No great program coherence, but a fine portrait of Joanna Ma
Discophage | France | 10/09/2008
(4 out of 5 stars)
"First, the packaging: lavish and trendy. A cardboard box in which a twofold is inserted, and therein an 18-page booklet with liner notes, color and black and white photos inside of urban or country landscapes, of some of the composers, of MacGregor's hands on the keyboard. Each piece gets its presentation, written by MacGregor herself.
The content? A journey through various repertoire of various styles, mostly contemporary but with forays into Byrd (pensive and touching set of variations), Dowland (his Forlorn Hope Fancy sounds like it's been excerpted from Bach's Art of the Fugue) and Bach (Allemande from the 4th Partita). All small snippets (longest is 7:30, shortest 1:30 and that's Cage's Sonata), adding up to a TT of 67:24. Some of the contemporary compositions are joint collaborations between MacGregor and the composer: the tabla player Talvin Singh, the South African band leader Moses Taiwa Milelekwa. Some are reissues from earlier MacGregor discs, namely Singh's Endgame and Cage's Sonata 5 for prepared piano (from Sound Circus SC003 "Perilous Night", now out of print and listed on the UK sister company under ASIN B00004L8JA, a project around Cage's Sonatas and Interludes in which composers were asked to write for the same preparations used by Cage) and Nancarrows Player Piano Study n° 11 (from Collins' "Counterpoint" which brought together Bach's Art of the Fugue and Nancarrow's Three Canons and three studies performed by MacGregor's human fingers, Counterpoint - Joanna Macgregor - Bach Art of Fugue BWV 1080, Nancarrow Three Canons for Ursula Studies for Player Piano 3c 6 11 (Collins)). I find those duplications a bit frustrating. Moses Taiwa Molelekwa's Strumming is a live recording made in Cape Town. Its inclusion there, on track 7, with announcement and a little introductory speech by Millekwa, is a little jarring, I find, as it breaks the fine continuity that arises beyond the different styles and epochs that are surveyed.
Among the contemporary, all kinds of styles: jazz with Molelekwa/MacGregor's Strumming (despite the liner notes, the strumming owes more to Cowell than to Cage I find) and whiffs of it, mixed with pounding references to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, in Nicolson's 42nd St. Stomp, Tango with Piazzola's Libertango (with a recording of Piazzola talking dubbed over - a questionable idea I think, as you get more a concept than the music), rhythmic and dynamic Dance Music in MacGregor's own "Dance it", combination of Indian-tabla and contemporary prepared piano techniques in Singh/MacGregor's Endgame, repetitive in the style of Glass-Adams (steady and simple but atmospheric harmonic progressions) with Satoh (great washes of notes, like the strings of space) and Skempton (less of them), conceptual with Ivana Ognjanovic's "Ship in Embrace of the Endless Dark Ocean", an eerie, wild and sometimes violent quasi-opera for piano, reciter (in Serbian, but translations are provided, and anyway it doesn't matter much if you don't understand: the voice is used more for color than meaning) and tape (the beginning uses a short dramatic moment from Debussy's La Mer) describing the journey and wreckage of a large ship, and the resulting moans of the dead souls. All are pleasant, but my favorites are Ligeti's mysterious, atmospheric and multi-layered Autumn in Warsaw from the fist book of his Piano Studies, Satoh's Incarnation, Singh/MacGregor's encounter of Cage-Crumb and Indian music, Nancarrow's wild boogie, Cage's enigmatic and poetic sound world.
I might have wished for a more coherent program (how `bout "Elizabethan to minimalist music"? A complete piano music of Satoh also would be a nice endeavor - but I see that Margaret Leng Tan has been there already, Litania - Margaret Leng Tan plays Somei Satoh), but as it is this is a fine portray of MacGregor.
"
Track Listings (15) - Disc #1