Music review: The Firm presents Marianna Grynchuk

It as soon as was once that “new music” live shows had been boldly experimental affairs, with composers on a mission to problem (and taunt) audiences with something past the acquainted or remotely linked with custom. What invigorating experiences they had been – although the music itself typically made you need to duck for canopy.

My goodness how instances have modified. Out of the nebulous, directionless post-avant-garde scene of the Nineteen Nineties emerged The Agency, a particular Adelaide composer outfit which have made it their enterprise to chart a 180-degree in up to date artwork music. Led by Quentin (Quincy) Grant and Raymond Chapman Smith, they characteristically embrace the mellow, reassuring hues of Nineteenth-century romantic piano music, chamber music and Lied in a hope that this shall be composition’s future.

After quietly plying their craft for years, The Agency have declared their colors much more overtly by relocating to the North Adelaide Baroque Corridor (having primarily used Pilgrim Church and Elder Corridor prior to now). On this “new” venue, their transformation is full: inside this exceptional duplicate of an ornate European rococo chamber they introduced a salon live performance equivalent to Robert Schumann or Johannes Brahms would have recognised it.

One actually must set foot inside to understand what this Baroque Corridor is all about, however suffice to say it’s simply as excellent a house for intestine strings and harpsichords as it’s for the type of music The Agency produces.

Marianna Grynchuk was their first performer for 2023 in a live performance entitled The Fantasie. A marvellous Adelaide pianist making her return after a few years in Switzerland, she is in reality extra accustomed to taking part in customary repertoire than new music. However a lot the higher, contemplating what she was requested to play: latest items by Grant and Chapman Smith, together with others by Ukrainian composer Valentyn Silvestrov and Baroque Corridor’s designer and proprietor, Julian Cochran.

Of their subtly other ways, all these items had been echoes of a distant previous, eerily so on condition that they arrive from the twenty first century.

Each dawn by Grant was distinctive amongst them in suggesting visible imagery and states of moods as Romantic poetry would possibly. Its six “scenes” every generated a unique imaginative image via their intently shaped repeating rhythms. It appeared like a freed-up reinterpretation of minimalism (assume: Glass, Reich) however enriched by heat harmonies and ending affirmatively with a easy old style main chord.

Grynchuk performed this pretty work with unaffected grace; and the piano itself sounded effectively: pearly and even in tone however for a considerably recessed bass register.

Chapman Smith travels on a unique however parallel path, whereby he invokes the nice Romantic and pre-modern masters by incorporating signposts of their music inside his personal epigrammatic designs. It’s as if Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms magically reappear, however in a ghostly, spectral manner.

Bergseeklavier Teil I is a living proof. This 14-movement album piece sounds Brahmsian in its resonant chordal sonorities and roaming melodic phrasing; and its harmonic development is usually harking back to Schubert. At instances you hear additionally Chopin, and even a theme from Richard Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie materialises – the luxurious string melody “On Flowering Meadows”. These references are all there to admire however are frozen in time and tinged with nostalgia, significantly with the sensitivity and understanding that Grynchuk was in a position to carry.

With Cochran’s Fantasia No. 7 – Sul Settimo it was as if all three composers had converged on the identical floor. He, too, shares in a back-to-the-future imaginative and prescient, the distinction being that this ex-Adelaide composer takes on extra of the overtly emotional directness of Romantics equivalent to Chopin. A live performance pianist himself, he is aware of all about their grand rhetorical type and is ready to recreate it in his personal compositions. On the identical time, this proved an alluringly lavish however mysterious piece of its personal. Grynchuk, clearly an exponent of huge pianism, seized on it commandingly.

What a wonderful confection this live performance was turning out to be. An actual shock got here, although, with Silvestrov’s Zwei Dialoge mit Nachwort. Right here once more allusions to Chopin however accompanied by experimental results as effectively. Later on this piece, the pianist is required to achieve contained in the piano to pluck low notes: this got here as a weird, incongruous shock, however a reminder that modernism has not but been fully outlawed.

For a lot of this live performance, one felt caught in a timewarp – intriguing however disturbing. All of it got here to a head within the final merchandise, Liszt’s Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata (“Dante Sonata”), one of many piano repertoire’s most thunderous and titanic creations. The piece itself has one completely in its thrall if performed effectively, and Grynchuk delivered all its glories with sensational method and totally magnified expression. She is a real Lisztian, and a pianist Adelaide should hear once more on future events.

One might need imagined the Baroque Corridor could be barely large enough to deal with Liszt’s extremes of dynamics, nevertheless it did. However it additionally made you query which century we live in. Such, maybe, is the novelty of recent music live shows as of late.

Marianna Grynchuk carried out at North Adelaide Baroque Corridor on July 24. Particulars of different performances scheduled for The Agency’s 2023 season may be discovered right here.