Tuesday, 24 March



Passing around a hat full of little slips of paper bearing the names of various contemporary composers, pianist Jenny Q Chai had her audience determine the order of pieces for her concert at The Stone on Tuesday night.  Works by eleven composers (three of whom were in attendance) comprised the program, and the music ranged from pointillistic sparsity to full and raging clusters.  Highlights included:

"Intimate Rejection" by Ashley Fu-Tsun Wang; after reaching inside to pluck some lower strings, Chai moved to the keyboard, as two differing thoughts occurred simultaneously, at times seeming to intertwine, at others seemingly unaware of each other.

"Kreutzer Sonata" by Frederic Rzewski; Chai spoke into a microphone an excerpt from Tolstoy's novella Kreuzter Sonata (the inner monologue of a man as he kills his wife) while simultaneously playing a frenetic piano part that acted as a sort of accompaniment to the thoughts of the "protagonist."  Chai's performance was both chilling and humorous.

"Brooklyn - Oct. 5. 1941" by Annie Gosfield; Chai removed the piano's music stand for this piece, so as to be able to reach inside and swipe/hit the strings with a baseball when the score called for it.  The loud, raucous music and Chai's powerful playing permeated the entire shaking instrument with clusters of sound in compelling, visceral rhythms, particularly when Chai donned a pink baseball glove on her left hand to strike the low end of the keyboard.

"I decided to send you home to a nice sleep" was Chai's preface to her first of two encores, Robert Schumann's "A Child Falling Asleep."  Her second encore was Debussy's "Etude for Eight Fingers" (no thumbs allowed!), through which she shredded mightily.

For those interested, here's a list of pieces, in the order performed:
"Étude No. 1, Désordre" by György Ligeti
"Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs/Nowth Upon Nacht" by John Cage
Piano Pieces, Op. 11 (second movement) by Arnold Schönberg 
Piano Piece VIII by Karlheinz Stockhausen
"L'empire des illumnièrs (Hommage a René Magritte) by Nils Vigeland
"Intimate Rejection" by Ashley Fu-Tsun Wang
"Kreutzer Sonata" by Frederic Rzewski
"Image de Moreau" by Louis Andriessen
"Brooklyn - Oct. 5. 1941" by Annie Gosfield
"Leaps of Faith" by Vanessa Lang
"La Fee Verte" by Ryan Francis
Encore #1: "A Child Falling Asleep" by Robert Schumann
Encore #2: "Etude for Eight Fingers" by Claude Debussy

Monday, 16 Mar


Darkly theatrical and orchestral, replete with danceable beats, Atarah Valentine's music felt caged within the walls of the relatively sober Joe's Pub on Monday night.  Not to be deterred, though, the audience--many of whom had stood in line outside the venue well before the show's start time--was vocally enthusiastic if not bodily so.

The music, sounding at times like a Martin Gore/Matthew Bellamy blend, nonetheless arrived at a genuinely "Atarah" sound, particularly when perceived via his vivid stage presence and protagonist-from-a-Tim-Burton-film look.  Rounding out nicely both the musical and visual element, Atarah was joined by a cellist and two live mixers/controllerists, one of whom also played trumpet and a six-string bass.

The set included the urgent "End It All," with its rising vocal lines in the chorus, and the dance-anthem "The Night Is Young," which Atarah introduced as "one of our songs that you don't have to be on anti-depressants to enjoy."  The set ended with the orchestral "Without You," featuring live trumpet.  The band was applauded back onstage for an encore, and Atarah warned the audience, "as a punishment, you get this." The mellow song started off with unaccompanied vox and slowly built in intensity and volume before falling back again at the end.

Catch Atarah Valentine at The Annex on April 8th.

Sunday, 8 March



“Either the string or my hand is going to break,” exhaled Josel as he simultaneously tightened and plucked the third string on his guitar.  Mercifully, an audience member came to Seth Josel’s aid, sitting down next to him and twisting the tuning peg as Josel continued to pluck the ever-tightening string on his acoustic guitar.  Having already plucked and tuned two strings until they snapped off the guitar’s neck, Josel was halfway through Peter Ablinger’s “Exercitium 1-6,” when the third string refused to break.  Far more exciting than listening to each of the guitar's six strings produce gradually higher and higher notes one after another, was the tension that gradually pulled Josel and his audience tighter and tighter, getting red in the face, waiting for the snap to happen.

Thus began the show at Brooklyn’s intimate Diapason on Sunday night, a CD release concert from Mode Records featuring Josel on solo guitar, the audience seated on couches and floor cushions.  Following this first harrowing piece was “The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar” by the super-chill composer Morton Feldman, Josel playing an electric guitar from above as it lay on the floor, in a replication of a recording made by Christian Wolff back in 1966.  The piece, like so many Feldman pieces, drew the audience into its quasi-ambient, nicely proportioned world.

Another work by Ablinger, called “63-99,” came next, and the tension felt in the first piece of the set began to build again.  A series of 36 approximately one-minute pieces flowing from one to the next, each movement, from #63 to #99 (with the exception of one of them) began at the bridge-end of the guitar neck with a high, descending scale before being abruptly interrupted by frenetic picking at the middle of the neck while speakers blasted out samples of Berlin city-sounds; then, just as abruptly, the city went away and Josel continued downward to the low end of the neck.  Surprising was the one piece out of the 36 in which the city did not blast its way in, leaving Josel to play uninterrupted down the neck. 

The set ended with Seth Josel’s slightly altered version (based on some sketches of Feldman’s) of the Morton Feldman piece, in which he held the guitar in the normal position and used a pedal to create some effective swells.  No completed copy of the score for this piece exists, so the performance was a welcome and rare one. 


photo taken from Josel's myspace page

Sun, 1 March



Piano and violin move in constant pulsing rhythm together, creating minimalist-esque blanket of sound over which a warm voice sings a sad song; at the end, violin solos over piano accompaniment.  Thus began Luke Elliot's intimate set at Pianos on Sunday night, himself on piano and vox, with a violinist standing at his back, in a pared down version of his band.
Telling a story with each of his songs, there followed "Ballad of a Priest" and its Irish air feel, and "Virginia," whose rapid and repetitious piano rhythm mimicked the motion of the train mentioned in his lyrics, while the violinist accompanied Elliot's vocals with sympathetic responses.
"Thing to Thing" had a nice groove, bringing to mind images of a pianist in a circa 1880's wild west bar, with some early rock styling at the end.
Elliot moved from piano to acoustic guitar for the last two songs, ending his set with the upbeat "The World Ain't a Friend of Mine," combining a folk feel with Rufus Wainwright-y vox.