Le Poisson Rouge has a potentially great show tomorrow by pianist Bruce Brubaker:
Glass: Etude No. 4 and Etude No. 5The Glass Etudes are better when played by someone other than the composer, Dream is one of Cage's best pieces, the same for Curran and Nico Muhly is Nico Muhly. Brubaker:
Nico Muhly: Drones & Piano (New York premiere)
Cage: Dream
Alvin Curran: Inner Cities 2
Backstage, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, after we gave a Haydn performance, I asked Nico about writing some new piano music, possibly with electronic sounds. Somehow, in Drones & Piano, fragments of Haydn, as well as lexia from lots of other music I play -- John Adams' Phrygian Gates, a phrase of Janáček via Alvin Curran, the drones in Duckworth's Time Curve Preludes -- all appear.From a review of the premiere of the Gilmore Festival in Kalamazoo:
The drones were pre-recorded on Brubaker’s Ipod and amplified through the theatre’s sound system. They consisted of pitches bowed on a viola and other scratching and percussive sounds. ... Like in an Indian raga, a drone sets up an expectation that the music will become grounded in the drone tones. Indeed, there were harmonies built on the drone tones but there also seemed to be another mysterious dynamic at work here.
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