Kandinsky is a very famous abstract painter who helped to revolutionize people's thinking about what painting is all about. He likes to paint with simple lines with basic colors and unexpected collocation of patterns. His paintings look disorganized but that is an illusion. He would carefully proportion his lines, his patterns and match them with pleasing color combinations. One always finds elements of play and good humor in his paintings. In 1928, he created certain visual effects to accompany Mussorsky's Pictures at an Exhibition in which the composer originally recorded different kinds of feelings evoked in his mind when he went to an exhibition in Russia. But the work cannot properly be called programme music because the relations between his music and the paintings he saw are far more tenuous. The pictures serves more as a jumping board for the composer's imagination. Whilst Rudy was hammering away or lightly and quickly running his fingers over the piano keyboard along with the rhythm of the music, we had flashed upon a huge screen at the concert hall various pictures by Kandinsky, first one then another and sometimes different parts of the same picture in red, blue, yellow, green, white and black but always, the speed at which changes and focus on the relevant images shifted would match very closely the speed of the piano playing, thus reinforcing the impact of the music. Baudelaire had spoken of the ability of certain artists to visualize different colors when they listen to different sonic patterns, a phenomenon he calls "synesthesia". The co-ordinated sonic-visual animation experience we were exposed to is a material exemplar of such a theory: we had not only a purely musical but also a rare visual experience too. I love it. It was simply marvelous. The colors and the dynamism of the visual images add immeasurably to the enjoyment of the waves of percussive music fluttering, pushing, charging, storming, bobbing, gliding out under the sound board of the grand piano. No wonder it went on tour all over the world. I post below a short u-tube presentation of one of the animations of certain of Kandinsky's paintings so that readers may have an idea of what I experienced that evening although that was not exactly what I saw last Saturday.
The first half of the programme was however much more conventional. We had piano selections from three different 20th century Russian composers. First we had some very atmospheric pieces from the musical mystic Scriabin, who likes to write music with plenty of light notes played on those keys close to the end of the right hand side of the piano with very few strong notes on the bass side, thus giving the music a very ethereal feel, something which was extremely well brought out by Rudy who would enter and leave the stage in a kind of effortless glide, his feet hardly touching the ground, with a faraway look on his face as if his mind was not really in the concert hall but somewhere in outer space. We had Scriabin's Two Dances Op 73: the Guirland and Flammes Sombres,which were followed by his Poème Vers la Flame Op. 72.
Next we had two works by Profofiev: his Prelude No.7 Op 12 and then two piano transcriptions from his ballet Romeo and Juliet which I just saw last week. The two pieces of ballet music were the famous Balcony scene and the Montagues and the Capulets, with its very dissonant and solemn march-like sound. Then we had three piano transcriptions of Stravinsky's musical burlesque, the Petrushka which are usually played together: the music from the first, the second and the fourth scenes, done with Rudy's own transcription. Rudy played very well. The sudden changes of musical motifs, the sudden switches in rhythm, speed and intensity of notes and of moods in the music of Prokofiev and Stravinsky was beautifully captured. As encore, he played two of the excerpts from Mussorsky's work. It was really worth every minute of my long journey all the way to Shatin. I have no complaints.
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