Piano Break: Dale Tsang

Dale Tsang at the keyboard of the Bösendorfer piano at the Berkeley Piano Club (screen shot from the video being discussed)

One week ago this site ran its first article about the Piano Break series, presented under the auspices of the Ross McKee Foundation. The article announced a solo recital by Dale Tsang recorded at the Berkeley Piano Club. The resulting video was then live-streamed through YouTube early yesterday evening. Tsang provided the full program for that recital on her YouTube Web page, and that same Web page is now available for viewing the archived performance. Those visiting that site are encouraged to scroll through the comments posted after the concert concluded, which include notes about each of the selections by its respective composer and a set of time codes for the beginning of each piece (including individual movements of the suites). Plans for the remainder of the calendar year (through December 18) were posted on this site this past Thursday.

The recital was relatively short, less than 40 minutes in duration. Given that there were ten time codes, one can conclude that all of the offerings were relatively brief. One might go as far as to say that each selection amounted to a personal vignette on a topic that had left a strong impression on the composer. The notes provided as comments account for the nature of those impressions with verbal brevity that matches the temporal scope of the music.

I suspect that I was far from the only one form who each selection was a “first contact” experience. That science-fiction argot suited the final selection, David Garner’s “Spider Music,” which was apparently inspired by a scene in which Spock tells Kirk, “Sir, you have a many-legged beast crawling up your shoulder.” Actually, the music scurries, rather than crawls, perhaps more evocative of Kirk’s reaction to the spider, rather than the spider itself.

“Spider Music” was one of three short “interludes” that Garner provided for the overall flow of Tsang’s program. The first of these was “Bagatelle,” taken from the composer’s opera Mary Pleasant at Land’s End and depicting the hectic Barbary Coast scene during the Gold Rush years. A similar sense of lively energy also pervades “Traveling Light,” whose “lightness” can be found in the monody that pervades most of the composition.

Garner’s “Gold Rush geography” was complemented by the more contemporary perspective of Allan Crossman’s Street Suite. Each of the three movements reflects a neighborhood where the composer lived: Dolores Street in San Francisco, Wilson Avenue in Montreal, and Grant Street in Berkeley. Geography also figured (as it often does) in Gabriela Lena Frank’s offering, “Barcarola Latinoamericana,” decidedly more energetic than the music associated with Venetian gondoliers!

My past experience with Alden Jenks had been limited to his electronic compositions. His two Piano Ballads provided a refreshingly new point of view. “Tombeau de Gershwin” could be taken as a reflection on the friendship that developed between Maurice Ravel and George Gershwin, each of whom probably wished, at some time or another, that he could compose the way the other did. While listening to “Be That Way,” the first of the two ballads, I kept wondering if Benny Goodman might make an appearance; but, if he did, he was well disguised. The same can be said of the seven quotes from Schubert that Elinor Armer claims she seeded in “Promptu.” Much as I tried to find Schubert “impromptu references” while listening, I was more drawn into the engaging eccentricities of the melodic lines that Armer unfolded.