Went to Charlottesville last Friday for a performance by Tyshawn Sorey. It was billed as a concert, but beyond that I didn't really know what to expect--would he have a band? Would he play a mix of drums, piano, and trombone? He's equally adept on all three. Turns out it was a solo piano piece, a "spontaneous composition," as the program stated. Turns out it was amazing. The setting was a Unitarian church, and the lighting was minimal: one small lamp on top of the piano, which, about five minutes in, Sorey turned off, to pay the rest of the piece in darkness. He started off with long drawn-out Morton Feldman-esque low-end chords, sparsely scattered and somber. The chords built on themselves and morphed into an hour-long rumination of dynamic power shifts, including some of the fastest post-Cecil Taylor runs I've ever heard. These powerful runs grew in intensity to loud crescendo waves of thunderous swells only to be cut off and dynamically cut to sequences of quiet melodic chords. This pattern of a gradual build to overwhelming power/quick cut to quiet melody occurred several times as the piece progressed. Stunning.
[The picture above is not from UVA; it's from here.]
No comments:
Post a Comment