[Dixielandjazz] Improvisation and Classical Roots

[Stephen G Barbone]

Here's another take on Improvisation.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone

March 8, 2008 - NY Times - By Anthony Tommasini
Returning Improv to Its Classical Roots
Composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt were not just  
great performers but renowned improvisers. In earlier eras  
improvisation was no stunt, though it involved an undeniable element  
of showing off. Improvisation was a serious component of a public  
musician’s craft.

The 20th century became a time of specialization. The tasks of  
composing and performing were increasingly divided. For the most part,  
classical music ceded improvisation to jazz players, who brought the  
art to perfection.

But now the classical music scene can claim the prodigiously gifted  
Venezuelan-born pianist Gabriela Montero, who has made free  
improvisation a major element of her artistry. When playing the  
standard repertory Ms. Montero is an exciting pianist, as she proved  
with her brilliant, wonderfully imaginative performances of Schumann’s  
“Carnaval” and Ginastera’s Piano Sonata No. 1 (1952) at  
theMetropolitan Museum of Art on Thursday night.

Yet since childhood Ms. Montero has had a knack for improvisation. Her  
EMI recordings of improvisations on Baroque themes have topped the  
classical charts.

As she often does, this charismatic pianist devoted the second half of  
her program on Thursday to improvisations. She asked audience members  
to suggest themes by singing them, then used them as starting points  
for elaborate improvisations: seven in all, lasting about 45 minutes.

Ms. Montero’s skills at improvisation surely account for the  
spontaneity of her playing of repertory works. She brought incisive  
articulation, vibrant colorings and, in the perpetual-motion finale,  
fearless leaps to Ginastera’s harmonically astringent, Argentine- 
tinged sonata. And Schumann’s “Carnaval” was an ideal work for her: a  
suite of 20 fanciful and quixotic pieces, many of them portraits of  
friends and intimates, capped by a triumphant final march.

She gave a poetic, scintillating, rhapsodic and fresh account of this  
challenging repertory staple. Even when charging through pieces like  
the helter-skelter “Pantalon et Colombine,” she seemed relaxed and free.

I must confess that as much as I admire Mr. Montero’s ingenious skills  
at improvisation, I do not find the results all that involving  
musically. When Beethoven improvised, from all reports, his creations  
were in the same style and musical language as his compositions. Ms.  
Montero looks back to older styles.

She turned “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” into a neo-Baroque  
contrapuntal twister, before segueing into a moody minor section that  
might have been a Rachmaninoff evocation of Bach, with more biting and  
pungent harmonies. Using Beethoven’s “Für Elise” as a theme, she  
wisely steered clear of the Beethoven style in her improvisation,  
creating music that began like updated Albéniz, then evolved, with a  
sense of rightness, into something obsessive and jazzy, like John  
Coltrane’s take on “My Favorite Things.”

It is great fun, in any case, to experience Ms. Montero’s  
improvisations live. The audience seemed enthralled.