| SO WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT?
21st November 2009
The Times preview: Leif Ove Andsnes combines music and visual art
Mussorgsky’s mighty piano work is to be played against a backdrop of modern video art. But will the gamble pay off? Plenty of artists have worked to a musical soundtrack. Eugène Delacroix palled around with Frédéric Chopin, discussing into the small hours the relative rankings of the great composers. Edouard Manet regularly dined with the French composer Emmanuel Chabrier, above whose mantelpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergère hung and in whose arms the great painter died. Kandinsky corresponded with Schoenberg; Picasso collaborated with Satie, Matisse with Stravinsky and so on. Yet one of the most successful meetings of artistic minds was also the most unequally weighted in talent. From the dainty, impressionistic images by the little-known Russian painter Viktor Hartmann sprung his compatriot and close friend Modest Mussorgsky’s mighty, lurching piano masterpiece, the suite named Pictures at an Exhibition.
When the Lincoln Centre came to the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes looking for a way to combine the visual and the musical arts, Andsnes suggested that they take a new spin of the artistic wheel with Mussorgsky’s Pictures. This they did. After a crash course in contemporary art — by his own admission, not Andsnes’s forte before the project began — and several days of fraught auditions, Andsnes plumped for the up-and-coming South African artist Robin Rhode, 33 — whose music choice is less Grieg than gangsta rap. The resulting video piece will be screened live alongside Andsnes’s concert performance as Pictures Reframed at the Royal Festival Hall on December 4, accompanying the release of Andsnes’s new recording on EMI.
So what can you expect? Something that enhances and departs from Rhode’s trademark methods. The artist is best known for his playful photographs and videos of large-scale line drawings, into which he will then incorporate himself. Popular pieces include him jacking a car and dunking a basketball. In Pictures Reframed these effects have been adapted into a bigger, more Baroque vision. Piano wires ripped from the piano are made to walk and dance; a clunking great disused train rolls into a disused station; a grand piano is submerged by the watery torrents of the North Sea; and a man in a dinner jacket walks awkwardly over a canvas of cocaine.
Actually, I am not quite sure about that last one. The singer and rapper Kanye West — a Rhode fan — had blogged about the project and underneath his post a suggestion was made that the chalky white lines in one of the videos were cocaine. “People were writing all kinds of crazy stuff, saying that you must have been drugged,” Andsnes says about Rhode. Rhode laughs guiltily. OK, let’s get this straight, Rhode wasn’t high on drugs when he came up with these ideas, was he? There’s an awkward silence, a suppressed smile from Rhode and a hesitant “No”, followed by plenty of joking that he was.
Well, he wouldn’t have been the first. Mussorgsky is likely himself to have been under the influence when he originally wrote the piece. Modest by name, not by nature, Mussorgsky was a drunk (thus the big red nose in the famous portrait), resulting perhaps in the errors in this and many of his scores and, as Andsnes admits, a lack of a lot of pianistic detail. As a result, it’s the sort of work that can be played around with and added to, most famously in the orchestrated version by Ravel (now far more commonly performed than the original piano piece). So as well as a jazzy new set of images, here comes Andsnes’s slightly jazzed-up score. “It’s not like a Mozart sonata, where if you add a note it sounds wrong,” Andsnes says. “With this, change something and it will survive. It even survived Rhode.”
Perhaps inevitably for a black artist who grew up in apartheid South Africa, subversion is the chief tool of Rhode’s artistic manner, both of the political and Chaplinesque sort. He chalks up a car on a wall or floor and attempts to change its tyre. He draws a urinal on the South African Parliament exterior and urinates in it. He performs these live or films them, in black and white or in stop-frame. His interview is no different. There he is sitting mischievously before me, his trendy little moustache ever on the move, being flung up into the air and back by his expressive face, edgy-eyed, stop-framed, filled with ideas for japery. You can see why his star is in the ascendant; he recently had a show at the Hayward and White Cube simultaneously. His head is full of ideas, many vitally grand and clever. One wonders, however, whether he’s gambled too much on this latest throw of the dice. He’s backed out of all shows for half a year to concentrate on it. In the world of classical music, where energy, however exuberant, is still less well received than hard-earned quality, it has a high chance of failure. So maybe the question is: will Rhode survive the music?
One of the many ideas that might not have sunk the whole project was his obsession with “murdering a piano”. “I had brought up this very interesting idea that I had had for some years, which is to murder a piano,” he explains. “I’ve been trying to murder it for some years, either by stabbing it, suffocating it or hanging it. They proposed to drop it from a crane in this dry dock. I said, ‘No, drown it’.” Rhode, gripped by the avant-garde spirit of the Russian Constructivists and the Fluxus performance artists of the 1960s, is keen to have us rethink through deconstruction or murder. Unhinged ideas such as this were not a worry for Andsnes; literalism was far more so, as was a sense that certain scenarios needed to go at a certain speed, something that Rhode deliberately counteracted. “I had no choice but to go against it; I was tempted to go with it but just could not,” he says. And Andsnes had to follow. “I had this idea that certain movements need to have the rhythm,” he says. “But often Robin created something that went in a quite different direction, which was so interesting. It created a much better impression than if he had gone completely with it, which would have been a simple illustration of the music.” The result was gain and growth all round. “Working with Robin the work has become even greater for me,” Andsnes says. “Bydlo, for example, which is a sketch of a Polish ox-cart by Hartmann, in which Robin took the footage of a deserted railway station, added so many new layers to the movement. My horizons are so much bigger and I’ve ended up loving the work even more.” But will audiences? Noises off will grumble at such a staple-gunned union. Why do it, they will cry? Surely the whole point of Mussorgsky’s work is that it doesn’t need the pictures, the work being able to conjure them up itself. “People say that to me. And I completely agree that it isn’t needed,” Andsnes admits. “It’s not because this music needs it that I am doing this; it works well on its own. But it’s a piece that has always been in development — from Ravel’s orchestration, to Kandinsky’s concept for Gnomus, to the Bauhaus projects on it. And it was interesting to play with the friction of bringing video and music together.”
For the wide-eyed young Rhode, such artistic high diving is essential and sustaining. “The project has allowed me to create works that I probably would never have been able to have created,” he says. “As a young artist I am having to work from my own inherent history. In this case I am given a framework that carries all its own history. “I love to work like this, not just for myself, which most artists do, believing that ‘I am a f***ing priest’. No. I want to develop. I need to look. I need to experience. I need to be thrown into the deep end.”
Leif Ove Andsnes performs Pictures Reframed at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1, on December 4 (7.30pm & 9.30pm) with accompanying visuals by Robin Rhode (southbankcentre.co.uk). The Pictures Reframed CD and deluxe DVD edition are released by EMI Classics on November 30.
Igor Toronyi-Lalic, The Times, 21st November 2009
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