Silas Bassa

Silas Bassa

I’ve had the album *Dualità* in my queue for some months but just getting around to listening to it, in part. The playing is not particularly distinguished or distinctive, but it’s listenable enough. What makes the album worth putting on the table, perhaps, is the programming. It’s fragmented, to be sure, opening with a mere movement from the Messiaen vingt regards, multiple interjections of the player’s own work, multiple iterations of Glass etudes, and so forth. In other words, with the exception of a complete offering by Gorecki, a potpourri. He seems to have done much the same with his first album, Oscillations. So that’s fine, it all hangs together well enough. And the serviceable playing doesn’t get in the way of the umbrella idea which is… what exactly? I don’t know. The duality idea means something, possibly. A clue to the intellectual project. There is a brief verbal monologue about midway through the program spoken by a woman (Nita Klein) in French. It is titled “le gibet” and precedes Ravel’s famous work of the same name. But I find no answers here. Instead, presumably the preface to a concert recital of these same pieces (minus the monologue), Mr Bassa tells us:

« Dualitá » est la fusion de 17 pièces, dont cinq de ma composition, nées d’une seule énergie créant l’unité. Inspiré de mon premier album « Oscillations »,  j’ai souhaité explorer ma nature créative face à la dissonance des éléments opposés et complémentaires qui représentent la dualité.

« Le regard du Père » d’Olivier Messiaen ouvre ce concert. Le Thème de Dieu place l’homme face à l’immensité de l’univers et aux questions que l’inconnu provoque en lui ; « Kleinstücke »,  ma première composition, essaie d’y répondre. « Santa Fe » nous surprend avec son mouvement circulaire qui oscille entre l’inquiétude  de l’être et son désir ; la vie se met en marche. La sonate de Gorecki, œuvre centrale d’une frénésie éclatante, installe la division et la lutte des contraires qui se métamorphose en chaos.

Le Gibet, extrait de « Gaspard de la nuit » de Maurice Ravel (inspiré par le poème d’Aloysius Bertrand), ouvre la deuxième partie du disque avec le thème de la mort. C’est dans ce désespoir  qu’arrive « Réminiscence », comme une réconciliation entre l’ombre et la lumière.  Une sérénité inquiétante encore traversée par l’effroi se déploie dans « Eternità ».

Ma dernière composition « Into the rush », exprime avec espoir et force les états d’âme vécus jusqu’à maintenant et la perpétuelle recherche d’un équilibre pour atteindre la non-dualité qui demeure en nous : notre vraie nature.

So the big idea is unity, fusion. OK. There you go.

Latest Quora answer

There should be, and no doubt is, a way to automatically have something from Quora post on Tumblr, but I haven’t figured out how to do it. So this was the question:

What other pianists are there who play Bach similarly to Gould? I.e. quite detached and rhythmic (no rubato)

And this was my answer:

No one plays similarly to Gould, so let’s clear that up straightaway — if by “similarly to Gould” you mean with a combination of swinging musicality and keen precision unlike anyone on the world stage before him (with the possible exception of his teacher, Alberto Guerrero). I’d dispute your “no rubato” idea, but I’ll take it as shorthand for his unprecedented attention to rhythmic detail.

However, there is one guy out there who plays with a /much more/ pronounced detaché and accent: the Finnish player (and former student of the great Ralf Gothóni): **Olli Mustonen**. There is no one who plays like him either! He’s got a fair lot of Bach in his rep, so you can get a sense of the differences (or similarities, if you like) between him and Gould. I don’t think of it that way, personally, but simply and needlessly to say I like them both very, very much. If you haven’t heard him, I encourage you to do so.

This is sad beyond belief... I hope it backfires on them.

Atonal music to win the fight against German drunks?

Atonal music to win the fight against German drunks?

Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles 1948, photo by Florence Homolka

Schoenberg on the metro? It will soon be a reality in Berlin, but not to calm passengers’ nerves… or grate on them.

Drug dealers, drunks and the homeless are a problem in Berlin’s underground passages and Deutsche Bahn’s solution is to play atonal music to encourage them to leave. Schoenberg would have been disheartened – though…

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Hélène Grimaud transforms the recital?

Well I don’t know if she has or not but she’s certainly doing something very lovely and I don’t care whether it’s an innovation or not. From Medici, here is the blurb:

Hélène Grimaud transforms the genre of the recital, integrating a performance of solo piano works by Romantic and Impressionist composers with a multimedia experience. Her recital is interwoven with the recorded music of composer Nitin Sawhney, and set against the backdrop of visual artist Mat Hennek's photography. The film presented here takes the live experience to the next level by interpreting the original performance through the birds-eye view of the filmmakers, more directly connecting the viewer with the artists and their creations.

By giving full weight to the visual interjections (“transitions” they call them here), it brings to my mind something that is vital to the live experience. As I’ve long ago encountered and answered the question, via Gould, what is added in the event of live performance? Other than obviously a great majority (we must assume) of performers prefer it to the studio for the *joie de schwing* it brings to their playing, the human connection and all that booshwha. Well, unless (maybe) it’s a great grand orchestra in a great hall with three full choirs, my answer is: nothing. Or unless your only home sound source is a pocket radio (and with today’s technology even that doesn’t necessarily mean the sound is flat or tinny). I will grant the sanctification of the studied moment, the expressly non-multithreaded focus on an experience (never absolute, but intentional and respectful of the work and yourself), and grant too that this is not the same as putting on background music while you work at other tasks. But the theatre Ms Grimaud is staging here is of a different order, subtly, one that increases the spectacle while decreasing the spectacular. Sea change? Probably not. But she’s bringing the century-and-a-half old form into territory occupied mostly by newer music performance formats and, whatever the Hamburgers in the Elbphilharmonie might have thought, I think it’s delightful.

And all that jazz.

From Le Journal Amusant, 1926.

Some remarkable piano imagery in this collection of vintage pianos.

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