Liquid colours in Salzburg Mozarteum Dialogues Festival

Liquid colours in Salzburg Mozarteum Dialogues Festival

Großer Saal der Stiftung Mozarteum

Performing in the grand Concertgebouw is always quite an experience, but the large hall of the Salzburg Mozarteum (above) appears to be even more elaborately decorated. No, sorry, we can’t hang your screen from the ceiling. Yes, we can raise the large chandeliers a bit. Psst! Don’t even mention the danger of splashing paint on to that stage! (It won’t happen). I can’t help a naughty giggle, thinking of the shocking moment when my projections will escape “out of the box” (screen) and the paint will appear to spread all over those oh-so-splendid walls. My hat goes off to the adventurous Festival director Matthias Schulz, for bringing an artist’s work-table, paints, jam-pots an’ all, into this distinguished Mozart shrine. I think Wolfgang Amadeus would have loved it - it’s almost opera.

Welcome to Salzburg. No, this isn’t the famous Salzburg Festival, but the contemporary festival of the Mozarteum Foundation. The Dialogues festival was established to celebrate the Mozart Year in 2006. “It’s primarily aimed at an audience which is open to a controversial, contemporary take on new and classical music. For this purpose, the festival invites contemporary artists from the disciplines of music, dance, literature, fine arts, and film. This interdisciplinary approach of the Dialogues festival seeks to move beyond the traditional concert protocol and develop unusual, powerful listening situations.”

The Piano Colours programme with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and my live kinetic painting fits into this concept perfectly. Our dialogue is between colour and sound. Pierre-Laurent’s painterly interpretation of Debussy’s Preludes reveal the composer’s genius at creating images in sound: he doesn’t need me to paint to that music. But these pieces are cleverly juxtaposed with works by Liszt, Scriabin, Tristan Murail and George Benjamin. And that’s where I come in, with visual harmony. 

Oh goodness – the composer Murail himself will be in the hall, watching for the first time the kinetic visuals I shall create to his beautifully resonant Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire (In memoriam Olivier Messiaen). It’s always a tense moment, wondering how a composer will react to my treatment of his “off-spring”. Well, I have Pierre-Laurent on my side. (Liszt and Scriabin can’t comment right now).

November 30th will be a long day: unload, set up and fine-tune projection gear, paints, brushes at 8.00 am, rehearse with PLA, rest, performance at 7.30pm, then right after the concert a verbal dialogue with the audience. Then, if I’m still alive, no doubt a stimulating discussion over a fine meal with some of the brightest brains in music today. More inter-disciplinary dialogue is exactly what classical music needs right now, as Bob Singleton has been telling us for ages in his blogs.

And this day is just one event in an intriguing festival. Can’t wait to get involved! See you there? For more details and tickets, go to:
http://www.mozarteum.at/en/concerts/dialogues.html

Dialogues Festival - Piano Colours, November 30th. 7.30pm. Stiftung Mozarteum, Schwarzstrasse 26, Salzburg.
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Touch and go with the elements

Touch and go with the elements.

(my notes from November 5th. 2012).

From birth, we are in touch with water daily, even bathe in it happily. With fresh air, water is possibly our greatest friend. Yet its power remains to be feared. 

The sun shines brilliantly this Sunday morning in New York’s Central Park and Ella Fitzgerald sings Autumn Leaves to me. But there’s a lot of sadness in the cold air this morning. I weave my way between thousands of frustrated runners as they demonstrate that the cancellation of the Marathon will not inhibit their daily rituals. And I’m thinking of those still without their homes, without power and their basic needs, as winter sets in.

How come we can’t befriend our natural resources instead of misusing them and arrogantly thinking it doesn’t matter? Will we ever heed Sandy’s awful message?

In a comparatively microscopic way, I’m totally at home in water(colour), wondering at and manipulating the organic flow, evaporation rates or delicate textures that emerge as I paint. Even on a small surface it has the inevitable destructive potential of a tsunami. The projection of this on a giant screen is awesome. Here’s just one example from my performances of kinetic painting:

The opening calligraphic rhythms on a silken background, kinetic images created for Written on the Wind: Huang Ruo’s music for pipa, vocals and visuals, created for Min Xiao-Fen.

Watch the video of Written on the Wind (parts 1 & 2) on YouTube:

Sandy: the ultimate four-dimensional kinetic painting

Sandy: the ultimate four-dimensional kinetic painting.

October 29th. 2012.

In New York for portrait commissions and highly civilised and delightful dinners with old friends, Hurricane Sandy has rudely intruded on my schedule.

This time, no romantic watercolours of falling leaves in Central Park. As I write, the elements are providing me with the ultimate expressionistic fluid kinetic painting - and surround sound by a very avant-garde composer. My high-rise appartment is lashed with savage brushloads of wind and rain. The ocean is surging into the lower end of Manhattan, but forget Debussy’s La Mer. The liquid painting on my imagined projector is accented, or rather savaged by honks, screams and a wailing chorus of flashing colours, reds, blues and whites, police and fire-service tape-barriers zig-zagging across my screen. Definitely New York school of painting, but which composer does this remind me of?

From my back window, I can see a broken crane that hangs, unhinged by the storm, above the unfinished sky-scraper on 7th Avenue, dangling like a long paint-brush ready to strike through Carnegie Hall next door on 57th St. The open skeleton of the sky-scraper sounds like a ghostly express-train, tarpaulins flapping frantically.  I feel like I’m inside a horrific Gesamtkunstwerk! All concerts are cancelled of course, whole blocks sealed off, the streets are virtually empty, but the audience is watching it all on television.

Thankfully we have few problems in mid-town Manhattan compared with those poor 220,000 people who are without power, those flooded out of their homes, or victims of crashing trees. The city has never been so quiet. Uncanny. Perfect setting for the “sounds” of John Cage’s 4’33”.

“You can’t go to bed with that!” - Painting ecstasy.

“You can’t go to bed with that!” - Painting ecstasy.

It was 1952. We art students were sweating away at our oil paintings of a nude model in the over-heated studios of the Birmingham College of Art. Our painting professor, Bernard Fleetwood-Walker (a prolific late-impressionist painter of portraits and the figure) was on the prowl. One look at the very well-structured but rather stiff, cold painting of the female nude on my easel and he exclaimed: “You can’t go to bed with that!” I was a strictly moral, naïve youth of seventeen and I had no idea what he was talking about. 

He grabbed my palette knife and, with a great show of bravado, started slathering luscious layers of oil paint on to my nude, sighing and groaning in make-believe ecstasy, as he transformed the nude into a shimmering, sensual image.  Although I had feverishly studied the nude paintings of Cézanne, Matisse, Modigliani and a thousand other classical and “modern” styles, I was being too careful. He was trying to loosen me up: he wanted me to let go of my drawing skill and explore the sensual qualities of the paint (and the woman). A new world was opening up to me!

Perhaps better than anyone, the great J.M.W. Turner (1775 -1851) could make his oil paint shimmer transparently. Popularly known as “the painter of light”, he was an early influence in my growing love of the translucent, glowing qualities of watercolour. But many years went by before my love for glowing light led me to discover the sheer ecstasy of transparent colours, when projected from analogue overhead projectors. Their analogue light-source transports us emotionally to places that digital synthetic images cannot reach. The overhead projector works in the same way as natural daylight shining through the stained-glass windows of places of worship. The light source shines through the paint. For centuries, this has created a luminosity that, combined with music, has moved millions to spiritual ecstasy.

The composer Alexander Scriabin was convinced that through the involvement of all the senses and especially the arts, mankind could achieve a higher state of supreme ecstasy. It was fashionable and respectable in his day to interpret this notion as a spiritual, mystical or super-human experience. Scriabin’s Poème de l’Extase (1908) could be seen as an example. 

In my live kinetic painting performance to this esoteric music with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2010, my fluid colours did indeed initially spread upwards and outward on-screen, dreamily reaching to the heavens for a spiritual experience.

But I had also discovered Scriabin’s frequent directions in the score that suggest that he had a double agenda. His original title for this work was Orgiastic Poem – a very different kind of ecstasy. The opening bars are marked to be played “languishing” (as in longing), but as one thing leads to another, we also find the instructions “caressing, gentle, sweetly, with ecstatic sensuality, perfumed, with ever increasing intoxication, almost delirious”. Scriabin is urging us to let ourselves be carried away with his love poem. 

So I choreographed my continuous visuals and my choice of colours to reflect and enhance his directions. This emotional music begins with a dream, pulsated and surged, the tension growing to repeated climaxes, then resolving into the blissful relaxing state after an erotic experience and finally celebrating the glory of the achievement. You get the picture? Maybe my images will help, but you really need to watch the video, to see what I’ve done with this poem of love: 

Having said all that, in fact those very respectable spectators in a packed Concertgebouw were merely looking (if not drooling) at floating pools of delicate or rich colour, abstract shapes without any figuration. They could perceive them as mystical or majestic, spiritual or erotic. Well, going by the blushes and giggles of some of the audience afterwards, it was rather obvious that the pulsating, organic, sensual properties of the paint and the rhythmic visual synchronization with the music had the desired effect, so to speak. I’m sure my professor would have loved it. I’ve come a long way since my struggle with that lonely nude, sixty years ago.

On January 25th, 2013, I’ll be performing with the National Orchestra of Belgium in BOZAR, Brussels, to the music of Scriabin’s classic Prometheus (The Poem of Fire). Lucifer was the bringer of light and with a part in the score marked luce, the composer prescribes which colours, sheets of flame and the like that he believed should be projected to provide a visual harmony for the music. This is a must for me – I can’t wait to play Lucifer.