An Agile Pianist Who Can Make the Minutes Waltz

Listening to Guy Livingston play his program “60 Seconds for Piano”--60 pieces about a minute long--is like being president for an hour. We stand in a long receiving line to meet and greet 60 composers, and each tries hard to make an immediate impression. It is not an unpleasant experience, and time flies. But after a while, it can all seem a blur.

In fact, Monday’s recital, the first in a four-part Festival of Pianos at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Bing Theater, was less about these many composers (most of whom are young and unfamiliar) than about Livingston himself. The 34-year-old pianist from Tennessee, who lives in Paris, is an exceptionally agile and charismatic performer with an entrepreneurial flair.

And many of the miniatures--for which a bottle of Jack Daniels was the commissioning fee--take advantage of his curious but winning combination of relaxed Southern charm, manic intensity and sense of humor.

The format was part of the fun. Livingston divided the program into six sets, each a dazzling kaleidoscope of 10 pieces dashed through. Between the sets, Livingston relieved the tension by casually walking over to a leather armchair and offering easygoing commentary about the program.

Much of his pleasure in the project, he told us, was the discovery of so many composers not yet introduced to the public. Often, the pieces came like postcards from near and far, like brief reports about the wide world. What began as 60 commissions has snowballed into nearly 200 (many now coming unsolicited). For each program, he chooses a different selection. The one he chose for his West Coast debut at the Monday Evening Concerts series included about two-thirds of those found on his Wergo CD, “Don’t Panic!”

Perhaps because so many of the composers do not yet have a public reputation, the program also became nearly 60 ways to make a splash. Humor was the most common way, which made for an uncommonly jokey evening of new music, and most of the works were one-liners. But the composers also recognized Livingston’s brilliant technique and had his fingers flying. Percussive attacks were also popular.

There was not much new from these composers, but there was variety and surprise. Dan Warburton, in his “Speed Study 1,” made sure Livingston found his way to all 88 keys in a moment of Boulez-ian complexity followed by a puckish tonal cadence. Sophie de Wit’s “Who asked you?” had a fondness for Scriabin-like trills, as did Marek Zebrowksi’s “Ex tempore.”

Frank Oteri wrote a lovely tango (“Last Minute Tango”), Gene Pritsker’s tango-ish “i’m afraid you might ask for a fragment of my soul” was more raw.

A few established composers came to the party. William Bolcom’s “60-second Ballet (for chickens)” had virtuoso fun with Tchaikovsky; Louis Andriessen’s “not [an] anfang” was a simple, haunting melody.

Pierre Boulez sent his regrets through an assistant, and the letter was read as a piece, as if it were one more work of conceptual art. Others intended their concepts to be performed.

And actress Michelle Munson helped out with Jerome Bourdellon’s Fluxus-style “Ha!” by skating up to the stage with a special delivery letter; Livingston read it, shouting “ha” loudly inside the piano, causing the strings to resonate quite beautifully.

Following the example of Henry Cowell or John Cage, other pieces had Livingston strumming the strings like a harp and tapping on the closed keyboard like a drum.

Annie Gosfield’s “Brooklyn, October 5, 1941” commemorated the Dodgers blowing the World Series by the pianist rolling baseballs over the keys to produce interesting clusters. Bernhardt Weidner (“2 homes, 1 garden”) obsessively went back and forth between German Modernism and pop music every couple of seconds. A piece by a composer’s cat, Ketzel Cotel, re-created the delicate sound of paws on the keys.

The most impressive performance was the last piece, Moritz Eggert’s “Hammerklavier XI,” which is made up of 60 one-second movements--prologue, prelude, one-second waltz, hommage to Glenn Miller, hymn, toccata, scherzo, requiem, dialogue, pastorale, finale, epilogue, etc.--and the title of each was called out. It works; it is a riot; and the performance was an astonishing display of manic energy and precision.

Eggert is a clever man; many of the composers on the program are clever men or women. But the last word in this evening was that Livingston is more than just a clever pianist. He even plays Chopin well--the encore was the “Minute” Waltz.