Friday, November 7, 2008

Brothers Selling Dreams: Ax & Bronfman Piano Duo

Manny Ax & Yefim Bronfman
M   any years ago, my wife Joan Morris and I got to know the once-very-famous William Saroyan [Armenian-American writer and playwright]. Many people just ‘blank’ on Saroyan’s name today. We once took Saroyan to dinner in Paris. Afterwards, we went to a friend’s house where I played some of our recorded music for him. He listened respectfully. As he was leaving us he said, ‘Art is what is irresistible.’ I’m still chewing on that all these years later. I think it means that if something of mine isn’t irresistible, it won’t last because it won't be needed by us. Knowing that I can’t be around to see if my stuff lasts has given me such a huge sense of relief. No lobbying or politicking for my own work will make it any more or less irresistible. In the end, it’s the performers who decide what they want to perform, and in the long run they will play what they really want to hear.”
  —  William Bolcom, interview with Christopher Wright, 2005.
The Harriman-Jewell Series hosted pianists Emanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman in a brilliant duo recital last night in Kansas City.

  • Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Haydn
  • Bolcom: Recuerdos (Three Traditional Latin-American Dances) for Two Pianos
  • Mozart: Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448
  • Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances
The Bolcom piece was particularly interesting….


    [50-sec clip, Elizabeth & Marcel Bergmann, William Bolcom, ‘Recuerdos: III. Valse Venezolano - a la memoire de Ramón Delgado Palacios’, 1.6MB MP3]

Clearly, the ‘perform a duo together’ gig is a different dynamic than to play in larger ensembles and very different, too, than solo performance. The intimacy and the intensity of the shared goals in ‘duo’ are exceedingly great. The project is infused with the historically-situated political pre-suppositions of both of the duo members, including the aim together to embody something true and enduring and universal and memorable. The dynamic of the exchanges between Ax and Bronfman was fascinating—in a word, ‘brotherly’.

And the Bolcom piece was a perfect vehicle for displaying their brotherly wit and ‘Oh, yeah? Well, how about this?!’ irony. The third movement (MP3 clip above) is an especially appealing tale, I would say—‘recalled’ ... Los ‘recuerdos’ fueron recordadas por Manny de forma diferente que Fima ... in progressively escalating, boastful paragraphs by two young boys, each of whom hopes you will deem his ‘version’ of the story to be the better, more amusing one. Classic Bolcom tonality and punchy, confabulating rhythms, in the service of tag-team storytelling. Bolcom’s chordal orientation and boy-like ‘neo-tonal vs. post-tonal’ mocking of both tonal and atonal devices. All of that! In that regard, Jonathan Bernard has observed [not about Bolcom or this piece, but broadly speaking] that “the so-called ‘return to harmony’ or even ‘return to tonality,’ much remarked upon by critics, is really an appropriation of harmony for purposes that are essentially new and not so well understood. To assume that composers, by retrieving such familiar sonorities as triads and major-minor seventh chords, have also taken on, whether intending to or not, the ‘hierarchical’ nature of common-practice tonality (if not its specific structures) may be assuming far too much.”

Bernard’s distinction between what he calls the third and fourth “Stages” in “the story of what happened after [the] initial establishment of minimalism” makes the point clear. In ‘Stage 3’, “pieces began sounding more explicitly ‘harmonic’, that is, chordally oriented, though not, at this point, necessarily ‘tonal’ in any sense.” In ‘Stage 4’, “harmony of an ever more tonal (or neo-tonal, or quasi-tonal) aspect assumed primary control, leaving minimalist devices pushed into the background, where they became stylistic objects” [see the Bernard link below, p. 114].

It was also Bernard who about 10 years ago came up with a useful gambit for analyzing compositions: compare a minimalist piece of music with examples of minimalism in the fine arts, where discussion is, as Bernard puts it, “less bound-up with exactitudes… Regions that alternate regularly between relative sparseness and relative density, very much like the alternating stretches of rhythmic synchrony and rhythmically out-of-phase transition...” In other words, very much like the features of these ‘Recuerdos’ by Bolcom [even though they are by no means ‘minimalist’ and are maybe beyond ‘post-minimalist’ even, heh!].

How does it help understand Bolcom’s music better—to know that it resembles a painting as Bernard is fond of suggesting—or, in my case, to know that it has certain features that are like the dynamic between two competitive 10-year-old brothers, each trying to tell the more successful, irresistible version of a story—[or to know that it is mathematically measurable, and has a distinct rhythmic density or a time-varying power-spectrum or (as in the previous CMT post on Gubaidulina) a Shannon entropy that varies over time]? Do analyses like these—both the ones without any discernible exactitude, plus the ones with some intermediate [e.g., literary-theory] level of exactitude, and the ones with precise mathematical exactitude—help?

W ell, the art comparisons are evocative enough. Lots and lots of people have been to enough art museums to have the contextual knowledge so that comparing a piece of well-known art to a piece of music can be broadly accessible and understandable and helpful. And literary comparisons are also pretty accessible and evocative in stimulating critical discussion among people. The only question, I guess, is how helpful mathematics can be, given the current state of ‘numeracy’ around the world. Can the mathematical features in a piece for two pianos help the performers play it or the listeners listen to it more insightfully and profitably? I firmly believe the answer is ‘Yes.’ You just have to have a decent level of ‘numeracy’, and you have to be in the mood for it. Based on several emails I’ve received on the maths in some of the CMT posts, it looks like the math music geeks are an underserved market in music criticism and music journalism. Maybe in a future CMT post, I will look at the math of Bolcom compositions...

At any rate, with Ax and Bronfman in-charge, we find ourselves in the mood to buy any dream they want to sell us, consider any fabulous tale they want to recount for us, see any neo-tonal/post-everything art they want to show us ... go anywhere acoustically and expressively they want to take us. They make us this irresistible offer that’s ‘aspirational’—and it invariably embodies things that we aspire to have, to be, to do, to experience, to feel. Attractive in the extreme. An irresistible offer—one that has a return-on-investment (ROI) that’s big and immediately recognizable and believable. ‘Irresistible’ in that it is not a one-time ‘special offer’—it offers assurances of dependability and reliable ongoing presence—it’s safe to depend on it being there. It is not compulsive, ‘over-the-top’ novelty—it is comfortable, credible. As an ‘investment’ it has a beta that is not too high, with liquidity and financial ratios that denote tolerable risk.

In short, at the Ax-Bronfman recital last night I was (we were) ‘sold’. Their brotherly sales pitch was irresistible. And as I reflect on the Bolcom quote at the top, I think it was nice, too, that these pieces—and the colors and ideas that they contain—are what Fima and Manny like to perform together. Their choice of these pieces says a great deal about their affection for each other, and about their optimism and enduring/endearing enthusiasm for life.




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