Roulette
Lisa Moore Concert - piano, sampler and keyboard with guests So Percussion

I have heard Lisa perform before at the Bang on a Can Marathon so was pleased to be able to hear a more extensive concert with her. I was not disappointed. Her playing, what she choose to play and the ambience surrounding her were all great. All the composers, except Fredrick Rzewski, there and each gave a brief introduction to their composition. She performed two pieces by Annie Gosfield: “Lightening Slingers and Dead Ringers” and “Brooklyn October 5, 1941” about a World Series baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the NY Yankees. Baseballs instead of fingers were used on the keyboard and inside the piano to create the sounds. She is a favorite composer of mine. “Orizzonte” (Horizon - where the sky and sea meet) by Missy Mazzoli was written to merge improvisation and composition. The notes are all scored but the tempos are free. Rzewski’s “To His Coy Mistress” is a lovely gentle piece and a big surprise as his music, at least what I have heard, is usually not that. Lisa sang the lovely poem “To His Coy Mistress”, a metaphysical poem written by the British author and statesman Andrew Marvell (1621–1678). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_His_Coy_Mistress. David Lang’s “Wed” was also a lovely and quiet piece of music. He told us he that there are a series of pieces written in memory of people who have died. This movement was for friends who were married at a hospital bedside. It was sad and sweet. The final two pieces were by Martin Bresnick. The first was “Willie’s Way” about Willie Dixon. It was written for Paul Dresher in 1968. On Bresnick’s website he talks about his inspiration - in part he says: “In the spring of 1968 I was sitting, not completely in my right mind, at a table in a very large house in Palo Alto rented by a group of Stanford medical students. These future doctors were then my very own merry pranksters and I had often tagged along while they tried radical politics, communal living, vegetarian foods, medical school laboratory pharmaceuticals, even raising a lion cub. On this night, after a meal of randomly exotic foods and sundry medications, they retired leaving me alone in the immense dining room, while a recording I had never heard before (oh Ginger, Jack and Eric!) gradually invaded every neuron of my not so slowly blowing mind. As I stared intently at the remains of a dinner that in my peculiar state resembled a disorderly old Dutch Master's still-life, a basic blues grew relentlessly from elemental simplicity into melodic improvisations worthy of a south Indian master, and the blues pulse multiplied into an infinity of polyrhythmic patterns, and the individual lines became a counterpoint that extended above and beyond the fifth species, and then, finally, when after a shattering climax of impassioned instrumental virtuosity Willie Dixon's great tune returned, I knew I had heard something I would never forget -that spoon, that spoon,that - spoonful. The final piece of the night was “Caprichos Enfáticos: Los Desastres de la Guerra” (Emphatic Caprices: The Disasters of War) It is a concerto in 8 movements for piano/keyboard and percussion quartet commissioned by Meet the Composer for Lisa Moore, pianist, and So Percussion. The 8 movements are accompanied by interpolated DVD projections, created by Johanna Bresnick based on Francisco Goya’s book of etchings Los Destastres de la Guerra. The titles of the 8 movements are either by Goya himself, or suggested by his ideas. We heard 3 of the 8 movements: “Estragos de la Guerra” (The Ravages of War), “Estrana Devocion” (Strange Devotion),“Farandula de Populacho” (Farandole of the Rabble). A farándula, or farandole, was a chain dance popular in Provence, although it’s origins are much older. The dance is often in 6/8 time, with a moderate to fast tempo. The music and the Goya drawings shown on a screen behind the musicians were dramatic and powerful.