The other day, I heard Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48 No. 1, performed live on a nineteenth-century Corning Steinway piano. As Igal Kesselman, the pianist, made his way through that nocturne’s melancholy, stormy, and contemplative sections, in the background a woman checked out a flouncy silver-grey dress on the racks at Ann Taylor. The Steinway, it turned out, was also for sale. Kesselman was one of dozens of professional and amateur pianists who played on six pianos set up at the World Financial Center as part of “Chopin 200: A Bicentennial Celebration of the Composer and His Music” held at the Winter Garden and complex from March 1 to 5. These free events began each day at 9 a.m. with “aficionado open mic” performances, followed from noon to 7 p.m. by a parade of established and up-and-coming professional pianists, and at 7 p.m. a featured performer on the Fazioli concert grand piano on the big Winter Garden stage. The six pianos, with manufacturers ranging from Steinway, Fazioli, and Kawai to the lesser-known Sauter and Wilhelm Steinberg, were stationed near escalators, near shops like Ann Taylor and Ciao Bella, and in the big open area near the palm trees. read more
If you’re in a roomful of professional musicians and you want to watch the cumulative blood pressure level spike, just question the assumed wisdom that live music by professional musicians is preferable to canned music. The agita is understandable—these are people worrying about their livelihoods, after all—but the fact remains that despite the many technology innovations of the past decades, so far a substitute for real, trained musicians has yet to be found.
Still, human nature being what it is, there’s always somebody trying to come up with a way to find a robot or other non-human to replicate live musicians. As I wrote about in an earlier blog, this is not a new question: back in the 1920s George Antheil used player pianos in his Ballet Mécanique, which got a revised performance at the 3LD Technology Center back in June using Disklavier technology. And a few weeks ago at Bargemusic in Brooklyn, there was a face-off between the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra—a group of live musicians led by Markand Thakar—and something called the Fauxharmonic Orchestra, a creation of Paul Henry Smith that utilizes digital samples and a Wii-mote wireless controller and pressure-sensitive platform. read more
I’ve been watching the San Francisco Symphony’s Carnegie Hall opening-night celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s 90th birthday year on Great Performances. Fittingly, there’s a little bit of everything Lenny here, early and late, Broadway, symphonic, dance, opera, song cycle—symphonic dances from West Side Story, “What a Movie” from Trouble in Tahiti (with Dawn Upshaw), “I Can Cook Too” (Christine Ebersole, pictured), and Meditation No. 1 from Mass (cellist Yo-Yo Ma). Everyone is clearly having a great time, and when conductor Michael Tilson Thomas joins in singing during “Ya Got Me” from On the Town, it works perfectly, like something Lenny himself might have done. It seems appropriate for a Lenny celebration that there are “high-art” singers like Upshaw and Thomas Hampson, kids from the Juilliard School, and Ebersole representing Broadway: Lenny straddled some of the traditional boundaries between the classical and popular-music worlds, tackling composing, conducting, and educating with equal fervor.
The concert is part of the city’s months-long Lenny celebration, The Best of All Possible Worlds. And I think Lenny would have approved. read more
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