Other Minds presents The Heaven Ladder & other works for piano by Terry Riley featuring Gloria Cheng and Terry Riley
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum
701 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-3138 USA
7:30 PM, Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2018 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2018 event list! ☸ On to the next event!

[7:33 PM lights down, announcements from Charles Amirkhanian]

Terry Riley (b.1935): Two Pieces for Piano (1958/59)

1. [7:40 PM] No. 1
2. [7:42 PM] No. 2
   [work ends 7:47 PM]

1. [7:47 PM] Terry Riley (b.1935): The Walrus in Memoriam (1991, rev. 1993)
   [work ends 7:55 PM]

Terry Riley (b.1935): The Heaven Ladder, Book 7 (1994)

1. [7:56 PM] Misha’s Bear Dance
2. [7:59 PM] Venus in ’94
3. [8:03 PM] Ragtempus Fugatis
4. [8:11 PM] Fandango on the Heaven Ladder
5. [8:22 PM] Simone’s Lullaby
   [set ends 8:28 PM]

[8:55 PM lights down, another long OM promo talk from Charles before he and Mark Abramson give a Wyschnegradsky color wheel clock away to a lucky audience member]

1. [9:01 PM] Terry Riley (b.1935): the Bull (?new improv?)
2. [9:10 PM] Terry Riley (b.1935): Simply M… (2007)
3. [9:24 PM] Terry Riley (b.1935): Requiem for Wally (1997)
   [segment ends 9:32 PM; pause a few minutes to reset the stage for the next part of the evening]

Gloria & Terry at the piano, by Ebbe Roe Yovino-Smith

Terry Riley (b.1935): Cheng Tiger Growl Roar (2018), performed by Terry Riley and Gloria Cheng

1. [9:34 PM] Growl
2. [9:40 PM] Cheng
3. [9:44 PM] Tiger
4. [9:51 PM] Roar
   [show ends 9:55 PM; no encore]

• Gloria Cheng: piano;
• Terry Riley: piano, vox.

I was really looking forward to hearing this show – Terry Riley is one of my heroes! – so all afternoon I kept glancing at the clock: time to get ready yet? no? how 'bout now? yet? maybe now? …

Eventually it was time to get ready, and so I had a quick dinner (lentil soup with fresh veggie chop, yum!), then hustled on down to Rockridge to catch BART (perfect timing today, YES!) in to SF. Exit at Montgomery station for an easy walk over to YBCA, and arrive pretty early (I already mentioned I was eager, right?). Most of the folks in the lobby appear to be YBCA staff or volunteers, so I chill for awhile, messing with my phone until another couple arrives and sets up at the door, first in the queue. Second is good enough for me! It's still probably 15 minutes before the appointed door time, so we stand and wait. That's what it's all about right? Being in the right place at the right time, I mean. You end up waiting, because you WANT to be in that right place.

Tonight we ended up waiting about 10 or 15 minutes extra, because the house didn't open on time. But I was mostly OK with that (after all, I was second in line, what could go wrong?). Turns out that I was smart to have arrived that early: the “better”, keyboard-view side of the first few rows was set aside for Other Minds donors (good for them … I'm not complaining at all. I think it's perfectly fair for OM to reward their donors with perks like reserved seating, as long as they make it clear that's one of the reasons to step up and be a donor!). Anyways, being at the head of the line meant that I was able to grab a seat in the front row, very close to the piano (why? cuz real piano sound is always better than PA piano sound, right?). I might have been perturbed about not having a keyboard view for about five seconds, but honestly, I was delighted to get the seat that I did: my effort paid off!

Happy also be to adjoined at the next seat to my pal Ken, another avant jazz aficionado: it's always more fun to experience a show with a friend, right? I felt bad for not having noticed him in line, but given my laser focus on being in front, I wasn't too surprised about that. Sometimes you gotta tune out the extraneous stimuli!

Turning to the show, I thought the first two pieces were really fine exemplars of their time: angular, crunchy, mid 20th Century twelve-tone pieces that could catch the attention for a little while, but bereft of anything like traditional melody or harmony, were best served up as a sort of appetizer for the evening: this is where we start! A nice way for Terry to acknowledge some of his roots, if wildly dissimilar to the rest of the evening's programming.

Leaping forward some thirty years, The Walrus in Memoriam is a LOVE-like gloss on the Beatles, tastefully refracted through the lens of Terry's unique musical vision. Sounds interesting? You can hear the version that Gloria Cheng recorded in 1998 on YouTube – go ahead, it's not too long!

Almost contemporaneus, The Heaven Ladder, Book 7, seemed to me to nicely encapsulate many of the distinctive features of Riley's style: long fugal runs, sifting echoes of stride and other older piano styles into a classical setting, and dance rhythms to keep things moving along at a snappy pace. It would be interesting to read the score for this piece: I thought I heard bits and pieces of the earlier sections buried in the long middle portion of Simone's Lullaby, but the excellent program note from Terry says nothing about that sort of thing.

First set ended at just under an hour: perfect for getting up to stretch and then make a few laps around the Forum hall. Noticed that Bill Frisell was sitting in the back, chatting with a few pals or admirers, but I didn't intrude: no need for yet another celebrity selfie! Had a nice talk with one of the ushers about music and style and how our upbringing lends itself to an appreciation (or a lack thereof!) for classical music and other sorts of “refined” tastes.

Second set opened with a previously unannounced piece by Terry; it sounded to me as if he introduced it as the Bull, but I couldn't find any references by that title on the all-knowing interwebs; maybe I mis-heard him? Scanning a list of his compositions, perhaps it was Coulé (1964) instead? Doesn't really match what I thought I heard, but unless OM posts an update, I'm stuck!

Terry added bits of vocal accompaniment to Requiem for Wally – this was probably the only time of the night that I wished I'd taken a seat farther back (where I'd have been able to hear his voice as amplified in the PA). From the front row, his singing was rooted firmly in the underbed – a sort of subconscious outburst, barely intelligible beneath the much louder tone of the grand piano foreground. Good for maintaining that dreamy sense of unfolding be-ing!

After a brief pause to set up a second piano bench for the night's final section, Gloria Cheng returned to join Terry for his latest four hands work, Cheng Tiger Growl Roar. Given the Terry's program note, it's a little surprising that the performance order of the sections doesn't match the formal title. Wonder if there's a bit of story there? If the music is really non-representational, why make the change? Anyways, Terry took the upper half of the keyboard in the first section, Growl, which started with a bit of back-and-forth playing between the performers: the sparring of two piano predators?

After Growl, Terry stood up and swapped places with Gloria; they kept this seating arrangement for the rest of the piece. Although I didn't jot detailed notes about it, my recollection is that long stretches of the work were in two- or three-hand parts – probably best not too lean to heavy on four hands at the same keyboard when you're avoiding audio mush!

I thought Terry really turned things up during Tiger – watching Gloria watch him play, I'm guessing that a large portion of this movement was improvised, and that she was concentrating to make sure she caught his cues for adding an occaisional third or fourth part to the dance.

Roar was a grand finale, and it's clear that the two performers relished playing this section. Lots of “Oh yeah? How about this?” back-and-forth to the piece. Improvised? Fully notated? I dunno! Didn't matter for my overall enjoyment, but my guess is that the exchanges were largely written out – it just didn't quite dance in the way that characterizes Terry's fully free pieces.

I was a little disappointed that we didn't get an encore: I'll admit, I'm a greedy listener! But I was satisfied nonetheless. Makes me think I need to solve that two events at the same time conflict so I can catch more shows in the coming Other Minds season… Anyone know where I can by a working time-and-space-shifter?

Program Notes or program notes

I didn't take any photos tonight, and Ting didn't attend, so for the moment this space is empty. I guess I'm a photo wuss – it takes me out of the moment (as a listener) to concentrate on the visual task of taking photos, so I'm an unreliable archivist! I noted that two video cameras were set up in back, and at least one photographer was roaming about with a giant lens; if I uncover pics or video links, I'll add them here…

Update 2018-12-21: Other Minds has added both a photo gallery and full audio of the show to their event page. Yay!

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2018 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2018 event list! ☸ On to the next event!