| CHILDLIKE IMAGINATION IS AT THE PROGRAMME'S HEART
7th December 2009
The Times reviews the London concert
Mussorgsky may never be the same again as Pictures at an Exhibition is given the video treament by Andsnes and Robin Rhode
Pictures at an Exhibition; but this is not the Great Gate of Kiev at all. It’s a sluice-gate in a Bergen dock, and when the whirling water is let loose it engulfs and drowns a grand piano. So ends Pictures Reframed, a re-imagining of Mussorgsky’s Pictures by the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and the South African video artist Robin Rhode.
Mussorgsky may well never be the same again. Yet what Andsnes and Rhode are doing is a very Mussorgskian idea. The composer, when creating his Pictures at an Exhibition, spoke of seeing sounds and ideas floating in the air. And the influence of Mussorgsky’s friendship with the painter Viktor Hartmann permeates the musical tableaux.
But to begin at the beginning. Last year Rhode created a digital animation called Promenade, which shaped his vision for Pictures Reframed. So, as Andsnes strides out boldly, we watch a film of an illusionist walking upside down against a wall, his feet seeming to create a tower of rhomboid shapes which threatens to overwhelm him.
But we are never overwhelmed. Rhode’s film sequences — some graphic, some photographic — are nearly all in black and white and they wittily counterpoint rather than illustrate each “picture”. For Gnomus, Andsnes’s robust trilling is answered by coils of fine threads of piano wire, in an “abstract ballet”. And, just as Rhode seems to toy with elements of Russian Constructivism, so Andsnes, taking a leaf out of Vladimir Horowitz’s book, takes slight liberties with Mussorgsky’s piano writing in order to emphasise its folk inflections.
This makes for a less subtle and variegated performance than Andsnes might otherwise give; and some of the correspondences — such as the menacing railway lines for the chuntering oxcart progress of Bydlo — can be a little heavy. But mad moments of colour, such as the running hen in The Hut on Fowl’s Legs and the monochrome kaleidoscope of bank logos for Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle, are sheer delight.
The Times reviews the London performance
Childlike imagination is at the programme’s heart — so no surprise that the Mussorgsky is prefaced by Andsnes’s somewhat sturdy performance of Schumann’s Kinderszenen; and by the fantasy of What becomes, a teasing piano suite by Thomas Larcher, specially written for this project. With elements of plucking and prepared piano, it takes a virtuoso look back to the whimsical dreams of Schumann, and forward to the robust iconic energy of Mussorgsky.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/live_reviews/article6946422.ece
Hilary Finch, 7th December 2009, The Times
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