Lisa Moore, Joe’s Pub

My first crush was on a pianist.  Mildred Adams was a walking china doll whose pigtail braids draped her shoulders like a shawl.  At various elementary school assemblies, sporting her delicate demeanor and rhinestone-studded princess glasses, her piano skills inspired jealousy and awe in her peers.  Later in life, I realized that my “crush” was really envy of her musical skill and the accompanying life of privilege I assumed made such a talent possible.   Grades later, another paradigm appeared in the person of the coltish Miss Barbara Doyle, she of the Joan-of-Arc haircut and knee-highs.  She took great pleasure in wielding the large wooden paddle that hung next to the blackboard, and in a barrelhouse style of piano playing that suited her musical forte: show tunes.

I thought of them both as I watched Lisa Moore take the stage at Joe’s Pub.  This engagement accompanied the release of Moore’s CD of music by Frederic Rzewski, titled Which Side Are You On? The first half of the program was a suite of pieces called North American Ballads.  This is music to recall an idyllic summer’s day, or re-experience same as a modern elegy; listening to Rzewski’s rhapsodic, rapturous melodies might call Stephen Foster to mind, yet the composer upends that déjà vu with the use of jazz figures, unexpected repetitions and progressions.

Expectation was also challenged by what you saw.  Moore is an Aussie lilt wrapped in a petite package of curly blondeness.  But we are far from Weill Recital Hall; her dress communicated that she was here to work.  Dressed in a white shirt and black slacks, a zebra-striped scarf of gossamer banded one of her arms, perhaps a tip off that this would not be your grandmother’s recital.

It goes without saying that holding an audience with this kind of music requires an artist possessing not only sensitivity, but also a crackerjack technique.  My seat afforded a rare view of the physical nature of such an undertaking.  Again and again I was struck by how aural lyricism could be contradicted by the visual explosiveness of the playing, notably during a repeated ascending passage that progressed with subtle variations, from sotto voce to pounding pianissimo.  An intricate section presented an astounding visual of the pianist’s hands.  As one crouched over the other with the fingers of both extended, the conjoining of Rzewski’s composition and Moore’s pianism made me think of diaphanous jellyfish.  The suite’s most remarkable physical moment occurred in Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, during a run of bass chords that begin with  standard fingering.  As the chords broaden, so too does the use of appendages.  I had to reassure myself that what I was witnessing was true: elbows out, body hugging the piano, Moore banged out the climatic chords with herforearms.

After a break, Moore re-emerged bedecked in a Pradaesque morning coat; the armband was now an ascot.  The piece was De Profundis, based on excerpts from Oscar Wilde’s same-titled journal of his arrest and subsequent imprisonment for “gross indecency.”  Rzewski hasn’t created a mere piano accompaniment: in addition to speaking and playing simultaneously, the musician taking on this work must master various eccentric vocal affects, singing, whistling, drumming and the playing of a car horn!

Lest you think these elements serve as gimmickry, quickly it’s revealed that their usage provides apt aural metaphors for the parlor of Wilde’s mind in this world of an artist brought low.  The gift comes in the juxtaposition of the elements as abstractions play against the formal, as antiquity gets amplified by the now. The piece swings between musical pastiche particular to the era and sequences of vocal/piano or vocal/percussive syncopations.

The music works as subtext – those chaotic passages communicate the difficult moments when those “bats in the belfry” threaten to overcome Wildean rationality, making the textual account all the more moving.   Rzewski sets the intelligence and the finesse of the writer like a jewel, lifting the words out of the period and hurling them into the here and now.  The symmetry of text and sound allow the listener to journey into the minds of every man and woman who ever served time as Wilde’s observations about imprisonment, solitude and their effects on the mind takes on universality.

In this piece (originally written for a man) Moore communicated a Brechtian air.  Certainly no similarity exists between her and Wilde, or any man.  Yet, this journey on the wheels of Wilde’s words provided as much excitement and drama as any play you’ll see this season thanks to her dulcet cadences. Again, the physicality on view enhances – towards the end of this twenty eight minute piece, Moore will slam down the lid of the piano, creating a symphony composed of finger pops, hand drumming, whispered words and chants, to recount the intricate process by which Wilde struggles to maintain his sanity, yet observe and chronicle his current reality.

Bookending the work is a line that goes something like this: “This is where the artistic life leads a man.”  That statement’s resonance is multifaceted: recounting the persecution of a writer who rejected the prudery of Victorian society echoes the recent blacklisting of the Dixie Chicks and Sean Penn, artists who refused to succumb to pro-forma patriotism.  A civilized world that would condemn Wilde, yet less than a hundred years later play host to the unmistakable vision of Rzewski and the artistry of Moore left this listener/viewer pondering the myriad fates in store when the worlds of art, inspiration and morality collide.