14 Jun 2017 Rachmaninov reading, jazz & classic
Rachmaninov Reads Jazz
George Barițiu County Library | Wednesday | 14 June 2017 | 7:00 pm
If at the Black Church concert the music allowed in a way to open up and describe sensations and feelings and brought forth the depths, a totally different story was revealed to us at George Barițiu County Library.
A story about elegance, sensibility, poetry, emotion, dreaming, maybe detail, maybe innocence and most certainly love.
In one of the reading rooms of the library we all read, grabbed by the soul and taken, page by page, to discover Rachmaninov’s music, both huge and concentrated – ah, the Russian spirit, the infinite steppes, the need for the other, for feeling, closeness, the fight with distance and solitude…the emotion!
From the start you could feel the beauty, the charm, the grace, the disarming humor of Diana Ionescu and Luiza Zan, plus the joy of the fact they honestly and directly shared a good part of their nervousness before the concert, which initially could really be felt. And it was good it could be felt!
The initial nerves left the stage to make room for experience and, it must be said, value, class! The nerves definitely nourish and drive. I noticed myself recollecting how gorgeous LIVE jazz can be, how… alive! I had forgotten!?
How easy it seems to let yourself be led in the reading of such a composer, when you have the reading keys. And we had them, because both Luiza and Diana offered them to us in full. How easy and irreversibly you can fall in love with the music if the music and the artists are the road companions.
On a separate note – this is what vibrate!festival wants to say in Brașov and this is why it risks moving over the genre, status quo limitations. It takes courage, even madness, risk and no matter what, it consumes you because you get out of your comfort zone, but the vibrations are… #worthsharing!
If we can talk (or write) about the quality of a live musical experience, we probably can because those who think and interpret (and organize!) are building a puzzle, piece by piece, (or opus by opus?). A puzzle that changes you, impresses you and provokes you to feel, to enjoy and to vibrate.
When details converge and synchronize, the discovery makes you believe that there can be nothing stronger and more relevant than music, vibration, the fabulous piano, the incredible voice, you understand the why and the how not with your mind, but with your… heart. That is, you don’t understand, you feel.
Getting back to the concert – when you hear Luiza’s strong voice so close to you, when Diana uses force and impulse on the keyboard, the heart grows and the mind forgets itself. Mind-blowing is a rather suitable concept, clouds bursting, synapses firing …
Rachmaninov’s uproar, explosive and sometimes incredibly intense, really speaks to the concept of the festival – Pulse, yes, a really high one! Then again there’s grace and humor, joy and love.
After the concert, we talked a bit with Sam Armstrong, the pianist who will play in the next concert at Hof Café, on Thursday – In memory of a great artist.
Among other things, we agreed that such a concert is the perfect doorway to a music dimension many of us think of as strange, inaccessible, or we simply forget about.
Just be there and listen, we were saying. Be there, listen, and the rest comes easily.
We are left with a simple poetic message that seems more and more complicated today – one of the lyrics sent into the ether by Luiza, towards the end of the concert: a new day with love for all mankind. Sounds good.
Text | Răzvan Zlăvog
Photo | Andrei Paul