There’s a bit of everything in the program for Arte’s Piano Day 2023, recorded in March at the Opéra-Comique in Paris: Casio synthesizer, jazz piano, contemporary song, rap… It’s aimed to a young, up-to-date or curious audience, and to do this, the Salle Favart has broken the sacrosanct stage-room relationship, inviting the public to surround the musicians in various spaces of the building.
Within these approximately eighty minutes of music, also available in separate sequences, we find a gem: a program by pianist Shani Diluka, born in 1976 in Monaco to Sri Lankan parents, which compares pages of Bach , the father – with the Solfeggio of the son, Carl Philip –, and pieces by minimalist composers.
With, first and foremost, Philip Glass, one of the main pillars of this aesthetic movement born in the United States, and in particular in New York, during the 1960s, in the downtown gallery and loft districts where visual artists met. , musicians, dancers and actors. This avant-garde artistic fringe soon attracted hordes of listeners beyond the circles of so-called classical music.
In her loft, Yoko Ono hosted the Robert Morris sound sculptures that fascinated John Cage; Bob Wilson worked with fellow dancer Andy de Groat and dancer and singer Meredith Monk in front of Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim; visual artist and musician Laurie Anderson came to listen to Philip Glass rehearse in his loft – where the latter hosted for a time Moondog, an enlightened and blind homeless man nicknamed “the Viking of Sixth Avenue”.
Glass, Monk et Moondog
Monk and Moondog are also on the program for this concert which is dominated by the music of Bach (in versions transcribed in the 19th and 20th centuries or in their original form) and Philip Glass, including some of the Etudes that he played in front of a very large audience won over during a Richard Serra exhibition (of which he was an assistant at the start of his career), in June 2008, at the Grand Palais, in Paris.
We could say that Glass’s music, since his famous Mad Rush (1980), played by Shani Diluka, repeats itself – an easy and worn play on words about the man who was for a long time, and almost always wrongly, described as ” repetitive.” Singular but much imitated, its moving sweet bitterness remains in the ear. The film The Hours (2003), by Stephen Daldry, owes a lot to him (Glass wrote a lot for the cinema).
Moondog is not exactly a minimalist: he uses archaic formulas in canon, loops and stubborn movements that (too) often associate him with minimalist musicians; Meredith Monk has a unique universe and says she doesn’t like the term “minimalist”… But it’s true that almost all minimalists hate the term…
The beauty of Shani Diluka’s program – which she plays subtly by creating a beautiful silence that is both protective and communicative – lies in the fact that she does not necessarily compare pieces that have too blatant similarities. She will, during this intervention – alas! – too short, with good reason preferred elective affinities and poetic correspondences.