Venue: Mestni muzej/Ljubljana
Concert date: 03.07.2008
Attendance: 30
Ticket price: 0
Classical music that isn’t classical!
On Friday, a lucky few of us at Mestni muzej got to witness the presentation of the upcoming record from Milko Lazar (you can read an interview with him HERE) and Bojan Gorišek. The music is the work of Milko Lazar, who always surprises with something new. The two have been working together for a long time and have even put out an album called Dva Klavirja. I knew that if the music was even half as good as on that release, a great experience was guaranteed. But it turned out to be even better than that: personally, I found the new composition to be a way bigger leap forward than the music on Dva klavirja.
In the first part of the show, Lazar and Gorišek played a “normal” classical set, though it was anything but ordinary. You can tell that Mr. Lazar has a superb feel for melody and dramatic tension. Together with Gorišek, he showed real artistry in taking apart and putting back together the pieces of a given melody. They took one melody, broke it down to its basic building blocks, stretched it out, gave it different colors, turned it into different arrangements. In short, it’s unbelievable what you can make out of a single melody. Of course, we didn’t hear just one melody in that first part: all of those handful of melodies went through the same process of taking apart and putting back together. It was never boring, and at every step the two pianists changed something. Either they slowed down the tempo or added a note here and there, and so on, and they knew how to tie it all together into a beautiful, dramatic whole, full of peaks and tension.
In the second part of the performance, Milko Lazar left his seat for a short while and we were treated to minimalist melodies flowing from under Bojan Gorišek’s fingers. Then Milko Lazar came back, but he didn’t sit down at the piano. First he fiddled with a computer, and then, surprisingly, he started plucking a piano string. He recorded everything on the computer, of course, and started playing the recording back in a kind of “loops,” with a single tone repeating over and over. The effect was similar to some Eastern plucked instrument. Then Mr. Lazar did a few more similar things on the piano (hitting the strings, the hammers,…) and built himself a proper backing orchestra. On top of that, he recorded a few partials on the piano, and a couple of times he even played something along with the orchestra (Gorišek had already left the stage by then). Lazar created a real sea of sounds, and this minimalist feast was a true pleasure to listen to. He showed what kinds of effects you can only get out of a piano (with the help of a computer, of course), and he combined them into interesting minimalist musical motifs. The Americans Mephista pulled off a somewhat similar show (report HERE), except that Lazar and Gorišek were far more successful in terms of striking the right mix of melody and experimentation.
Throughout the show, images were constantly playing on two screens (the second one only started showing images in the second part). The first screen cycled through pictures of the two protagonists’ hands and faces, while the second showed a pulsing heart (at least that’s how it looked to me). If I came from snobby pseudo-artistic circles, I’d say it wasn’t a show but a performance piece.
The concert ended after three quarters of an hour and went by way too fast. With Bojan Gorišek’s help, Milko Lazar showed how to effectively combine the old with the new, classical music with experimentation. The fact that he used only a piano for his experiments (recorded on a computer, of course) is all the more impressive, because it showed just how much a single instrument can do. Plenty of other musicians might not even have thought of such things. All I can say is: bravo.
Words: Rok Podgrajšek
