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Kaufman Center Presents
No Minimum
One Artist, Many Sides
Don Byron, clarinet
(Don Byron Website)
with
Ursula Oppens, piano
(Ursula Oppens Website)
Kenny Barron, piano
(Kenny Barron Website)
At
Kaufman Center Merkin Concert Hall
(Kaufman Center Website)
Kim Smith, Public Relations
Nikolas J. Lund
January 22, 2007
Any excursion to the Merkin Concert Hall promises a musical program which will be unique and in many cases, I dare to say it, thought-provoking. And tonight’s concert featuring soloist-composer Don Byron is the reason why I am finally inclined to offer my generalization of this space. I love hearing concerts here.
The very structure of the concert itself tonight was highly clever and actually only gets more clever the more I think about it. It is possible perhaps that my thoughts were somehow “over-provoked” by the concert tonight, and were taken more with what I see as the concept at work rather than the actual musical creation which took place, but then I heard the music too, and I think that there is a case to be made on both fronts.
What Byron set up for the audience tonight was something quite experimental in a certain way, though in no way which one might associate with something otherwise called “experimental music.” Or, in other words, with regards to Byron as a composer and a musician, I would not charge him with any labels of the “experimentalism” which I am enclosing here in ironic quotation marks. His work is inventive certainly, and deeply searching, and very much his own—but does not subscribe to any of the caprice which would abandon beauty to the potential arbitrariness involved in attempting to create “a sound beyond genre” (Byron’s project as expressed in his own words).
The first half of the concert was the section I found most provocative. This set put Mr. Byron in duet with Ursula Oppens: a pianist I have long admired not so much for her absolute commitment to the music primarily of the 20th century, but indeed for her apparent love for each and every note of this highly dissonant terrain. This deep musical love is reflected clearly in her playing (check out any one of the great many recordings she has made) and tonight she brought herself entirely to what was clearly a unique situation with unique difficulties involved.
While Ms. Oppens did play from a score at all times this evening, she was still responsible for providing a sensitivity and flexibility of response which would permit Mr. Byron to present the music—consisting primarily though not entirely his own compositions—in a way which would allow room for the improvisational impetuses of the latter artist to manifest themselves. Several of the compositions from Mr. Byron were from film scores which he had composed, and were clearly notated out in their entirety. For Ms. Oppens this meant holding her focus on a difficult score and yet somehow playing a part beyond mere accompaniment, while Mr. Byron himself faced all those challenges of one trying to re-create something new from one’s own music.
And born of these highly differing positions, in short, the music did not always work.
There was one instance, for example where Ms. Oppen’s very straightforward reading of a piano accompaniment to the Four Tops classical “Reach Out ” (written by Motown’s famous Holland-Dozier-Holland team) seemed too staid and stiff to allow Byron to make this song into the miniature epic he clearly trying to represent. Throughout, the soloists were at obvious pains to making the phrasing work, and even though they were managing to stay more or less in the same place, there was really no point at which it seemed that they were playing together.
But then however, when the musicians presented Alban Berg’s Op. 5 (Four Pieces for Piano and Clarinet) it was Oppens who was so clearly in her natural element, while Byron struggled visibly to achieve the strength of line and tone essential to unlocking a piece which he himself called quite accurately referred to as “beautiful in an ugly kind of way.”
And yet somewhere in-between this difficult juxtaposition of artistic temperaments—of which these two pieces represented extreme examples—lay the fascinating experimental consequences of this concert.
For while there were many long passages where the music did not seem to come off, and where a unified vision did not seem possible between the two artists, there were nevertheless moments where two minds clearly were thinking the same thing, and where an authentic beauty was achieved. The Berg, in fact, contained a number of highly interesting passages, which would not have sounded the same from any other musicians, while the first piece played this evening—a film composition from Byron called “Blinky”—had an unquestionable freshness to it and moments of tonal interplay between the piano and the clarinet which were extremely exciting in their fleeting movement.
And so, in a perhaps more or less equal proportion, the moments that did not succeed were constantly conjoined with ones which did in one long progression in which neither musician gave any less than everything they had. One merely had to listen closely. And to realize that the musicians were listening even closer. And, eavesdropping on the crowd afterward, I sensed that the truly unique nature and value of this concert was not lost on those listening.
In the second half of the concert, I found far less to think about. And thank goodness.
Byron was joined here by the immense and rightly praised talent of pianist Kenny Barron, whose extraordinary poise and sound at the piano is surpassed only by his musical imagination. Of all three musicians I heard tonight, it was Barron who was hitting all the notes that caught my ear, and the one who managed to open up a space where experimentation was allowed to proceed in a happy fashion. The music in this segment continued with more of Byron’s compositions, interspersed with a few unannounced standards, which achieved a bright grandeur that everyone could feel good about.
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