The Irish Times
Saturday 17 May
Erik Friedlander, The Sugar Club, Ray Comiskey
TO CALL Erik Friedlander's astonishing solo cello concert a virtuoso
exhibition would be only partly accurate. A virtuoso? Clearly. But an
exhibition? That is hardly the way to describe a performance in
which, in the first set in particular, there was a sense of someone
straining the bounds of the possible on the instrument in pursuit of
a musical equivalent of impressionism.
And achieving it. In what was clearly a well-prepared and structured
programme, he used the first half to evoke his childhood travels
across America with his father, the celebrated photographer, Lee
Friedlander, and his family. Playing pizzicato (replete at times with
some gripping, up-tempo double-stopping) even more often than arco,
he conjured up musically a vanishing rural time against a projected
backdrop of his father's evocative pictures. Pieces like Tough Guy
and Here Comes The Mad Woman spoke of encounters on the road. But
others, like Road Weary, King Rig, the brief Cold Chicken, Yakima,
the pastoral Rusting In Honeysuckle, Dream Song and Airstream Envy
(about a swankier mobile home than their own) reinforced the visuals
and his commentary.
Throughout, the changes of register and acutely sensitive dynamics,
and the mix of dissonance and lyrical delicacy, were almost graphic
in their impact.
Only one piece in the first set came from another source, when he
gave a bravura performance and improvisation on Arthur Blythe's near- Eastern composition, Lower Nile.
A shorter second set, devoted to the music from John Zorn's Masada
Book 2, The Book of Angels, offered a more expressionist side of this
great musician's art. Drawn from Friedlander's solo cello album,
Volac, the pieces provided some of the most moving and arresting
playing of a memorable concert. Particularly striking were the
opening three pieces, which, if I have identified them correctly,
were Harhazial, a gloriously tender Rachsel, and a dazzling mix of
arco and pizzicato playing on the uptempo Zumiel.
One measure of the impact of this remarkable musician is the fact
that, although Friedlander was on-stage for over an hour and a half,
it felt like less than half that time. He must come back here again.
