Pianist makes most of minimalism
Pianist Bruce Brubaker played his first faculty recital at the New England Conservatory Tuesday night, offering a program of minimalist music, or at least of music related to minimalism. He proved an elegant advocate, without, perhaps, convincing everyone that such a program was a good idea. He wasn't doing missionary work, but preaching to the converted.
The program leaflet included two full pages devoted to Brubaker's biography, and not a word about the music, so the lanky pianist offered a few observations -- one wished he had said more. Philip Glass was represented by "Mad Rush," a quiet piece, a little like a Schubert song accompaniment, and, at encore time, by "Metamorphosis II," which presents a melody in octaves which alternate with ornamental figurations which rapidly whirl around the same outline. It was quite haunting.
John Cage's "Dream" is pretty, and Brubaker played it with subtlety of touch and dynamic gradation. What the composer was dreaming about was evidently Debussy's "Reverie," but without the melody.
Brubaker described Alvin Curran's "Hope Street Tunnel Blues III" by calling it "piano playing as extreme sport." Chords rapidly alternating between the two hands depict the rapid movement of a locomotive, of a train headed west; the pinkies of each hand etch a clashing harmony. The piece goes on past any normal point of exhaustion for performer or listener. The very end bursts into a railroad blues, after which it was the audience's turn to erupt.
John Adams's "Phrygian Gates" (1977) has emerged as a classic of the genre. Brubaker argued it is actually closer to Beethoven than it is to Glass. Brubaker played it with an enviable command of voicing and texture and an extraordinary crescendo of volume and excitement toward the overwhelming end which then evaporates without resolving the harmonic conflict.
One lesson of this recital was that minimalism, like every other kind of music, profits from the most sensitive and expert performance, and Brubaker at his best achieved a blissful stasis through ceaseless motor movement and suspended time by focusing on iridescent detail as it flashed by.
Bruce Brubaker, piano
At: Jordan Hall, Tuesday night
