It turns out that 50 pianos played together can summon many different sounds, including that the piano doesn’t sound like a piano at all.
A series of ambitious performances begin at the Park Avenue Armory in New York 11,000 stringsorchestra works by composer Georg Friedrich Haas, including 50 black pianos. The lighting is low-key, subtle and space-like enough to evoke another atmosphere while showing the overwhelming 55,000 square feet of the Armory Drill Hall. This makes the voice the star of the show and a lot of To be sure.
Tuesday’s premiere begins with a slight martial arts rift with 50 pianists entering the hall, an opposite of the vocal image, with Don Delillo for a long time sticking to my voice, who describes a character in a spacious apartment metropolis As “a soft sidewalk and rock mosque, murmured on the vault.” Afterwards, silence was established, 11,000 strings It starts not with piano, but rather sounds like a harpsichord, and also a tense and tense pile of strings, atmosphere, brass, woodwinds and other instruments from Klangforum Wien (from the new music group of Austrian legends).
The piano introduces itself in abstract quality, with 100 hands waving low keys in a hurry rumble, sounding like a jet engine blew up in the thunder. Then, a dramatic pause that lets all the tones dissipate and decay, then the musicians at two broad percussion stations stimulate the amazing jump.
When it stretched for more than an hour 11,000 strings Through different emotional developments, the patient focuses on the tone and texture on the melody, or any novelty that might be considered pretty or fully focused on its 50 piano arrangement. It’s strange, tense, discordant music that sometimes evokes GyörgyLigeti, Krzysztof Penderecki and Karlheinz Stockhausen (their electronic tilting opera cycles). Lichter It was the highlight of the programming of Park Avenue Armory last year).
11,000 strings at Park Avenue Armory.
Stephanie Berger
In the notes of the program, Haas wrote that isolated in a house in Morocco during the pandemic and found that the utopian scene “like greetings from another world, like a rush of hope.” His hopes seem to have been tempered, but are still obvious in the music to find something powerful and profound.
Although pianos are fine-tuned adjustments, their common sounds are very different, and the sounds of the rest of the ensemble (with 25 musicians besides 50 pianists) show an equal and sometimes dominant role throughout the performance. Many people play multiple roles; Flautists stand up and play drums, and cellists spend time beside them, scratching with bows and arrows. At the end, the pianists all wore black gloves, as if to ease their performance, but then a crescendo also rose up, each of them swinging left and right with a constant Glissando Trance. Bringing it to the feeling of sitting on a spaceship with cosmic waves.
