Art Series Blog #2
Phyllis Chen Concert
Thursday November 18, 2010 7PM at the Sears Recital Hall
The opening information given for this art series event was, “A classically trained pianist—she began at Oberlin Conservatory—Phyllis Chen has a passion for pushing the boundaries of performance, most notably by embracing the toy piano. This concert will include works on a traditional grand as well as the toy piano. Chen, whose playing has been described by the Los Angeles Times as “a dazzling delight,” is a rising star of the New York music scene.” In order to explain what concert I saw I felt it was necessary to give you the ‘official’ background on what the concert was all about. Ok, so now for another wonderful art series review from yours truly. I made it to the concert early and on time and I was excited to see what was going to go down, seeing as I had attended the presentation Chen had the night before and I was ready to see more. This concert opened up a lot stricter then the presentation, I’m guessing because it was purely a concert, but I liked how she talked at the presentation and gave openings for her songs, as well as information about herself. However, at the concert she did not do that and it felt like blur after blur, she would just bounce from song to song and I wanted to know more about them. Chen opened up with a song called “Mirabella” which was played just on the toy piano. The song was very up beat and fun but overall the sound was not pleasing and I was a little concerned if the whole concert was going to go this way. She then moved to a song called “Macrokosmos Book 2” which I really did not like. She used both the toy piano and the grand piano in order to play this song. The grand piano sounded like static when she played it and I was not sure if that was the sound system of the recital hall or how she actually meant to play it. Another comment I have on her overall play is that I just do not like how she physically plays the piano. I feel that her body motions are all very unnecessary and she is trying to put across emotion that I don’t feel comes through her music. Her music does not touch me at all in any way. It seems as though her music is a lot of jumbled up notes and sounds and she has no rhyme or reason for why she plays them this way. It is very hard to understand her work and I cannot relate to it at all. The fourth song she did was called “Colura” where she used both the toy piano and bowls. The song was actually painful to listen to. I almost thought about leaving to be honest. The one thing I can say about her playing that I enjoyed was not even on the toy piano. It was when she played the grand piano and used the inside of the piano by running her finger along the inside strings. At times it was a strange sound, but kind of cool that she could do that with the grand piano. However, the sound that her song produced was not pleasing at all. After playing on the grand piano she switched back to the toy piano and used her computer and boom box in order to produce a background sound for her while she played. She introduced the song by saying that it would sound like rock n’ roll and what it actually sounded like was a bunch of loud annoying racket. I feel that if I had gone up on the stage I could have made better sound. Overall, I am not sure why she is referred to as a rising star and the performance itself was very startling, alarming, and bad.
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