension in an ocean (there’s that vastness) and an insistent trudging forward. Movements (such as the second) can be as wistfully airy as they are heart-wrenching. The Plains, however, never stays in the place, nor in the same motif, for too long, and more active passages open to more spacious ones, more repetitive passages to more hopeful melodic ones. Through it all persists a fascination with tension, slight variations on repeating phrases, slow and patient development, but also slight shifts of tone, pacing, and volume. Primed by an hour of this slow accumulation, the unsteady but defiant surge (relatively speaking) in the last few minutes is simply riveting.
The Plains is a solo piano record, but despite the constraints that might indicate, it is big in vision, in scale, in emotion. That is the strength of this corner of the contemporary classical sphere, and that is something that Smith and Duvall do better than most anyone else. Take the intimate, the small, the modest and reveal the universe, the variations and the granular details, inside of that.
The Plains is available as a CD and download on Bandcamp:
0 comments:
Post a Comment