Arts: A bouquet of barbed twigs
Classical: JOANNA MACGREGOR; QEH, SBC LONDON
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Your support makes all the difference.I'LL SAY one thing for Joanna MacGregor - she didn't pretend to look pleased with the hideous sculpture of twigs and bits of gold wire she was given instead of flowers at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Tuesday.
Perhaps it echoed the theme of ironmongery in her programme, centred on John Cage's prepared piano - two instruments, to be precise: one with the elaborate array of bolts, screws and bits of rubber between the strings, specified for Cage's Sonatas and Interludes and yielding the effect of a ghostly band of bells and metallophones; the other with the simpler preparation of rubber that Cage used to simulate a small percussion group in Bacchanale.
MacGregor played the Sonatas and Interludes in the second half, bringing to these 20 placid and charming pieces her own characteristic sense of impetus. Ideally, they effect a mood of stillness, and you might expect the performer to embody discreet composure.
MacGregor could not forbear to amplify each modest musical event with a gesture and the effect was just a touch condescending, unnecessary.
The concert was a project, with five new pieces specially written for the more elaborately prepared piano, plus tape - or tabla in one case - and, as a sort of filling between them, very short electroacoustic pieces, or soundbites, by students at Liverpool Hope University College, where MacGregor gave a workshop on prepared piano early in the year. Since all these, as well as Bacchanale and another early Cage piece, The Perilous Night, were played continuously, it took a while for the audience to get their bearings.
Django Bates's You Live and Learn was identifiable from the taped vocals of his nine-year-old daughter and, if you were familiar with his work, you would soon have recognised the amiable playfulness of his style. Perhaps the playfulness is becoming a bit too cute, but it did point up the humourless tedium of the other pieces.
Deirdre Gribbin recorded her tape part in a Himalayan monastery and threw over its cavernous mumblings an insistent rattling on the piano. Jonathan Harvey should have known better than to take a work of genius - the fleeting last movement of Chopin's "Funeral March" Sonata - and then decompose it electronically, like an item in a guessing game. Andrew Toovey pitted syncopated stamping on tape against gamelan-like burbling on prepared piano, and Talvin Singh, on tabla, joined MacGregor in what seemed like an ear-tickling but unremarkable improvisation.
For this programme to have featured in the South Bank's International Piano Series is a sort of achievement. Very few pianists could have swung it, and even fewer could have attracted such a substantial audience. Yet as far as I'm concerned, it was an experiment that needn't be repeated.
Adrian Jack
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