December 20, 2009: A virtual rendering of a non-standard concert

When Pictures Reframed was given its world premiere in New York, New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini felt it was necessary to begin his November 16 review with the back-story:

The remarkable Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is a self-effacing, substantive and completely unflashy artist. You would not peg him as someone curious to explore multimedia and reinvent the piano recital.

Yet several years ago Mr. Andsnes approached Jane Moss, the vice president for programming at Lincoln Center, to propose collaborating with a visual artist on a performance of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Ms. Moss embraced the idea as being ideal for New Visions, part of the Great Performers series. After some searching, she introduced Mr. Andsnes to the South African-born video artist Robin Rhode.

The product of that collaboration, “Pictures Reframed,” an intriguing multimedia piano recital 80 minutes long without intermission, was presented at Alice Tully Hall on Friday night. It was the first of two performances, and the place was packed.

Astute readers may wonder how Andsnes managed to take 80 minutes to perform Pictures at an Exhibition;  and, fortunately, he didn't.  Here is Tommasini's account of the rest of the program:

… childhood was the theme of the “Pictures Reframed” program, which included three other works as well as two short Rhode videos without music. Mr. Andsnes began by playing the two existing pieces from Mussorgsky’s incomplete 1865 suite “Memories of Childhood.” “Nurse and I” was a Mozartean delight depicting the composer’s childhood nurse. But “First Punishment: Nurse Shuts Me in a Dark Room,” is a hard-edged, driving toccata that reveals the nurse’s ominous side.

In another fitting selection Mr. Andsnes offered a ravishing account of Schumann’s “Kinderscenen” (“Scenes From Childhood”), played with affecting directness, impressive clarity and vivid imagination. “What becomes,” a new work by the Austrian composer Thomas Larcher in its premiere performance, though often turbulent and volatile, also fitted the overall theme and was accompanied by video. This 20-minute, six-movement piece ranged over diverse styles, with stretches of postmodern harmonies that recalled the bucolic Copland and fantastical episodes that included pitches, thuds and scratches produced from altered strings on the piano. Mr. Andsnes dispatched the piece, which climaxes in a hell-bent, frenetic scherzo, with brilliant pianism and cool authority.

Prior to coming to New York, Andsnes gave a special preview at his Risør Chamber Music Festival in Norway.  The performance took place in a warehouse to accommodate the special staging needs, and the event was captured on video.  The house appears to have been as packed as it was in Lincoln Center.

Those staging needs provided the first clue to the "reframing" that took place.  Above Andsnes and his grand piano hung a large screen on which Rhode's videos were projected.  Both piano and screen were surrounded by five decorative panels that "framed" the presentation area.  The effect is one of a single "picture" on a very grand scale;  and it was immediately clear that both the magnitude of the scale and the nature of the images on the screen were beyond the scope of today's video capture technology.  So the "raw" video was then processed by a crack editing team into a document of the Pictures portion of event that included Rhode's source material and considerable close-up footage of Andsnes.  The result is now being offered in a package that includes the edited video on DVD, a CD of Andsnes' performances of all of the Mussorgsky selections (and two other short works) and the Schumann Kinderscenen, and a coffee table book of Rhode's images.  Meanwhile, Andsnes has just completed his European tour of the show first given in Lincoln Center;  and two more performances are scheduled for March:  one in Beijing and one in Abu Dhabi.

The most important thing to bear in mind in approaching the video is that any resemblance between Rhode's imagery and the paintings by Victor Hartmann that inspired Mussorgsky are purely coincidental.  This was very much a collaboration with Andsnes, which may be just as well since Andsnes took some pretty major departures of his own from Mussorgsky's original text, at least as documented in the complete edition published by the Soviet Union in 1939.  There are time when it sounds as if Andsnes is more interested in going after the sound of Maurice Ravel's orchestration than after the original notes, and his approach has provoked more than a little wrath from the purist crowd.  Thus, one needs to approach the work with a willingness to accept it on its own terms.

Unfortunately, the video editing does not facilitate that approach very well.  The biggest problem is that we really do not see enough of the video for it to take full effect.  Some of this, ironically, may have been a problem with the high-definition (HD) technology.  The HD aspect ratio required that Rhode's videos appear to the side of the shots of Andsnes.  Had this video been produced with the old-fashioned (pre-HD) American aspect ratio, there would have been perfect screen space for the video to appear above Andsnes, exactly the way audiences saw it.

Furthermore, with all due respect to Andsnes and his performance technique, there is just too much of him.  The amount of screen time given exclusively to Rhode's video sources is thoroughly dwarfed by shots of Andsnes from every conceivable angle, including far too many shots of the face staring pensively into space.  (I never found myself thinking about this at any Andsnes performance I have attended.)  The resulting DVD thus makes it far more difficult to accept this project on its own terms than would be the case at an actual performance.

The back of the CD includes the following quote from Andsnes:

You have to challenge the status quo.

I agree entirely.  At the same time I remember Merce Cunningham, the choreographer who spent his entire career challenging the status quo.  Cunningham had an even more memorable quote:

Sometimes it works;  sometimes it doesn't.

When things didn't work for Cunningham, he would move on and try something else.  There is so much creative imagination in both Andsnes and Rhode that I hope they have no trouble with moving on, either together or each in his preferred direction.