zahab at the frick

Roger Zahab (violin) and Rob Frankenberry (piano) gave a duo recital tonight at the Frick Fine Arts Building on the Pitt Campus. This is a nice, small, intimate space, well-suited for chamber music. But, like all the campus venues the Pitt Music Dept. has at its disposal, this room is also a multi-purpose lecture/recital hall. (Of interest to some is the fact that the piano in this space belonged to the late composer and conductor Robert Black.) Normally an acoustically sound room, tonight’s event was “colored” by the popping speakers that are controlled behind a locked door. I recorded the event and captured the hall's pops.

Roger compared this to a recital on the sea shore; I thought it sounded like an old phonograph. At any rate, it was a very Cage-ian experience because the “noise” of the speakers created a counterpoint to all of the works that their composers did not intend. This backdrop annoyed me the most when I was attentively listening to the quiet moments (especially in Roger’s viola solo, “secret device”). In the louder moments, the speakers were hardly noticeable. At the end of each work, especially following Aaron Copland’s “Two Ballads,” the speakers seemed to give an approving electronic applause.

Roger sometimes describes his performances as resembling “informances.” He approaches each piece on its own terms, striving to find its communicative essence. In this way, his recitals are more of his imparting information (from the composer) to the audience. He makes the music the focus. It is less about his performance and more about the ideas the composers are imparting.

What is always exciting about Roger’s recitals as an audience memeber are the breadth of the composers represented. he gives a multifaceted picture of contemporary music, never afraid to push his or his audience’s aesthetic limits. This is a good thing for music. Too often it seems as if new music outlets are subsumed by a particular group’s subset of friends or a single aesthetic vision.

The program from tonight, titled “Transnational Composers in America”:

• Nketia, “Three Ghanian Airs” (1962)
• Zahab, “secret device” (2000)
• Nytch, “Lyric Suite: Reflections on Carl Sandburg” (1993)
• Zahab, “Enfolding Studies” (1996)
• Copland, “Two Ballads” (1957)
• Mamlock, “From My Garden” (1983)
• Moe, “Flex Time” (2005)
• Vali, “Caligraphy no.5” (2003)
• Rosenblum [arr. Zahab], “RedDust Motes” (2007)
• Zahab, entelechron lullabye (2005)