Carnegie Hall review: The Tao of Wittgenstein
Orchestrasfrom Susan Hall:
The Junction Trio’s Carnegie Hall debut reflected the wide-ranging tastes and temperaments of pianist Conrad Tao, violinist Stefan Jackiw and cellist Jay Campbell. Jagged beauty and harsh dissonance are characterized in each of the compositions by John Zorn, Charles Ives and Ludwig van Beethoven.
In Zorn’s Philosophical Investigations everyone plucks, including Tao inside the piano sounding board.
Conrad Tao is an arresting figure. You can’t take eyes or ears off him. His technique is gargantuan and subtle. His physical approach to the piano is a dancer’s. It is not exaggerated, but you follow his movement and enter the world he proposes. Of particular delight is a withheld note or phrase, where you
hang in the air, in delicious suspense, awaiting the conclusion. The Zorn work dangles moments of
lyric beauty with the crashes of chaos.
Ives starts out commenting on an old professor: 27 measures are played with different combinations of the strings and piano. Tone chords accompany a melody in another key. Jackiw suggests that Ives heard multiple bands circling a town square as a boy. The Beethoven Archduke Trio is full of humour, bouncing staccatos and flowing melodies.
These composers never let the listener rest. Yet who wants to when the Junction Trio is in action? Conrad Tao will tour Amsterdam, Hamburg and Berlin late this summer with the Kansas City Orchestra.
I have long wished that Wittgenstein’s most famous quotation would be adhered to by Slipped Disc’s commentators.
“If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/ludwig_wittgenstein_121260
I actually had in mind: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.”
Fortunately, it is very easy to speak about the vain attempts of composers to get philosophy serving their musical ends.
Well, they say if no one did silly things nothing intelligent would ever be done.
Plucking directly the piano strings is so 50s (or 60s if you are a free jazz pianist).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD9_Q6HkeWU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5C5fLhjWdY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr-hTtBEVyM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0IjfENstXE
In the last century, flirtations with philosophy were a means of giving nonsense some veneer of respectability, or simply mocking the audience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksUbZRgs9BM
“The Zorn work dangles moments of lyric beauty with the crashes of chaos.”
The well-meaning approach of some type of critics is fed by the anxiety of appearing in teh enxt edition of Slonimsky’s ‘Lexicon of Musical Invective.’
And Ives was merely an amibitious amateur (as anybody can hear), trying to translate philosophical ideas literally into music which shows both ignorance of philosophy and music. But in the last century he anticipated much of the nonsense that only later was seen as something that had not already been done, so that was a bit of a disappointment when Ives’ work was dug-out in the sixties…..
Poor Beethoven! His Archduke Trio fulfilling the surprise role of a bishop at a party of drunken rappers.
you wrote: “Tao is an arresting figure. You can’t take eyes or ears off him. His technique is gargantuan and subtle. His physical approach to the piano is a dancer’s.”
It’s hard to watch and even harder to listen to his immature/indulgent and overly aggressive approach to the piano. Lots of technique for sure, but rarely anything subtle about it. Make it fast and loud and jerky, and make the facial and body contortions (nothing like a dancer’s) and that makes reviewers such as this and others in the audience go wow and thinks it’s something special and new. It is neither.
I look forward to when he takes some time to really listen to his sound and go deeper.
You forgot the part about playing bare footed.
Don’t care what he wears.
Care about how the playing is.
Where there is much show around a performance it has to cover-up some emptiness. Performers have a never-failing instinct for spotting that point.
And fortunately for the performers, many in the audience fall for the “showy” and new, bright and shiny” parts.
Indeed.
But superficial people, like my PA, fall for it.
I seriously object to that insinuation. I am a very serious person, I regularly listen to my Boulez box, I try to come to the work place in time, I don’t complain when I’ve to attend one of those concerts, and I go to the gym every week to keep my fingers in shape. I much like this mr Tao and thank god he has some philosophy as well so that I’m not bored by the music he plays.
Sally
You wrote: “Jackiw suggests that Ives heard multiple bands circling a town square as a boy.”
No. Jackiw wasn’t “suggesting” anything. He is repeating what he has learned, what many have learned from reading about Ives. Ives often spoke of loving his his memories of “marching bands playing different music simultaneously from the corners of the town square.”
What does this say about Ives’ ideas about what a musical work is? He was interested in sounds first, and music second, very much ahead of his time, and probably it had a touch of the joker in it as well – not taking music very seriously.
The effect is hilarious indeed. I once came across a long parade during a ‘sail’ with various different sailor groups marching behind a loud band, from different nationalities. Every group had its own band, playing different music, all in the same time. The hughe number of sailors created some distance between the bands so that they could be heard relatively separately; alas the route was a loop: at the end of the trajectory they turned around and marched back at the other side of the street, thus passing the bands who were heading the U-turn. The cacaphony was delightful, something from a Chaplin movie, but with music it had nothing to do.