|
Re: 10-year performances summary
|
djw-@snafu.de
|
Oct 07, 2009 16:22 PDT
|
Regarding the difficulty of _Piano_, the remarkable pianist Jon Barlow,
long a faculty member at Wesleyan, played the piece marvelously. Most
notably, he played it in a program including the Ives _First Sonata_, the
Lou Harrison Suite and a number of the Cage _Etudes Australes_. Barlow
developed a practice regimen for the independence of the hands for the
Cage (in which each hand has its own grand staff) and found that the
techniques he developed — which I can only describe here as the arms and
hands in orbital motions like a form of celestial mechanics — lent
themselves well to other repertoire requiring similar independence, not
only the Ives and Feldman, but also Chopin. In learning these pieces, Jon
essentially prepared his own playing editions of each of these pieces,
copying them out completely by hand, sometimes in parallel critical,
analytical, and practical notations.
Feldman had played with Barlow in a concert of his works at least once at
Wesleyan; at one point in a rehearsal Feldman stopped and said to Barlow:
"Sir, you play like a philosopher." Barlow replied, "I take that as a
compliment" which was probably not the answer Feldman was expecting. In
1987, when I met in San Diego, when I introduced myself to Feldman,
mentioning Wesleyan, he immediately said: "There's a pianist there... he
plays like a philosopher."
Daniel Wolf
Frankfurt
|
|
 |
|
