Taking watercolours to a city of continuous rain?

Taking watercolours to a city of continuous rain?

Well, you might argue that the audience of the Bergen Philharmonic has a natural affinity with the beauties of kinetic water. Why else would they live in a city where it rains “all the time”?  Well, appreciation for my performance also poured down on September 6th, when I created flowing watercolours in the opening concert of the new season of the Bergen Philharmonic in the Grieg Hallen. Music Director Andrew Litton has turned this orchestra (one of the oldest) into a world-class orchestra. What a magnificent palette of sound they produced for him! Sound that blended beautifully with my kinetic images for Elgar’s Enigma Variations.

Brushing up-bow, down-bow to Enigma Variation B.G.N,, with the gorgeous cello solo.

This wasn’t an easy set-up for me. The programme included a work by Dorman for percussion duo and orchestra, with intruments spreading all over the stage. Uh-oh! No room for my projectors. So we had to project from back-stage through the screen. Problem was, the image lacked full brilliance and you saw the coloured pin-points of the projector-lights. In every different hall, you are so dependent on the helpfulness of the technical staff  - and they came through in Bergen. 

With his characteristic flair for creative programming, it was artistic director Ronald Vermeulen who brought me to Bergen. Back in 2004 he programmed me to do Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat in the Concertgebouw. That turned out to be quite a milestone in my performance career and it was so good to work together again. 

Back in sunny Amsterdam, I had hardly unpacked when it was time to gear up for the Amsterdam Trouw-Yellow Lounge on 9/11, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard. A concept started in Berlin and spreading world-wide – engaging top-flight classical musicians to attract a younger generation, in a night-club setting. This one takes place in the former printing factory of the Trouw newspaper. More soon.

Me? Satanic orgies? Nah, just demonic patterns and poisonous greens!

Me? Satanic orgies? Nah, just demonic patterns and poisonous greens!

Just got back from a delightful visit to Helsinki, after a Festival performance of Piano Colours with Pierre-Laurent Aimard. We both found it most enjoyable. In a fully packed Sibelius Academy hall, the audience just wouldn’t stop applauding!  Alongside an interview of Pierre-Laurent, here are some comments by Hannu-Ilari Lampila for the Helsingin Sanomat (29.8.2012).

Piano Colours at the Helsinki Festival.
Watercolours gliding with the music.

“The Englishman Norman Perryman has been visualizing music in concerts for forty years. As pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard played, Perryman was inspired to paint kinetic colours and shapes on glass plates resting on five overhead-projectors.

One might have expected Perryman to use his brushes to paint satanic orgies, during Scriabin’s Black Mass Sonata. Instead, what appeared on the large screen were mysterious, golden, demonically spiralling patterns, changing into poisonous greens.

Perryman fortunately avoided an illustrative approach. His paintbrushes followed the music freely and their movements corresponded with the rhythms and movement of the piece. The dissolving, flowing colours created an abstract, sensually glowing, shimmering colour-language - a visual language that left room for the imagination.

In addition to the Scriabin, Perryman visualized works by Liszt, Tristan Murail and George Benjamin. 

In the last work it was a fantastic idea to break through the boundaries of the screen and let the projections of the brushstrokes spread on to the ceiling and the walls of the hall.”

From Scriabin’s piano Sonata No. 9, mixing from warm to cool – and back.

Well, well. I’ve never really been into demonizing, myself, and actually I thought my “poisonous greens” were rather beautiful, changing from warm to cool variations. A chacun son goût.

Behind Pierre-Laurent you get a glimpse of my image, chopped in half by another ruthless editor.

One couldn’t help sensing the history of the prestigious Sibelius Academy hall, where so many of Finland’s now famous musicians have studied or taught. I was very touched to meet the wife of the composer Rautavaara, who came to our concert when she heard that I’m also performing one of her husband’s works in October, with the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra.

This was my first visit to the city of Helsinki and I stayed at a hotel from the Art Deco period, overlooking the centre of town. Getting some sleep was a major challenge, as it seemed like the whole city was celebrating the end of summer until deep into the night! The rest of the hotel was filled with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, in town to play two concerts with Riccardo Chailly in the impressive new Helsinki Music Centre.

After our concert I had some time to sit at the Contemporary Art Museum with a coffee and do some people-watching. (The coffee was definitely better than the exhibition). As a portraitist, I can’t help studying faces. Most Finns seem to have a rather straight, sharp nose, strongly formed at the point, that also suggests that they know where they’re going. Well, they do in music, that’s for sure! People tend to dress casually, with some adventurous alternatives – perhaps symptomatic of their culture. Finnish is completely incomprehensible to me. It sounds direct, spoken efficiently, with a sense of purpose, but by no means unfriendly. Serious, but often with a sense of humour. The hospitality of the excellent Festival organization was heart-warming. They had 200,000 visitors. I can’t wait to go back! 

By now, the gear will have arrived in Norway, for my concert with the Bergen Philharmonic next week. Another first for me. But more about that next time!

Piano Colours in the Helsinki Festival

Piano Colours in the Helsinki Festival

On Thursday night my technical assistant Jan-Cees will be driving north from Amsterdam, to catch the night ferry from Lübeck-Travemunde (Germany) to Helsinki (Finland). The ferry trip alone takes 27 hours! Did you know how far Helsinki is from Amsterdam ? (1500 km/930 miles). 

He's taking my performance gear to the amazing Helsinki Festival, that last year attracted 184,000 visitors. On August 27th, at the Sibelius Academy, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and I will perform our recital Piano Colours, that was so well received at the Aldeburgh Festival. If you missed Bob Singleton's blog On an Overgrown Path (June 27th), check out his delightful piece Has classical music finally found its contact high? He describes our audio-visual partnership as a "revelatory experience".

"In the post-concert talk Pierre-Laurent Aimard described how he watched Norman Perryman's kinetic visuals during (a Concertgebouw) performance, and went on explain that the visuals actually helped mould his interpretation; while from his side Norman recounted how he took visual and aural cues from the pianist. Which was the eureka moment for me - suddenly I understood that Piano Colours was not a solo piano recital by Pierre-Laurent Aimard with added graphics, but a duet for piano and improvised kinetic art, with the same risks and rewards as a conventional duo performance.

A still from Scriabin’s Sonata No.9 at the Aldeburgh Festival

So Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Norman Perryman have created much more than a powerful classical music marketing tool, they have also created a new and notably adventurous performance form. This is a considerable achievement and their pioneering work needs to be taken very seriously." 

My wonderfully analogue projectors, paintbrushes, jam-pots and glass plates.

So rather than a van-load of gear, why am I not just taking all my visuals on an iPad, like everyone else does these days? Because an iPad is merely a digital tool, and I'm a painter, working with analogue means that touch us emotionally. In fact, Pierre-Laurent and I both use a "hands-on" method of communication. My "primitive" overhead-projectors produce analogue coloured light: fluid kinetic images that we respond to in a visceral way. Research published in Nature Neuroscience reminds us that good food, sex and music release dopamine (and a feeling of elation/euphoria) in the brain. So do kinetic visuals with music, believe me! 

Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music

See you in Helsinki?

Aldeburgh Adventure with Aimard: a triple A experience!

Aldeburgh Adventure with Aimard

After conceiving, designing and practising the Piano Colours programme for a year and a half, how can you describe the kaleidoscope of feelings after our premiere at the Aldeburgh Festival on June 22nd: relief, happiness, exhaustion, pleasant surprise and deep satisfaction? Three curtain calls from a packed house (on a Friday morning!); an animated discussion for 45 minutes with a hundred people crammed into the room available; and I began to realise that this project really was a success. Together with Pierre-Laurent, I had moved people to tears, joy and understanding. They told me.

Before driving back to Holland, I took a moment to gaze out over Aldeburgh’s marshy landscape to reflect on this wonderful experience in the country of my birth, invited back here by a Frenchman.

Peaceful Snape landscape encompassing a turmoil of musical excitement.

The challenges of staging, logistics, rehearsal conflicts, projection-technique and nerves almost overshadow the actual performance of live kinetic painting - the purpose of the trip. As everyone in music-theatre knows, you have to hold it all together, stay focussed, then peak artistically for the relatively short time you’re on stage. 

How the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, torn between a thousand demands and commitments as festival director and also performer in multiple programmes, survives this pressure is a miracle.

He and I so much enjoyed the rapport we discovered in performance, giving and taking as he watched my screen and I took his musical cues. Even though I had memorised the score, I realised how much flexibility and yes, improvisation there can be in music that is live and therefore creative. Flexibility in my case, as my colours flowed in slightly unexpected ways – (the hall was very dry) or my brush-strokes had to be adjusted to PLA’s tempi, where they differed slightly from the dress rehearsal. You are never satisfied and I’m preparing myself for the fact that the next performance will be different again.

If you’re not familiar with my performances of kinetic painting to music, read my blog post of June 11th, or go to the videopage on my website.

Moment of calm after the dress-rehearsal in the Britten Studio at Snape.

Just before leaving, what really made my (birth)day was the news that a certain super-intelligent and celebrated composer had been overheard to say after the concert that it was my visuals that “made sense of music that he knew, but hadn’t appreciated before”. Thanks a million. He and I have to talk.

Off to the Helsinki Festival in August with Piano Colours, but I’ll tell you all about that after the summer break. No more blogs until September. Have a great summer!

P.S. Bob Singleton, in his blog On an Overgrown Path, writes with real understanding of the aims of our Gesamtkunst art form. His earlier blog was headed: "Pierre-Laurent sees the Light" :).

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