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Was it a recital? Was it a conference? Was it a New Age session? The opening event for the new Edmonton Chamber Music Society season, the first since March 2020, was a bit of all of those things, what it wasn’t, it was a concert.
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Pianist Nicolas Namoradze was the winner of the Honens Piano Competition in Calgary in 2018. He is also Professor of Mindfulness and is currently pursuing postgraduate studies in neuropsychology at King’s College, London. What he provided was an evening of mindfulness instruction in listening to music, with himself at the piano to accompany exercises for the audience.
I suspect ECMS was not fully aware of what it was getting, and in fact Namoradze told us that this was the first time he had done something like this.
If he had known, he would have told me that he was not the ideal person to cover such an event. I have seen too many regimes that tell people how to think, what the Chinese call ‘correct thoughts’, and it seems to me that the mindfulness movement sometimes has an element of that, and the teacher assumes they have a higher form in compared to your audience.
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In fact, what Namoradze gave us was pretty dated. Breathing exercises and body awareness have been family therapy for decades (not to mention Buddhist heritage), and the idea of listening to the ambient sounds around you was expressed much more definitely in John Cage’s 1952 piece titled 4 ‘ 33 ”, where the artists remain in complete silence.
However, I’m sure there were some in the audience for whom this was all new, although I was wondering how many.
There are fascinating advances in our understanding of how the brain works and in the science of how we physically react to music. There are neuroscientists who believe that everything we do is in fact mechanistic, predetermined by chemical and physical processes.
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Maybe it is, but Namoradze gave us very little of this. His example of color, states that we all see colors differently, illustrates the problems of this vision, as it is a more than demonstrable philosophical statement. Ignore the joys of a riot of colors.
None of this would have particularly mattered if the musical composition made up for it, and if it had had those joys. Unfortunately, it wasn’t like that, whether it was Bach or Rachmaninov. I suppose Namoradze’s playing style here was designed more to illustrate the exercise he had given the audience for each piece, rather than expressing musicality, as it was rhythmically stiff and deliberate, soulless, and the final grating for emphasis they were awfully obvious.
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The most interesting were the two pieces by the 20th century English composer York Bowen, simply because his music is rarely heard in concert, although it is quite recorded. There is a disc available of Bowen’s own 78 rpm recordings, and Namoradze has recorded a widely praised disc of piano works on the Hyperion label.
Two of Hans Andersen’s Bowen fragments, preceded by fragments quoted from fairy tales, were very English, of a pre-World War I aesthetic. The Snowdrop was Andersen on the English village green, or in one of the cottage gardens, while A Leaf from the Sky had an impressionistic influence, both very attractive.
But it was not enough to rescue what was a rather strange and unsatisfying evening.
Edmonton and Honens Chamber Music Society present Nicolas Namoradze
Where Robertson-Wesley United Church
When October 23
Reference-edmontonjournal.com