Converging piano and theater
In 1998, composer-pianist David Rosenboom completed a solo piano tour de force, “Bell Solaris,” for his fellow pianist Katrina Krimsky, in a form involving variations on a theme. In an expanded, theatricalized version that he premiered Thursday at REDCAT, he lavishes new variations upon his earlier ones, in visual and technological as well as musical terms.
Leave it to Rosenboom -- the CalArts dean of music, who is also actively engaged in computer music, improvisation and other experimental pursuits -- to up the ante of performance possibilities. He aptly subtitles the piece “Twelve Metamorphoses in Piano Theater.”
This time out, he plays one grand piano while triggering a second, unmanned grand piano -- through his own software -- often creating a thrillingly dense thicket of pianistic sound in the space.
Too rarely do we get the chance to hear Rosenboom’s considerable skills as a pianist, and this work serves as a fine prism for his musicianship. “Bell Solaris” is a virtuosic and layered score, in which passages of discernible tonality and idiom -- sometimes even including folk and gospel -- are dissected and fragmented.
Fleeting echoes of Messiaen and Nancarrow pass through, along with touches of Rosenboom’s voice as a post-free-jazz player. Amid the density are movements of slow, languid lyricism, palate cleansers for the beautifully crazed sonic onslaughts to come.
For the REDCAT incarnation, Rosenboom had help on the theater side from CalArts colleague Travis Preston, the school’s director of theater and opera. Floors and walls are randomly plastered with huge white sheets of paper against black, evoking piano keys.
That backdrop becomes entwined with the swirling, collaged projections from a troop of videographers who roam the stage and supply live data. The sum visual effect, at its most intense, can suggest a house of mirrors or the retro phantasmagoria of Fritz Lang’s silent film “Metropolis.”
Convergence is the underlying theme of this “Bell Solaris,” in what is ultimately a fairly blissful match between the pure physicality of vigorous piano playing and the more ambiguous layers of data carried through wires and software. Piano theater, indeed.
*
‘Bell Solaris’
Where: REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2nd and Hope streets, L.A.
When: 8:30 tonight
Price: $18
Contact: (213) 237-2800 or www.calarts.edu
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