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Pianist takes on Bach’s ‘Well Tempered Clavier’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
RECITAL REVIEW Pianist Brian Parks. Saturday at the High Museum’s Hill Auditorium. www.publicandprivate.org
Bach was under his fingers Saturday night. Couple that with his other odd adventures and you’ll see that Brian Parks clearly has his priorities straight.
As a composer, Parks draws from a broad palette, with titles like “The Center of Things” scored for contour drawings, untrained singers, dancers, chess players and strings.
He’s also played his music in areas sadly underserved by composers, such as the Krog Street Tunnel (under the railroad tracks that separate the Cabbagetown and Inman Park neighborhoods) and the 17th Street Bridge over the downtown connector.
This isn’t clowning around: it’s carefully planned music — or maybe performance art — elevated by integrity and flair into high-minded art.
For a conservatory-trained composer and pianist — Parks, 26, studied at Boston’s Berklee College of Music — it’s a refreshing mindset, one that’s welcomed by the art-gallery crowd but too often disdained by the tradition-rutted classical set.
Parks’ latest happening is an Everest of keyboard music: Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier (book two),” about two hours of music coupling preludes and fugues in all 24 keys. Learning the “WTC,” as it’s called, is something like training to run a marathon. Each tiny step is easy, but getting through the whole thing requires as much psychological preparation as physical endurance.
And given the pianist’s multi-arts demeanor, it seemed natural that he rented the High Museum’s Hill Auditorium, an elegant, angular, asymetrical space that is more likely to host a painter’s lecture or film than a classical concert. His instrument seemed luxurious, a 9-foot C. Bechstein concert grand bright in tone and still a bit unseasoned and “green,” like a tender young tree limb. (The piano was lent for these concerts by Mona’s Pianos in Roswell).
I caught Saturday’s show, the second of his two performances. It was surprisingly well attended; many in the audience followed along note-by-note with “WTC” scores on their laps.
The pianist’s psychology, and this music’s psych-out factor, were evident from a brief program booklet essay. Parks compared the “WTC” to a grand piece of architecture and admitted, “I have not seen its inner foundation…I do not know how this building fits into [the] environment.”
He was lowering expectations. Although he didn’t have the tonal polish or keyboard charisma of an Andre Watts, who was performing at the same time across the plaza in Symphony Hall, Parks’ Bach was clear in voice, the lines sharply etched.
Despite his reputation as a free-spirited creative soul, Parks was generally better and more assured in the fugues, with their taut rigor and endless, unyielding counterpoint. In the preludes he created robust inner voices and then shied away from the personal confession and on-the-spot flights of imagination that bring these small fantasies to life. A few menory slips aside, he soared whenever he seemed to forget about the technical challenges and let the music’s forward propulsion carry him along, when he let Bach do the hard work.
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By Casey Sloan
October 10, 2006 1:18 PM | Link to this
As Brian noted in a mass e-mail sent out to many of those who were in attendance over the two nights of performance, it was somewhat exhausting being a spectator for so many pieces. This, of course, was part of the overall piece and reflected the fact that Brian’s reputation as a “free-spirited creative soul” will be evident even in something seemingly as simple as performing Bach. I was glad I was there Saturday night and able to experience the fatigue along with Brian, who was performing such a hefty collection of pieces by memory for the second night in a row. The constant and systematic display of counterpoint acted like a mantra to the untrained ear, which allowed my often unfocussed mind to occasionally lock in to a piece and hear it with unusual clarity and understanding that would not have happened at a shorter concert. Brian’s display of stamina, while challenging to an audience member, allowed one to catch a glimpse of that “inner foundation” and thus understand what it was that Brian had been discovering over his many months of living with the work.
By Casey Sloan
October 10, 2006 1:22 PM | Link to this
As Brian noted in a mass e-mail sent out to many of those who were in attendance over the two nights of performance, it was somewhat exhausting being a spectator for so many pieces. This, of course, was part of the overall piece and reflected the fact that Brian’s reputation as a “free-spirited creative soul” will be evident even in something seemingly as simple as performing Bach. I was glad I was there Saturday night and able to experience the fatigue along with Brian, who was performing such a hefty collection of pieces by memory for the second night in a row. The constant and systematic display of counterpoint acted like a mantra to the untrained ear, which allowed my often unfocussed mind to occasionally lock in to a piece and hear it with unusual clarity and understanding that would not have happened at a shorter concert. Brian’s display of stamina, while challenging to an audience member, allowed one to catch a glimpse of that “inner foundation” and thus understand what it was that Brian had been discovering over his many months of living with the work.