Date: May 30, 2012
Venue: Carnegie Hall
Concert review by Dawoud Kringle
Sometimes great music just falls into your lap. The founder and editor of DooBeeDooBeeDoo called me at the last minute and asked if I would review a recital at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall. This was somewhat inconvenient for me, as I had an early performance of my own that day. But, I agreed. After my own performance on a pleasant summer evening, I ran home, dropped off my instruments and headed for the legendary venue to listen to a pianist I’d never heard of.
That pianist is Jeremy Siskind.
Press photo by Gerry Szymanski
Siskind, a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, with a Master’s Degree in Music from Columbia University, presently studies classical piano with Sophia Rosoff and jazz piano with Fred Hersh. He’d performed both jazz and classical at Carnegie Hall at age 25. His compositions have received several prestigious awards and recognitions; including ASCAP’s Young Jazz Composer’s Award, and Downbeat Magazine’s Student Music Award. He has offered countless performances, released several CDs, and is a respected teacher who has taught master classes everywhere from Paramus NJ to the Xin Hai Conservatory in Guangzhou, China.
I must confess that part of me expected the concert to be a flawlessly executed display of the usual fare one gets at classical piano recitals. Admittedly, this was a prejudice on my part; a perpetuation of a stereotype. This night, that stereotype was pleasantly annihilated. The Weill Hall is actually a quite beautiful place. The flawless acoustics and a décor designed to calm the mind is a perfect place to present fine music.
Arriving late, I had to listen to the first piece on the lounge monitor – not a preferable way to enjoy such music. But there it is. Siskind was playing one of his own compositions, Pourest thy full heart in Profuse Strains of Unpremeditated Art – the first movement of Such Harmonious Madness, which he premiered that evening. Inspired by Miriam Gideon’sShadows of Numberless, the five movements of Such Harmonious Madness were a fascinating evocation of a wide spectrum of musical colors. From the second movement (having missed much of the first – sorry Jeremy) had rubatos and ritardandos pulling and pushing each other like yin-yang. Colorful harmonies would give way to quasi-dissonance, and then reassembling itself. The startling shifts of mood did not interfere with the music’s cohesiveness. The third movement, melodies chased melodies, rendezvousing and then parting ways. The pastoral, lyrical fourth movement gave way to the jagged, angular fifth.
Courtesy of Jeremy Siskind
This was followed by Claude Debussy’s Etudes, Book 1 & Book 2. Siskind’s performance interpreted the French composer’s works with great sensitivity. He did not play the compositions as much as he invoked their essential meaning. He approached it like a method actor who immersed himself in his part and became the character. In fact, it is impossible to fail to see the influence Debussy, Messiaen, Ravel, and the like had on Siskind. He does not, however, play a subservient role to them.
After an intermission. Siskind returned and performed a reworking of Michal Jackson’s Black and White. It was interesting how he blended a stately, majestic Bach chorale feel with a Gershwin-esqe blues that madly devolved and reassembled itself. I must wonder how much of it was improvised…
The following three pieces, More Mist than Moon, Twilit Water, Vanished Music, and The inevitable Letdown complimented each other well. Watery, crystalline melodies danced above a pulse, and transformed into an angry march that scowled and exorcised its own demons; lightened into an optimistic, lyrical, savoring of joy, then settling into a sense of sad resignation.
His interpretation of Harold Adamson’s Too Young to Go Steady was an interesting compliment to the previous pieces. It seems to place a cultural signature on Siskind’s own pieces.
He concluded the program with two of his own compositions. Aubade & Theme for a Sunrise. Both pieces invoked facing sadness and regret, and the triumph of dignity and joy over them.
Courtesy of Jeremy Siskinde
His encores were fine conclusions to the night. Here, Siskind gave us a fine interpretation of a ballad from My Fair Lady and concluded with a piece the name of which I never learned. It began as an aggressive stride with sharp harmonies, out of which pastoral statements would occasionally show their faces. A ragtime that danced at the edge of the event horizon of a black hole, and finally dove in, never to be heard from again.
Siskind clearly understands the essential nature of the piano, and the music it is capable of producing. The performance was not only ingeniously planned and flawlessly executed, but his music – and his own compositions – contained real emotional content that he invoked with the confident skill of a wizard conjuring a spirit to do his bidding.
