drunken minimalism
michael blake’s piano concerto enjoys the alternate title “rain dancing” and as the composer noted in his all too brief introduction to the world premiere performance of the work by the johannesburg philharmonic orchestra at the linder auditorium last night “it hasn’t rained this much in gauteng in october for years”.
the comment might have been made in jest but it actually gives an acute insight into what michael blake really is. a shaman. his componistic practices derive in equal parts from cinema editing and sculpture. he works with his computer timeline as a fine artist would, shaping and teasing form into wry, elfin sets of sound that skip away from balance and artfully elude perfection. there is a willful perversity in blake’s approach to sound. it’s as if he knows exactly what we would like to hear a motif develop into and instead of feeding us what we want he conjures up possibilities that are maddeningly close to our own sense of resolution but never quite get there.
blake is a carrot dangler and his sometimes fey, sometimes wistful melodies encourage us to hum, to whistle, and even occasionally, to jig - but never in a way that would actually release the tension that his compositions ever so gradually build towards.
the premiere performance of the work suffered slightly from a disparity in volume between the brass and piano, which tended to get drowned out too often, but intriguingly the rain concerto’s most memorable sections occur when percussion and strings talk to each other and the climax of the work is a full on joburg thunder storm. one expects the cavalry to charge, cannons blazing.
on the way to this zesty climax there’s a great deal of repetitive phrasing but it isn’t the kind of austere minimalism we know from steve reich or the agonizingly empty on and on-ness of philip glass; michael blake’s shamanism evokes the giddy swirling of the baal shem tov on shabbas, tossing back the vodkas and merrily dancing his praises to hashem. if you could imagine the most playful rigour or the most rigorous playfulness then you would be some way towards appreciating this shamanistic invocation by michael blake that demands to be described as drunken minimalism. rain on!
aryan kaganof
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