I've been waiting for the past few years to listen to someone else perform Colin McPhee's Balinese Ceremonial Music for 2 pianos. I've personally gone all out to search, find and collect 4 recordings of the piece, one of which was a CD recording performed by the composer Colin McPhee himself together with his friend Benjamin Britten in 1941. The wait was finally over at last night's Piano Festival 2005. However, excitement turned to great disappointment in the following manner:
1. It was a Premiere for the piece to be played here in this country. What total, complete and utter rubbish! My 2 piano partner and I performed the piece at a University sponsored concert held in 1998 at the same venue using the same 2 pianos (both Steinways if I remember correctly) with our former President as the guest-of-honour. I guess being amateur pianists doesn't count when it comes to premiering completely new pieces for this country. This is so sad, it's almost pathetic!
2. The professional pianists, I shan't name them, it's obvious why, performed it without much research or coordinated effort going into playing the piece. It was ploughed through, with so much rubato and romantic forte that it would have made Horowitz weep and be completely mistaken for a Rachmaninoff piece!
3. The lack of power or rather the balance of power in terms of sound while performing the Balinese piece was confounding, as one of the pianist managed to bring out the ending notes of Ravel's Ma Mere l'Oye with so much power that it only could have been a backstage tonic drink that did the trick, Red Bull perhaps?
Balinese Gamelan music, (or BGM as tribute to the growing number of nonsensical acronyms here) has a greater metallic ring to it as compared to it's counterpart Javanese Gamelan music, (or JGM) which is mellow, sombre and has deep resonance. BGM is fast, joyful and celebratory, as compared to JGM, which is slow, relaxing and sometimes dreamy.
Colin McPhee's stay in Bali from 1934 onwards had him contributing to transcribing most, if not all of Bali's cultural music, including it's rhythms and intonations. He even managed to transcribe the notes from the individual gamelan instruments with the closest sound to the key played on the modern piano. These can all be read from his book Music In Bali, which is a fantastic publication on ethnomusicology.
When the Balinese Ceremonial Music piece is performed on the piano, little or hardly any graduations for loud and soft should be heard at all. It should be performed like you're playing it on one of the gamelan instruments, and struck with precision and equal weight like a percussion instrument. The ability to control the speed is very important in gamelan music. I'd have to have recorded the last few bars of the 2nd movement Gambangan for you to have sampled a taste of Romanticism in 20th century Balinese music. Tempo changes for the piece must be sudden and surprising, therefore, the speed for the 2nd movement should have been sustained till the very last note and stopped, not rubato-ed (if there's such a word) for the last 3 bars till the last note!
Finally, there are over 65 instruments in a gamelan [orchestra]. All of them are important and none of them should take importance over any of the others, in other words, there are no solo performances for any of the instruments. Similarly with the performance, piano 1 and 2 should have been so seamlessly integrated that the listener could not tell one from the other, an amalgam of sound if you wish, that would have been worthy of a performance. Anything less would have been just uncoordinated play of dissonance. Sad, considering the calibre of the 2 pianists performing last night, it could have been done right.
I welcome any comments, especially from those who attended last nights concert who agrees or disagrees with me.
Cheers.
Our critics are our friends, they show us our faults.
- Benjamin Franklin
1. It was a Premiere for the piece to be played here in this country. What total, complete and utter rubbish! My 2 piano partner and I performed the piece at a University sponsored concert held in 1998 at the same venue using the same 2 pianos (both Steinways if I remember correctly) with our former President as the guest-of-honour. I guess being amateur pianists doesn't count when it comes to premiering completely new pieces for this country. This is so sad, it's almost pathetic!
2. The professional pianists, I shan't name them, it's obvious why, performed it without much research or coordinated effort going into playing the piece. It was ploughed through, with so much rubato and romantic forte that it would have made Horowitz weep and be completely mistaken for a Rachmaninoff piece!
3. The lack of power or rather the balance of power in terms of sound while performing the Balinese piece was confounding, as one of the pianist managed to bring out the ending notes of Ravel's Ma Mere l'Oye with so much power that it only could have been a backstage tonic drink that did the trick, Red Bull perhaps?
Balinese Gamelan music, (or BGM as tribute to the growing number of nonsensical acronyms here) has a greater metallic ring to it as compared to it's counterpart Javanese Gamelan music, (or JGM) which is mellow, sombre and has deep resonance. BGM is fast, joyful and celebratory, as compared to JGM, which is slow, relaxing and sometimes dreamy.
Colin McPhee's stay in Bali from 1934 onwards had him contributing to transcribing most, if not all of Bali's cultural music, including it's rhythms and intonations. He even managed to transcribe the notes from the individual gamelan instruments with the closest sound to the key played on the modern piano. These can all be read from his book Music In Bali, which is a fantastic publication on ethnomusicology.
When the Balinese Ceremonial Music piece is performed on the piano, little or hardly any graduations for loud and soft should be heard at all. It should be performed like you're playing it on one of the gamelan instruments, and struck with precision and equal weight like a percussion instrument. The ability to control the speed is very important in gamelan music. I'd have to have recorded the last few bars of the 2nd movement Gambangan for you to have sampled a taste of Romanticism in 20th century Balinese music. Tempo changes for the piece must be sudden and surprising, therefore, the speed for the 2nd movement should have been sustained till the very last note and stopped, not rubato-ed (if there's such a word) for the last 3 bars till the last note!
Finally, there are over 65 instruments in a gamelan [orchestra]. All of them are important and none of them should take importance over any of the others, in other words, there are no solo performances for any of the instruments. Similarly with the performance, piano 1 and 2 should have been so seamlessly integrated that the listener could not tell one from the other, an amalgam of sound if you wish, that would have been worthy of a performance. Anything less would have been just uncoordinated play of dissonance. Sad, considering the calibre of the 2 pianists performing last night, it could have been done right.
I welcome any comments, especially from those who attended last nights concert who agrees or disagrees with me.
Cheers.
Our critics are our friends, they show us our faults.
- Benjamin Franklin
No comments:
Post a Comment