Old First Concerts Piano Festival Begins

Nicole Brancato performing at the New York City premiere of The Illustrated Pianist (from her Old First Concerts event page)

Last night marked the beginning of Current: A Piano Festival, a series of three programs presented by Old First Concerts (O1C) with support by the Ross McKee Foundation. Each of those programs will focus on contemporary repertoire, but each will take its own unique approach to presenting that repertoire. That strategy was clearly evident last night in a program produced and curated by Nicole Brancato entitled The Illustrated Pianist.

The cover page of the O1C program book also had a subtitle: “A Concert of Imaginative New Works for Piano and Visual Installation, inspired by science fiction.” That inspiration involved the fact that last year was the centenary of the birth of Ray Bradbury, and this year marks the 70th anniversary of the eighteen stories that Bradbury collected under the title The Illustrated Man. The new works were composed by Brancato herself, Nicholas Pavkovic, Jed Distler, Dee Spencer, Monica Chew, and Keisuke Nakagoshi. All the composers played their own music with the exception of Chew, whose “Pitter Patter” was performed by Jerry Kuderna.

The “visual installation” was created by Cory Todd, consisting of video projections that accompanied each of the works on the program. Since I “attended” this concert through a live-stream, I am not sure where the images were projected in the Old First sanctuary; but in the streamed version they were strategically superimposed on the images of the pianists giving their performances. The entire program lasted a little more than an hour, and the video seems to be available for additional viewing on its YouTube Web page.

That availability is decidedly advantageous. A program consisting entirely of nine new compositions puts a strain on even the most focused attention. When the music itself is part of a larger mix that also includes real-time video and an itemization of Bradbury titles serving as “inspiration,” there is far more than enough for mind to manage.

However, as one that has enjoyed a generous share of Bradbury’s work, I have to confess that I have long been uncomfortable with his having been classified as a science fiction writer. Yes, he was inspired by the Astounding Science Fiction periodical, as well as authors such as Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. However, Bradbury’s real interest was the complexity of human nature; and situating a narrative in a setting that involved a distant planet or advanced technology that had not yet been invented was his strategy for exploring that complexity. (We should also remember that one of his best explorations of that complexity can be found in the screenplay he wrote for the film version of Moby Dick.)

As a result I found myself hard-pressed to identity a “Bradbury connection” to any of the new works on the program. Indeed, I am not sure that Bradbury was ever mentioned in any of the verbal introductions provided by the composers. Only the O1C program sheet specified links of each of the compositions to Bradbury’s writings. Thus, in my capacity as a listener, it did not take long to me to put Bradbury out of my mind. The inventiveness of the music provided more than enough to keep that mind occupied.

The visuals, on the other hand, seemed to supplement the dispositional nature of the music itself. Unfortunately, there was more diversity in the musical selections than there was in the techniques that Todd engaged to create his videos. Mind you, in order to create a visual context, he would have had to begin with an understanding of the content being visualized. Since all of the works were new, Todd could only begin to arrive at that understanding through awareness of how the piano performances were being prepared. Given how much content there was in this program, that would have been quite a tall order for Todd to follow.

Where the music itself was concerned, I was impressed by the wide extent of technical challenges behind the works being presented. I was also pleasantly amused by the number of instances in which snippets of quotation would pop up, almost as if the composer wanted to check on whether the listener was actually paying attention. The advantage of having a video available is that the attentive listener has greater control of how (s)he devotes her/his attention. With such an abundance of content, “piecemeal” viewing will probably allow for attention that is both more consistent and more focused. Having sat through all of the “live” encounter, I would now advocate getting to know the nine compositions on this program through that “piecemeal” approach to viewing.