Miller Theater, Columbia University, New York; November 14, 2002
Concert promoters today, despairing of the traditional piano recital, are going whole hog for “concept” programs and musical “happenings.” Miller Theater’s latest contribution to this new genre consisted of a series of variations and vignettes inspired by Thelonius Monk’s jazz classic ‘Round Midnight. Some twenty composers contributed to this extravaganza, the brain-child of Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli and some of his compatriots (including Carlo Boccardo, Alberto Barbero, Roberto Andreoni, and Filippo Del Corno), whose extremely uninteresting and marginally talented contributions figured prominently in the mix.
As might be expected, very little here held a candle to Monk’s original, a fact which perhaps accounts for the Arciuli’s puzzling decision not to perform the work on which the entire evening was based. What we had instead was a too-cute-by-half introduction by Matthew Quayle purportedly representing Monk “composing” his famous tune. This was followed by a concept within a concept: four groups containing three pieces, each organized around the times of day leading up to, you guessed it, midnight, and yet another irritating gloss on the theme by Joel Hoffman, this one including pointless references to other great variation sets (including Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated). There was no determinable reason why any one piece belonged under any particular “time of day” heading; the organization might as well have been purely random.
In general, the best bits were those by composers working in idioms relatively close to popular music or jazz (Michael Torke, Michael Daugherty, and most impressively, Fred Hersch), and also those by composers with recognizably personal styles who were able to remake Monk’s tune in their own image (Frederic Rezewski and Milton Babbit). Prime among this last category was the American premiere of a suite in nine movements by George Crumb, A Little Midnight Music: Ruminations on a Tune of Thelonius Monk , the confident mastery of which put everything else on the program in the shade. Scored for amplified piano and employing those ‘inside the instrument’ techniques that he pioneered, the work displays all of Crumb’s aural sensitivity and nocturnal suggestiveness, and adds an element new to the composer’s late style: humor. In one particularly witty section (“Golliwog Revisted”), Debussy’s famous piece rubs shoulders with Monk, Wagner’s Tristan, and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel.
The composer’s son, David Crumb, also contributed a hauntingly lyrical piece of his own, but everything else was junk, not least an atrociously empty and noisy “Superstar Etude No. 2” by Aaron Jay Kernis, eight bars of cynical nothingness by William Bolcom, some faux lounge music by John Harbison in his “Great Gatsby” style, and an arid bit of atonal doodling by Augusta Read Thomas. Arciuli’s performances were mostly acceptable if never dazzling. One has to admire his enterprise in learning all of this music, but it would be idle to pretend that he commands a particularly attractive tone, or that his technique was always up to the challenges thrown at him. Moreover, he is one of those self-conscious “performance artists” whose stage mannerisms (conducting an imaginary orchestra with his idle hand, making sucking motions with his mouth like a guppy, tossing sheets of music up over his head to fall on the floor behind him) make watching him painful.
Doubtless Arciuli finds something profound in all of this, but seeing him poke at the keyboard, banging in fortissimos, snatching his hands away like he’d been bitten at every staccato, was sort of like listening to Monica Seles grunt her way through a tennis match. There was no questioning his qualification for the job, but the execution was just plain ugly. If he had put as much energy into simply playing the piano as he did into interpreting each piece with his body language he might have managed to overcome at least some of the limitations of the material being presented. In the final analysis, the evening was worth it for the Crumb, which was adequately performed. But as for the rest, when you add up the various principal and sub “concepts,” Arciuli’s own antics, and the actual quality of most of what was offered one question remains: Where was the music?
David Hurwitz
