Contemporary British piano composers are not at the forefront of most students' minds, but Music Department faculty member Jacob Greenberg proved Saturday that these composers can fill more than a few seats.
Greenberg, who has performed as a piano soloist throughout the country and extensively in the Netherlands, presented a program of some of England's most promising contemporary composers in a recital at Slee Hall Saturday night.
The program, which consisted of the recent work of composers Thomas Ades, George Benjamin and Harrison Birtwistle, was not a complete survey of contemporary British work, rather a sampling of Greenberg's favorite pieces.
In 1998 Greenberg gave the U.S. premiere of Birtwistle's "Harrison's Clocks," which is Saturday night's featured performance. In all performances, Greenberg portrayed an undeniable affection for the chosen work, which translated to confidence and precision.
Opening the program with Ades' 1992 composition "Darknesse Visible," Greenberg introduced a major theme in each selection's tone: the extremes at which the piano's keyboard can reach. In Ades' melancholic re-imagining of John Dowland's "In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell," the highs and lows of musical emotion are unmasked and wide open.
Plucking the highest reaches and pounding the lowest vessels of the keyboard, Greenberg embodied the rhythms of Ades' intensity. Like a Stanley Kubrick thriller, the tension in the air could be cut with a knife.
Benjamin's 1984 tune, "Relatively Rag," was an explosion of traditional rag-style syncopation, with a clearly outlined storyline. As described in the evening's program notes, Benjamin's piece introduces one rag while weaving others into it's own syncopated rhythm. The middle section, which breaks from the frenzy of the rags' beats, is smooth and contrasting, completing with a move back to the rag to conclude in its own dizzying structure.
Its opening section's sound could be most clearly described as a skipping record, with four-second segments of melody playing in reverse order. Benjamin effectively merges different emotional styles while enveloping it all into one distinctive mess. Greenberg paints Benjamin's two separate pictures eloquently, but also carries off the convergence with care.
A longer selection was Benjamin's "Shadowlines," a 2003 commission from Betty Freeman written for the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. The piece premiered at the "By George!" festival in February 2003, and was performed by the prestigious London Symphony.
The composition, a collection of canons with altered variations on the overall theme, is a streamlined composition of delicate sounds and gentle keyboard horseplay. Similar to his own "Relatively Rag," and also Ades' "Darknesse Visible," "Shadowlines" offers a single musical theme replayed on top of itself in different zones of tone and volume.
It's clear from Greenberg's first act of selections, in addition to the second act's monstrous "Harrison's Clocks," that he adores the pieces he plays. In witnessing a faculty member's developed skill, it's hard to not be inspired and entertained at the same time. At an institution that features student performances as often as it does faculty recitals, it's a joy to be witness to a matured performer.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
