By Nick Ostrum
Minimalist solo piano can be a gamble. One cannot make up for weak or
inexact vision through sheer density or volume. At the same time, uninspired
detours are emphasized in their lonesomeness. Too much quiet or repetition
can sound trite or just plain uninteresting. Techniques that can exercise
incredible power in trios and quartets, moreover, can fall flat without
accompaniment. (We won’t even broach the issues of the arbitrary tastes and
wandering attentions of this listener.) A lot can go wrong, maybe even more
than in most other settings. The composer and musician are certainly more
exposed.
The first of four in a series dedicated to Smith’s solo compositions,
The Plains
consists of a single titular piece composed for and performed by the
masterful Cheryl Duvall. The two – pianist and composer – have a close
musical relationship. Smith had taught Duvall as an undergraduate. After
graduating and presumably getting on her feet, Duvall started performing
Smith’s work live and commissioning additional compositions. The familiarity
shows. Duvall is confident and compassionate in her playing, and this style
of music requires both. The Plains is alternately vast and precise,
wandering (Smith’s well-chosen description) but forward-moving rather than
meandering. At once the repeated chords imply suspension in an ocean
(there’s that vastness) and an insistent trudging forward. Movements
(such as the second) can be as wistfully airy as they are heart-wrenching.
The Plains, however, never stays in the place, nor in the same motif, for
too long, and more active passages open to more spacious ones, more
repetitive passages to more hopeful melodic ones. Through it all persists a
fascination with tension, slight variations on repeating phrases, slow and
patient development, but also slight shifts of tone, pacing, and volume.
Primed by an hour of this slow accumulation, the unsteady but defiant surge
(relatively speaking) in the last few minutes is simply riveting.
The Plains is a solo piano record, but despite the constraints that
might indicate, it is big in vision, in scale, in emotion. That is the
strength of this corner of the contemporary classical sphere, and that is
something that Smith and Duvall do better than most anyone else. Take the
intimate, the small, the modest and reveal the universe, the variations and
the granular details, inside of that.
The Plains is available as a CD and download on Bandcamp: