Mannes Piano Recital: Toward the Light

Friday evening, the Mannes piano department put on another in its series of student recitals, but this one turned out to be a multimedia experience quite different from other classical music events I've attended this season.  The program, entitled Toward the Light, was curated by faculty member Eteri Andjaparidze and was apparently a recreation of a similar recital in which she had taken part in the early 1990's, one that had been conceived by composer George Flynn and staged at DePaul University in Chicago.  Aside from the music, there was visual accompaniment in the form of a stunning abstract animation projected onscreen over the heads of the students as they played.  Meanwhile, the audience sat in the dark and watched and listened exactly as they would had they been in a movie theater.  There were only the briefest pauses between pieces and no intermission during the hour long performance.  Only at the very end did the students appear onstage to take a bow and receive the applause due them.

Though this was the first time I had ever seen it applied to classical music, the concept itself was not new to me.  In the 1960's, liquid light shows were very common component of counterculture musical productions.  Perhaps the most famous of these was the Joshua Light Show that routinely accompanied rock concerts held at Manhattan's Fillmore East.  The purpose of these shows was to create a true psychedelic event in which visuals and music combined in an almost hallucinatory manner.  Although the animation shown at Mannes was obviously a high tech artifact that had been computer generated, many of its effects were quite reminiscent of those of the old fashioned light shows I had witnessed a half century before. 

The music itself explored the works of a wide range of composers but placed greatest emphasis on those artists active in the early twentieth century.  All the pieces took as their subject some manifestation of light, such as moonlight or fire.  The full program, together with the names of the student pianists who performed each piece, was as follows: Alexander Scriabin, Vers la flamme, Op. 72 (Reed Tetzloff); Franz Liszt, Angelus! Prière aux anges gardiens from Années de pèlerinage III, S. 163 (Jose Ortega Arias); Moritz Moszkowski, Étincelles, Op. 36 No. 6 (David Mamedov); Olivier Messiaen, Études de rythme: Ile de feu I (Santiago Lomelin); Claude Debussy, Clair de lune from Suite Bergamasque, Feux d'artifices, L. 123/12 from Préludes (Gvantsa Zangaladze); Manuel de Falla, Danza ritual del fuego (Santiago Lomelin); George Flynn, Toward the Light (Ariela Bohrod); J. S. Bach, arr. Myra Hess, Jesus bleibet meine Freude from Herz und Mun und Tat und Leben, BWV 147 (Reed Tetzloff).

The real star of this performance, however, was the light show itself.  Despite a few intrusive technical glitches, the visuals could only be described as mesmerizing.  Like their East Village predecessors, they provided to the audience an experience that once would have been described as "consciousness expanding."  In its attempt to enhance the appreciation of music on a visual as well as on an auditory sensory level the animation approximated very well the sensation of synesthesia.

The piano department represents one of Mannes's greatest strengths.  Its curated  recitals never hesitate to explore lesser known areas of the repertoire, and the performance of the pieces chosen is at the highest level.  They are well worth attending, especially when they indulge in such imaginative experimentation as this.