In his improvised solo piano concerts, Keith Jarrett has made it a custom to save a familiar song or two for the encores — a gleaming prize at the finish line. But of his three encores at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night, just one fit that bill: “I’m a Fool to Want You,” an abject cry of romantic despondence introduced by Frank Sinatra in 1951.
Mr. Jarrett gave the song a deliberate and empathetic reading, milking the moments of lingering irresolution in the melody, with an air of absolute sincerity. It was an elegant capstone to an often exquisite performance. Still, it was hard to shake the notion that this song had been intended as some kind of joke. The implicit contract between artist and audience has been a complicated subject in Mr. Jarrett’s career — especially as it pertains to his heroic solo performances, the most famous of which, “The Köln Concert,” was released on the ECM label 40 years ago. Because he creates the music in the moment, at the mercy of his muse, Mr. Jarrett maintains a notoriously low threshold for disruption. Occasionally, needled by coughing or other offenses among the crowd, he darkens, and the concert curdles.
That didn’t happen here. But Mr. Jarrett kept alluding to the subject, making it a thematic framework for the evening. He was a few minutes into his second piece, a rhythmic vamp with faint gospel implications, when someone coughed sharply. His hands left the keyboard at once. “Thank you, for that,” he said. Then he grinned. “Some people know exactly when to cough,” he offered, encouragingly. Plenty of time left. No harm, no foul.
Mr. Jarrett turns 70 in May. To mark the occasion, ECM has scheduled two releases: a classical album and an album of solo inventions. His fan base, from both camps, tends to accept that the intensity of feeling in his playing is worth whatever limits he chooses to impose. “I want to thank all of you for following my work,” he said near the concert’s midpoint. “Here’s the big deal that nobody seems to realize: I could not do it without you.”
This audience, responsive and discerning, rained extra approval on every moment deserving of it. That included one ballad with the noble architecture of a Gershwin song and another that seemed to arrive fully formed, with a twinkling motif and a delicate logic of harmonic development. The prickly but flowing piece just before intermission and the gem of rapturous romanticism just after it were also standouts. So was one exercise that morphed from boppish chromaticism to a derivation of boogie-woogie.
Mr. Jarrett’s pianism, precise and aglow, was irreproachable even on the less engaging pieces. What they lacked was the structure and emotional clarity that seems to issue forth, in a cloud of mystery, from this pianist at his best.
And as he implied, the role that an audience plays in this alchemy isn’t exactly passive. It can’t be an accident that his encores, emerging from a frothy ocean of adulation, always manage to reach some higher gear. “Time and time again I said I’d leave you,” goes one tortured line in Sinatra’s song. “Pity me, I need you,” goes another.
Who knows whether Mr. Jarrett was thinking about those lyrics as he finessed the tune. But he seemed to hold something in check when, after his bluesy third encore, he spoke his parting words: “So maybe you’ll be the first audience where I don’t say a word to the person who’s taking photos.” See you next time.
- http://bit.ly/1DPIjEa
Niciun comentariu:
Trimiteți un comentariu