Pianist Yuja Wang recently detoured from playing big music in big venues – remember her Rachmaninoff marathon in January at Carnegie Hall? – to present a solo program, of music ranging from Bach to Boulez, at “Bigger and Closer,” an exhibition of works by the British artist David Hockney, in which images of his paintings are projected onto the walls of the King’s Cross Lightroom in London.
Music critics were admitted to the show on condition that they not review what was described as an experimental performance. Among those admitted was Norman Lebrecht, the veteran classical critic/reporter/gadfly, who has broken the no-review pledge because “I felt that what I was witnessing . . . might actually be the future of concerts for the rest of the century.”
Writing in the UK magazine The Critic, Lebrecht reports that the audience’s “[c]oncentration was intense and, since no word was printed about the music, each successive piece was greeted with an audible gasp of curiosity, appreciation or perplexity,” the latter perhaps provoked by “two-cam video of Yuja’s hands on the keyboards, legs on the pedals. Her presence was projected in this way as part of the artwork but, rather than distracting from Hockney or the music she played, it enhanced them both with further associations.”
Wang’s experiment “harnesses visual technology to play music in three dimensions for all five senses,” Lebrecht writes. “We have reached a point in the performing arts where concerts are half-deserted while art shows sell out years in advance. Fuse them and see what happens.”
http://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2023/have-i-seen-the-future-of-music/
Music-making in visual-art spaces is not new – museum concerts have been staged for more than a century. Music made to complement visual art is not new; examples range from Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (1874) to Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” (1971). Collaborations between visual artists and musicians, from album covers to multimedia shows, are also old news.
Wang’s production was something else. According to Lebrecht, the pianist, after seeing the exhibition, “decided that Hockney could be even more effective with music” and assembled a playlist for it. Hockney apparently was not consulted or otherwise involved. Have the two ever met? What might he think of images of her playing projected onto images of his paintings?
Instead of a collaboration, this was more like an appreciation, or maybe akin to a critique by analogy rather than technical appraisal, a common practice among critics writing for non-specialist readers. The analogies in this case were couched not in words but in sounds. Wang responded to Hockney’s images with music, most of it by composers who died long before the artist was born.
Did Lebrecht witness “the future” of the classical recital? A future, perhaps, promising only if musicians are competent curators, demonstrating a real appreciation of the art they mean to reflect in sound.
I’m reminded of an old saw about my trade: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” In today’s no-limits cultural climate, I’m sure there are dances about architecture; but do they do justice to the two very different art forms?
I discussed the relationships (or not) of music and other art forms in a 2006 article for New Music Box:
The Impossible Case of Seeing Music
Letter V 