On 5 February 1996
during the Ligeti Festival at the Royal
Conservatoire in The Hague, the stage
in the Kees van Baarenzaal was occupied
by a pair of player pianos, and we were
treated to a fascinating live concert
of works by Nancarrow and Ligeti under
the gentle guidance of Jürgen Hocker.
The player piano as used then and here
is a conventional looking grand, but
as the underneath view in the booklet
of this new CD shows, the whole thing
is not only the usual mass of strings
and hammers, but is also filled with
a substantial air pump and a mass of
tubes. With the live recording I still
have from Hocker’s concert, you can
clearly hear the click of the switch
and build up of air pressure at the
beginning of each piece. In this new
recording, a pump was placed outside
the recording location, and the performances
are as a result almost entirely mechanically
silent. I was delighted to see that
these recordings use instruments from
Jürgen Hocker’s collection, and
that the detailed but easily followed
booklet notes are from his hand.
The Player Piano is
now thought of as more or less an obsolete
instrument, pushed aside by the more
convenient or exciting media of gramophone
records, radio and film. I’ve been to
the Pianola Museum in Amsterdam, and
know about the fascinating reproductions
we can still hear, played ‘live’ by
composers like Grieg and Busoni on the
Welte-Mignon system. With a well prepared
instrument and mechanism it can be quite
unnerving, watching the keys react exactly
as they were touched by long dead legends.
I also remember one of those famous
New Year concerts in the Concertgebouw,
where an invisible Horowitz was supposed
to appear on stage, his aura followed
by a spotlight to a player piano. Unfortunately
the instrument ‘played up’ rather than
playing ball, or it might have been
Chopin. A technician had to run onto
the stage to fix the thing, and by the
time the music started Horowitz’ aura
had given up the ghost, and was already
in the bar sipping lukewarm tea. Humour
belongs to the player piano, as it did
to Nancarrow: in all of those photos
he is laughing like a drain, and the
more solemn, sensitively thoughtful
profile of the more youthful Conlon
on the cover of these new MDG CDs is
quite a surprise.
While performances
and arrangements of Nancarrow’s work
for live players and ensembles become
increasingly frequent and more popular,
recordings of his original piano rolls
have been relatively elusive. I had
always thought there was something weird
sounding about the Wergo recordings
of Nancarrow’s work for player piano
(WER 6907 2), and the booklet notes
in this new release tells us why. Due
to technical difficulties with Nancarrow’s
preferred instrument, a second one was
used which had no felt on the hammers.
Player piano can sound unyielding enough,
especially for those of us used to the
expressive qualities in our human player
favourites, but compared to these new
recordings the 1988 Wergo versions sound
a bit like pub-piano Nancarrow. Recorded
in the composer’s studio in Mexico,
they also have a slightly home-made
feel, whereas this new disc has a more
satisfyingly concert hall acoustic:
nothing which obscures any detail, but
with an aura of resonance which gives
the notes some extra breathing space.
Apparently, the de-felted piano used
on the Wergo recordings was kept by
Nancarrow for certain special studies,
but over the span of his entire oeuvre
the thin, pingy effect, while having
its own charm, can be a little wearing
after a while. That is not to say that
the piano used on this recording is
full-fat Bösendorfer. Nancarrow’s
work requires a remarkable degree of
clarity, and so the hammers have been
prepared with hardened felt – the results
having being approved by Nancarrow from
recordings made during earlier concert
tours. These are the hammers used on
this CD. Remarkably, this new MDG series
contains the premiere recordings of
a number of the Studies on an original
Ampico player piano, in this instance
the Study No.30 from around 1965,
which, using prepared piano strings,
sounds like John Cage being thrown around
inside a tumble-dryer.
Nancarrow’s early career
involved him in jazz music, and rhythms
and harmonic inflections can sometimes
be heard shooting through the earlier
studies. Born in Texas in 1912, he became
a political activist and fought against
Franco in the Spanish Civil War. On
his return to the States he was persona
non grata as a result of this, and
thus he ended up in Mexico. He worked
in complete isolation, using the mechanical
medium of the player piano to realise
highly complex musical ideas, some of
which would, even with today’s Olympic
standards still be unplayable by a live
performer. Study No. 21 is one
of the most famous examples of this:
a two part canon in which the voices
are led in opposing velocities – at
their quickest more than four tones
per second. Studies No.24 and
the incredible No. 25 are others
in which the notes become breathtakingly
dense, and the statistic of Nancarrow’s
only being able to produce around five
minutes of music in a year becomes believable,
especially when you consider that he
was working meticulously slowly with
a hand punch, and working to measurements
which can permit no error.
If you don’t know these
works, then this could be just the moment
to give them a try. You may be in for
the shock of your life! Nancarrow’s
is a remarkable, unique voice which
has had its influence on composers,
and who was especially admired by György
Ligeti. If you like Ligeti’s ‘hobbling’
rhythms then you will certainly appreciate
those of Nancarrow, Nancarrow’s studies
are explorations of canon, acceleration
and deceleration, velocity and the teasing
manipulation of time and tempo. Often
strict in their working out of counterpoint
and rhythmic relationships, they can
also be rhapsodic, sometimes using highly
expressive and intense harmony. You
might find it all a bit hard on the
brain to start with, and I do admit
it can be an idiom which takes some
education of the ears – not because
the music is unapproachable, but because
the speed and intensity of the material
requires a different kind of listening,
a concentration to which you might not
be accustomed. Dipping into a collection
like this is a fair approach, but while
you will inevitably be drawn to favourites
after a while playing the whole thing
is less of an ordeal than you might
expect. More surprisingly, the numerical
order which Nancarrow gave to these
studies works very well in programming
terms, and avoids the tedious hunting
one has to do with the Wergo set.
Volume 1 contains Studies
1-12, and this new series from MDG is/will
be very much the one to have. I can
sense collectors and music libraries
globally breathing a collective sigh
of relief that we finally have a decent
record of this unique body of inspired
musical creation.
Dominy Clements
MUSIKPRODUKTION
DABRINGHAUS UND GRIMM 645 1403-2 [68:10]
