The tempo was the main thing. “Slow”, sure, but it wasn’t languorous. Some moments were animated, other nearly came to a complete stop. Christine Tavolacci (flutes), Brendan Nguyen (piano and celesta), and Jonathan Hepfer (percussion) registered micro-scale nuances of speed as well as attack, volume, and everything else. It never stalled, for the five hours it unfolded.
Five hours!? Five hours is nothing: an afternoon at work, a flight to New York, a drive to Las Vegas. But in terms of music, it’s longer than Götterdämmerung; it’s longer than a double feature of Don Giovanni and Rigoletto. What could possibly be the point? It disrupts the concert-going routine; it demarcates an event that’s unique. The point being the preparation of an opportunity to really hear.
I did not sit straight through. I had to take a break. I don’t know when – I didn’t allow myself to check the time. After maybe two hours. My mistake was failing to bring water. I made my own 30-minute intermission and came back and stayed to the end.
Why? It was the pleasure of sitting in dark stillness, catching now and then bird calls and traffic sounds coming from far away.
But landscapes are just one way of describing it.
It was also immersion in a tempo in which it is impossible to be willful, violent or sly. No racing, no jolts. Instead of statements there is a sounding-out. Not only no rhetoric but no syntax. Poignant without schmaltz. Not ascetic, either: discrete, voluptuous, urgent.
Image: Dial (Philip Guston, 1956)