{"id":1734,"date":"2010-08-22T09:00:54","date_gmt":"2010-08-22T08:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/music-matters\/?p=1734"},"modified":"2010-08-21T22:32:00","modified_gmt":"2010-08-21T21:32:00","slug":"the-piano-illusion-two-prom-concerts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/music-matters\/2010\/08\/22\/the-piano-illusion-two-prom-concerts\/","title":{"rendered":"The Piano Illusion: two Prom concerts"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Piano\"
All keyed up<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The two Proms from Friday night<\/a> both employed the piano not as a percussion instrument, but as a weaver of illusions.<\/p>\n

In the first concert, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet gave a dazzling performance of Ravel\u2019s often brooding Piano Concerto for the Left Hand<\/em>, written between 1929-30, in which the piano part is so carefully constructed that, if you\u2019d missed the title of the piece, you could be forgiven for not realising it was written for a single hand. Rather like the single instrumental voice in Bach\u2019s solo partitas for cello and for violin, the single part executes both melody and accompaniment in a way which convinces the ear that there\u2019s another part also involved. Ravel built the piano part so carefully that, when an arrangement was made for both hands, it actually destroyed the careful balancing and textural placing that Ravel had so diligently organised.<\/p>\n

The second, late-night Prom saw a very different piano concerto, Morton Feldman\u2019s Piano and Orchestra<\/em> of 1975, in which the piano explores distilled vertical sonorities, often at times either blending into or emerging out of the accompanying orchestral texture. John Tilbury\u2019s delicately-balanced reading made the piano seem as though it were dripping dabs of colour into the surrounding air. Unlike the traditional concerto, which pitches the solo instrument against the orchestra and includes a solo cadenza to display the virtuosity of the instrument, here piano and orchestra are united in a sonic exploration, defeating time by eschewing the traditional three-movement structure and using instead a slow-moving, metre-less feel over a single movement. The sense of time pausing, of contemplative reflection and of the slow examination of ideas from\u00a0several perspectives\u00a0are concepts\u00a0another Frenchman would have recognised \u2013 Satie\u2019s Trois Gymnop\u00e9dies<\/em> achieve something similar in condensed form.<\/p>\n

Working towards the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Debussy talked of composing for the piano a \u2018music without hammers.\u2019 The piano is essentially a percussion instrument: rather than strings being bowed or plucked, they are struck with hammers, and you can\u2019t get more percussive than that. It was Debussy who began the idea of treating the piano contrary to its essentially percussive nature, and Feldman\u2019s piece stands in the tradition Debussy began nearly a century earlier.<\/p>\n

Two concerts, using the piano to weave two very different illusions: one to overcome the absence of a right-hand (I avoid the word \u2018missing,\u2019as the concerto certainly doesn\u2019t suffer from the absence of the upper hand), and one to pretend the piano isn\u2019t a piano at all. Would Debussy have approved of Ravel\u2019s piano concerto, had he lived to hear it ? I feel certain he would have approved of the Feldman.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

(You can hear the concerts for a week on-line on BBC iPlayer, and the concerts will be repeated on Radio 3 later next week).<\/span><\/p>\n