Toy Pianos Rule!
Instead of going the normal course to hear ICE’s great duos of flute & flute (Wired) and bass clarinet & sax (Lowfirm), I went up to the Fine Arts Building to hear Phyllis Chen play toy piano in PianoForte’s experimental piano series.
Phyllis played three pieces for solo toy piano by Karlheinz Essl, Fabian Svennson and Andrian Pertout. I doubt any readers of this would be familiar with these pieces. But by toy piano standards, they were very good.
The fourth piece was by Phyllis herself. She ’s mastered the art of hand-punching music-box paper to play along with the toy piano. “Carousel” was fascinating because it demonstrated that a good musician can crank a music box with her left hand while playing melody with her right.
For the last two pieces of toy piano, Phyllis was joined by her friend of many years, Alex Peh. They played pieces by Takuji Kawai and David Smooke. Wow, four hands banging on toy pianos! Very cool.
Phyllis is playing real piano December 18th & 19th 8pm at Epiphany
Episcopal Church, 201 S Ashland with cellist Sophie Webber and a multi-media show with dancer Ben Delaney. The music will be by Britten, Shostakovich, Part and Nagy.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR.
As is the custom, the second half of the Experimental Series is jazz.
Steve Cohn improvised on the piano for about 10 minutes then was joined by Christopher Preissing on Flute, Guillermo Gregorio on clarinets, and Dan Godston on trumpet. There were two long sets.
During the second set Steve played a couple of miscellaneous instruments like bamboo flutes and an autoharp. Meanwhile the flutist was playing a chopped-off flute with his finger up the tube to make sounds like a tin-whistle. That was new to me, and the jazz set wasn’t too shabby.
I’d say it was a worthwhile substitute for ICE. I stopped by MoCP on my way home to say hello the the ICE Crew. They were very gracious and knew about the double booking. So it’s live-and-let-live in the new music circle.
Bruce Oltman
