Yesterday morning the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released its latest streamed video premiere in its Omni On Location series. As was the case with its last release in this series, the “location” was in Europe, this time in the Sound & Wave Studios in Warsaw, Poland. This was a “bare bones” setting, a far cry from the frescoes that served as background for the last On Location video.
Polish guitarist Mateusz Kowalski (photograph courtesy of the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts)
However, while those frescoes served to highlight suite movements inspired by lute music of the seventeenth century, the music for the new video is more narrative in nature. Polish guitarist Mateusz Kowalski performed an arrangement (presumably his own) of Maurice Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante défunte.” While this music is probably best known in the orchestral version that Ravel prepared in 1910, he originally composed the work as a piano solo in 1899.
Kowalski’s performance thus reflected Ravel’s original intention of music for a “solo player,” so to speak. Mind you, that piano version is prodigiously rich in its textures, making no end of technical demands on the pianist. Clearly Kowalski could not translate all of those demands into his guitar performance. Nevertheless, he knew which of them most needed to be satisfied. As a result, anyone familiar with how the music was originally composed could appreciate how underlying expressiveness emerged from Kowalski’s performance. Furthermore, when the ear did not always guide the listener through Kowalski’s presentation of those elements, it was abetted by visual cues arising from the video direction provided by Bartosz Kołaczkowski.
Thus, while Kowalski may not have accounted for all of the expressive details that Ravel wrote into his “Pavane,” the guitarist still cultivated his own path to reflect and highlight the primary intentions of the composer.
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