Goldstein
OLD GOLD AND BLACK REVIEWER
As a young child, I had a peculiar fantasy about crawling inside my grandparents' piano. Though perhaps not the typical youth, I still had a very childlike ability to stretch and amplify perspective into the sublime and boundless, along with a tremendous desire to play -- with a ball, a toy, yes, but also with ideas, transmuted into words, images and tones.
I imagined the boundless and the playful enjoying perfect synthesis within this massive piano.
Within its endless array of strings and unfathomable resonance, gravity fell away, the finite lost definition, all clocks liquefied into nothing, and I, suspended in space, made symphonies upon the great filaments with my own little hands.
Though much contemplated, the fantasy was never carried out, much to my timid chagrin and the piano's ignorant benefit.
Yet the evening of Nov. 5 in Brendle Recital Hall at the Scales Fine Arts Center, I received a stunning approximation of my youthful dream. Pianist Louis Goldstein, a professor of music, invited the audience, pillows in hand, to lie upon the stage and underneath the great Steinway itself as he performed the complete "Sonatas and Interludes" for prepared piano by the late American composer, theorist, and visionary John Cage.
The entire happening (a more inclusive title than "recital"),which quietly enthralled the audience, beautifully cultivated those two poles of the childish mind so potent in my fantasy: the chaotic order of play and the orderly chaos of imagination.
What more could one hope for from the composer who rediscovered in art the principle of the game, who "composed" from flips of a coin, from astral charts and amplified flora and fauna, whose most famous (or infamous) work bears no parameter more than the title "4'33"" (of silence).
"Mutes of various materials are placed between the strings of the piano keys used, thus effecting transformations of the piano sounds with respects to all of their characteristics." So Cage defined his prepared piano, itself a magnificent tribute to directed play.
The result of such toying with nuts and bolts, spoons and wooden blocks, is an utterly shocking redefinition of our Western old standard of instruments -- a cross of Balinese and African percussion orchestra and toy keyboard.
Needless to say, Goldstein presented the work magnificently; a tireless champion of American music of our century, he has performed the entire cycle many times and has recently recorded it.
As would any friend of Cage's music, Goldstein has an extraordinary sense of the power and variance of silence, of that second of active space which reverses expectation or changes boredom inexplicably into awe. Along with this subsonic virtuosity was given a full sensuality which other players have seemed reticent to reveal with concern for preservation of the title "avant-garde."
Strangely enough, these pieces still sound remarkably fresh and strange long after the old avant-garde has become the embarrassing reminder of obsolete stylistic panaceas.
Cage shows us that our juvenile pinings are ultimately redemptive.
The fundamental seeds of childhood: the tinker, the improvisation, the game, the mind and body at play, all embody the creative act, that which in the face of ubiquitous entropy and decay continues to order and synthesize, to give life, to redeem.
Joined to the inimitable chaos of the child's unfettered imagination, this union achieves through art that most eternal of all human desires: a finite way of experiencing the infinite.
Cage's "Sonatas and Interludes" eloquently spoke of this, all the more beautifully in the hands of Goldstein -- even more so `neath the bowels of the very instrument, with eyes closed in ecstatic wonder.
One may now approximate this rapt experience with Goldstein's superb new recording of the work, available at the campus book store and Now Hear This in Reynolda Village.
If you find purchasing a Steinway to snuggle under too opulent a venture, Goldstein recommends "laying down with (your) ears close to speakers playing at low volume." Happy redeeming.