Gig: Christina Petrowska Quilico

Christina Petrowska Quilico

Glenn Gould Studio. Thursday, March 17, 2011.

'Sfunny how after never being here before, I was back at the Glenn Gould Studio less than a month later. And this time, it was for a show that would probably be a little more simpatico with the venue's namesake.

For many of those at hand, this would be an emotionally resonant night, coming only a few months after composer Ann Southam's death. The occasion was a celebration of the release of Glass Houses Revisited, a new updating of some older compositions, crafted by Southam specifically for pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico. Petrowska Quilico had long worked closely with Southam, and was more like a collaborator than a mere player of the works on offer at this show, with the pieces incorporating editing and alterations that would gives her the status of co-author in all but name.

There were a couple dozen people in the lobby as the doors to the hall opened, and it was your typical older, bourgeois sort of crowd. I felt like a bit of an outlier, but it was an easy group for me to shoulder-check my way past in staking out a spot near the front.¹ The Steinway was on the otherwise bare stage with no microphones, amps, wires, etc. to distract from pure acoustic music in a gorgeous acoustical space. In a cool bit of circularity, the album had been recorded on this very stage, and was being presented in its entirety.

Speaking of circularity, all of the "Glass House" compositions were based on left hand ostinados countered by precise right hand patterns. As Petrowska Quilico — in an elegant black silk Japanese blouse — took the stage with a quick bow and no other introduction, she launched into "Glass Houses #1" and that elegant circularity was immediately apparent. A rapid chatter on the left hand, and then a counter with the right — a quick cluster, followed by a repeating two-note motif.

There's so much fascinating stuff going on here. Southam's compositional m.o. for this material is to have the two hands playing rigourously independent of each other, each working out a precise mathematical order, free of syncopation in the funky sort of sense. That creates a bit of a tension, as the two hands aren't supposed to "groove" with each other in the way that humans tend to easily fall into.

That theoretical underpinning might give the idea that these are merely "clockwork" pieces, something invented by a composer bent on displaying their technical abilities, but I think part of what fascinates here is how the listener "completes" the composition, receiving it not so much as a series of algorithms as an emotionally-registering statement.

The following "Glass Houses #7" might be my favourite of the set, with a right-hand melody that keeps working its way back around like a niggling memory of something you can't quite place your finger on, while evoking the feel of some of the older elements of the musical tradition — admittedly, the phrase "Bach on crack" filtered through my mind here as the piece moved to its breakneck conclusion. It was hard to not burst out with a hearty "woo!" at the end of that, but I was observing conservatory rules and withholding my applause.²

Were there minor imperfections? I thought I caught a little fumble during "Glass Houses #6", but so what? It's those minor variations that also help to underline the rigourousness of the compositions; put another way, you know that you "get" what's going on when you can distinguish the mistakes. And as the set went on, the fact of the pieces as played artifacts became more important, with the first half closing with the night's two longest compositions, "Glass Houses #3" and the moody, sullen "Glass Houses #13", which went eight and ten minutes respectively, making the player's sheer endurance a part of the whole experience. As the selections stretch out, the repeating loops of the music become something that both performer and audience can get a little more mesmerized by, and just sink into the music.

That led into the intermission — which was probably a necessity for Petrowska Quilico, who is probably one of the few players able to handle this stuff, after the non-stop, intense playing.

Another route of theoretical entry would be to think of this in relationship to electronic music. Given that meticulous precision, those repeating left-hand ostinados are rather easy to "get" for anyone who's ever listened to sequencers, and the whole thing could be seen as a low-tech way of playing loops off of each other. It's worth noting, in that regard, that Southam was an early adopter of electronic composition, only returning later in life to composing for the piano. But at the same time, in the notes for the show she discussed how the repeating figures evoked childhood memories of folk reels and Don Messer's fiddle. Ultimately, the analogue is digital is analogue in a satisfyingly complicated relationship, and the digits of the hand may get the last note in.

In the second set's selections, "Glass Houses #9" had a pretty fab high pinkie riff on the right hand that I kept waiting to come around again, and "Glass Houses #4" was just dazzlingly dense, clusters of notes rushing up in quick-passing knots. The main portion of the night ended with "Glass Houses #5", almost as note-packed as the previous one and again pushing past eight roiling minutes.

For an encore, Petrowska Quilico told the crowd she was going to do a slow number, "because I don't think I could do anything fast." Instead, she offered the crowd Southam's haunting "Slow River #7". This was mind-blowingly good — Southam's slow, spare stuff was the material to which I was first drawn, finding it in a pitch-perfect space between Satie and Eno. She closed out the night with another slow one, Liszt's "Little Piano Piece #2", which had a waltz-y regularity in its left-hand movement to make it feel like there was an affinity to the Southam pieces we had heard.³

Coming out from the hall, there were a couple tables in the lobby filled with fruit and fancy sweets, so what the hell — I lingered a bit to nosh. It turned out to be a little reception to complete the album release. There were some fond words from Petrowska Quilico as well as producer David Jaeger, who talked about the recording process and their relationship with Southam — her absence leaving a slight pang underneath it all. But let her be remembered through these artifacts — and hopefully discovered by more explorers.

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¹ This sentence may contain slight exaggerations. Actually, I wasn't the most aggressive person on hand in the jockeying for seats. As the neophyte will soon learn, at shows like this, the primo sightlines come from house left at the front, where you can get the best angle on the keyboard and really see the pianist at work. You could quickly see the crowd divide themselves into groups of people who thought this was a big deal, and crashed that zone right off the hop, and those who were content to sit elsewhere and just lean back to listen.

² Throughout the night, the rest of the audience would be struggling with the same issue, and after a few particularly tricky selections, a few people broke protocol to offer a smattering of applause at the end of each piece, though mostly the applause was saved for the sustained busts at the end of each set.

³ Concurrent with the album of Southam compositions, Petrowska Quilico was also celebrating the release of her Liszt Anniversary Collection. Those two discs would be followed later in the year with Tapestries, a collection of Canadian piano concerti. The ever-busy Petrowska Quilico has a couple local performances coming up in the near future, a duo performance with violinist Jacques Israelievitch at York University on January 17, 2012 as well as at January 28 at the Karen Kieser Award concert during the U of T's New Music Festival.