SOUNDTRACK: DAVID GREILSAMMER-
Tiny Desk Concert #676 (November 24, 2017).
It has been quite a while since there has been a classical pianist on Tiny Desk. I’m unfamiliar with the Israeli pianist David Greilsammer, but his playing is wonderful and his selections are quite fun and diverse.
For this Tiny Desk appearance, Greilsammer begins with his muse Domenico Scarlatti, the 18th-century Italian whose 500-some keyboard sonatas are compelling, colorful snapshots of his decades-long service to Spanish royalty. In the “Sonata in E, K. 380” you can hear a little street band processing along with trumpet fanfares.
Greilsammer describes the piece as sounding very contemporary. Scarlatti lived 300 years ago and his music sounds ahead of its time. He says it’s almost jazzy or pop-like harmonies. He says it feels like he is playing a Beatles song.
Greilsammer follows by jumping ahead 175 years to the eccentric Frenchman Erik Satie, who not only owned seven identical gray velvet suits but, with a freewheeling spaciousness and humor in his music, is often thought of as the precursor to everything from minimalism to new age. His series of mysterious pieces called Gnossiennes strike a particularly sedate mood, capable of neutralizing any source of anxiety.
Greilsammer plays “Gnossienne No. 3” which he describes as full of pop and jazz and colors and harmonies. He was writing these strange short pieces that at the time people in Paris didn’t understand. Everybody loves Satie now but just over 100 years ago he was completely misunderstood.
I absolutely love the way the final notes ring out in this room–they are quite haunting
Lastly, Greilsammer takes a left turn to Leoš Janáček, the idiosyncratic Czech composer from the early 20th century, acclaimed for his operas. He set one of them on the moon; another, the dramatically taut and emotionally wrenching Jenůfa, is perhaps the most undervalued opera of a generation. But Janáček also wrote in smaller forms. His piano cycle On An Overgrown Path plays out like a diary of musings, nervous tics, simple pleasures and mysteries. Within the claustrophobic tension that pervades “The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away,” you can hear the rustling of wings and the repeated four-note bird call.
Greilsammer says that Janáček lived in the Romantic period and all of his music is enigmatic, with many secretive things. He wrote things related to dreams and wild scenes with things obsessively haunting him. In “The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away” (from On An Overgrown Path) the theme of the owl comes back many times. Every time you try to get away from it, it comes back.
For Greilsammer, who recently performed in a working crypt in Harlem, threading these disparate musical fabrics together comes as naturally as, well, playing behind a desk in an office building.
These are some really beautiful and nicely unexpected pieces.
[READ: May 31, 2017] Audubon
I have really enjoyed most of the French graphic novels that come across my desk. This book, translated by Etienne Gilfillan, is no exception.
It is a biographical sketch of John James Audubon (born Jean-Jacques Audubon in Haiti in 1785). His story, aside from the whole birding aspect, is quite fascinating in itself. He was an illegitimate child (his father has seduced a servant) who was eventuality adopted by his father (!) and called Forgèére (which means fern). His father wanted him to escape military conscription, so the boy was sent to Mill Grove in he United States in 1803. He became a US citizen and there met his wife Lucy Bakewell.
The book actually begins in 1820 with Audubon and two other men sailing on the Mississippi river. They hit bad weather but all he cares about are his drawings.
Then we jump back to 1812 in Kentucky. Audubon climbs into a tree to study the swallows who are living in it–some 9,000. He took home more than 100 birds to study them. And then he tagged some others to study their migratory patterns.
As the end of the book points out, Audubon was one of the world’s greatest naturalists who did a lot for birding. Except he was also responsible for the death of thousands of birds. There’s a section where he kills two ivory billed woodpeckers. He is so excited at his luck because they are becoming a rarity. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 