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Review of our recent Silvia Jiang Piano Concert...
‘... where the heart is’
Performance at St Lukes Church Rotorua, July 23, Reviewed by Shamus Baker
Home. Such a reassuring, almost maternal word, but bound up in melancholy associations – homeless, homesick. Reacting to our disturbed modern times, many would gripe that the commodification of the artifacts of culture and personal identity, such as music, alienate us from ever really possessing a firm footing anymore. We are all apparently displaced persons now, actually or spiritually.
This uneasy footing in the world was reflected – brilliantly – in the recital pianist Sylvia Jiang presented at St Luke’s on the 23 rd July. A Chinese-New Zealander based in America, Jiang is a musician with first-hand experience of the dilemmas of such interstitial identity.
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Hers was a programme of two strands, each half consisting of a bracket of smaller character pieces followed by a major repertoire warhorse. Those character pieces contained some of the
highlights of the evening, and seemed a veritably catalogue of displacement tropes. Take as an example the work that opened the recital: New Zealand composer Gareth Farr in The Horizon from Owhiro Bay.
Here he has written about his own home in the most severe post-impressionist pentatonic Japonismes, a language heavily signifying the exotic! Home and away indeed. Consider also New Zealander Ken Young’s acerbic railings against change and decay in A Time and Place There Was; the almost camp, pseudo-atonal augmented-chord Gothicism of George Walker’s Piano Sonata No. 2; Gershwin’s displacement of popular idioms into art music – a treatment Gunther Schuller labelled ‘cultural larceny’ – and this reviewer’s standout favourite Nostalgia, a crystalline miniature about rain and homesickness by contemporary Chinese master Gao Ping. This was hypnotic, disturbing music played with brilliant panache – particularly ravishing were the delicate layerings of simultaneous dynamic levels in Farr and Ping’s music.
Those warhorses – Chopin’s second sonata and Prokofiev’s seventh – stood out a little in this wonderfully fresh and creative company, but the relentless bleakness and hypnotic repetitions of both lulled one into a continuation of the evening’s general mood of hazy dislocation and a strangeness not quite grounded in reality. Pianist Daniel Barenboim emphasizes the need to ‘find the opium’ in Chopin’s music, an observation highly relevant to the second sonata’s hallucinatory narrative of death, mourning and memory. Consider too that Prokofiev’s seventh sonata contains music based upon Schumann’s song Wehmut: “I can sometimes sing as if I were glad, yet secretly tears well and so free my heart...” An appropriate postmodern ennui, perhaps, but one balanced by the total and marvellous ferocity of Jiang’s interpretation.
Both works were brought to vivid life by Jiang’s immaculate and varied sense of rhythmic dynamism, heard to monumental effect in the well-known slow movement of Chopin’s
sonata.
Jiang has an extremely entertaining and personable stage presence, and her command of the keyboard cannot be over-praised. While bleak in subject, the consistently sparkling quality of
her musicianship serves as a reminder that one sometimes needs to leave home to create something worthwhile, and to grow.
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About Us...
Chamber Music Rotorua specializes in presenting live music by chamber-music ensembles and soloists. Our focus is on high-quality performances, which are usually performed by professional musicians. Although many of our members love music in the western "classical" tradition, we present works from all over the world and from medieval times right up to the present - we've even had some NZ premieres of new work.
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We normally run about four to six concerts per year, some of which are part of the Chamber Music New Zealand series, while from time to time others may be organized independently by us.
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