Pushing Back the Borders of Music and Imagination
By Jessica Nicholas

The Age, Melbourne (Thurs 15 May 2008)

Lisa Moore is bringing home musicians with tastes as diverse and questing as hers, writes Jessica Nicholas:

The restless spirit that has fuelled much of Lisa Moore’s career was born long before she became a professional pianist. She inherited it from her parents, who spent several years travelling around the world with their three young children in tow. By the time she was 13, Moore had visited over a dozen countries.

The daughter of an art historian and a high-profile economist in Canberra, Moore remembers the family home being filled with “strange and interesting people”. Among the artists to frequent the house were Charles and Barbara Blackman, who later rescued Moore from educational conformity with their unconventional School Without Walls.

Other artists and encounters presented challenges and inspiration in equal measure. There was Albert Landa, a remarkable piano teacher who persuaded the rebellious Moore to take her talent seriously. There was an unplanned pregnancy leading to several months of confinement, during which the 17-year-old Moore had little to do but play piano (she gave her baby up for adoption, but has since been happily reunited with her daughter). And there was the Sydney Conservatorium, where Moore was surrounded by young composers who helped set her on a career path in new music.

And what an astonishingly diverse career it has turned out to be. Moore broadly defines her field as “music by living composers”. But she finds it hard to sum up her own performance practice it one neat phrase, even though she has been asked to do so for over two decades. “I usually tell people I play some popular music; some semi-popular music; and some unpopular music’,” she says with a laugh.

Moore, who has been based in New York since the mid-1980s, was a founding member of the influential Bang on a Can collective. As a soloist she has performed over 100 commissioned works for piano, stretching across classical, theatrical and contemporary music domains.

Her creative approach, she says, is as borderless as possible. “During my 15 years with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, I had to improvise in a jazz style, use my voice, work with electronics… And we worked with so many composers – from Meredith Monk and Philip Glass to people who do really experimental music – that for me, now, there are no boundaries.”

Moore’s latest project is a directorial as well as musical one. She is the guest curator of ‘Sounds Alive’, a new music concert series within this year’s Canberra International Music Festival (concluding this weekend). Two of the acts featured in the series will come to Melbourne before returning to New York, and Moore is thrilled to introduce Australian audiences to such unique creative artists.

Don Byron is a superb jazz clarinettist whose music – like Moore’s – embraces a wide array of styles and genres (in his case, klezmer, hip hop, Afro-Caribbean and avant-garde chamber music). Byron and his New York-based Ivey-Divey Trio will perform their idiosyncratic tribute to saxophonist Lester Young.

And the astonishing Czech-born vocalist and violinist Iva Bittova will perform as a duo with Moore on piano. Bittova dissects Czech folk and classical music as imaginatively as she explores the full range of her voice. “She can sing like a bird, very high and chirpy, or with a low, guttural, gypsy sound. It’s incredibly earthy, and… really, you’ve never heard a voice like it in your life,” enthuses Moore.

“And Don (Byron) is incredibly virtuosic. Both these artists play music at the highest level – music that’s challenging, but also very accessible. We may never have them in Australia again, and I’m excited to see how audiences react to them. I just can’t wait for the concerts, really.”

Seen and Heard International Web Review
By Alain Matalon

Keys to the Future, Greenwich Music House, NYC April ‘08

With the changing of the pianist, came a changing of the mood altogether. Lisa Moore walked onstage to play three pieces from three composers, the first being Ingram Marshall’s Authentic Presence, written in 2001 for pianist Sarah Cahill. The music, lasting about 12 minutes, is described as “a continuous state of mind.” If that is indeed so, it must be a restless mind—for the piece is periodically interrupted by forte passages and pauses, acting to reverse the underlying forward motion. Authentic Presence is demanding: hands are frequently crossed to deliver the main theme that resurfaces in different keys and dynamics throughout. The middle section, a meditative segment based on the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” is the only time the mind is at rest. The music returns to its agitated mood soon afterwards and Ms. Moore managed to join the seemingly disconnected parts to sound like a whole.

China Gates, dating from 1977, also composed for Ms. Cahill by John Adams, is a complementary piece to the composer’s Phrygian Gates. The music can best be described as “an etude for composers.” A root note in the lower register sets the tone for the patterns of eighth notes immediately following in the high register, alternating between figurations and modes. The overall effect is that of a rock falling in churning waters and creating seemingly irregular, infinite ripples. This playful music benefited immensely from Lisa Moore’s intricate finger work.

Ms. Moore continued with the first movement from Kevin Puts’ Alternating Current (1997), its baroque character helped by toccata-like fast monophonic runs and Bach-ian bridge passages in thirds. Puts uses modal and metric changes as well as constant key shifts. However, Ms. Moore was brilliant once again in providing all that the score asks for, and as the highlight of the evening, it was a shame that the whole piece was not performed. But Mr. Puts was in the hall, and received a warm ovation from the audience

What takes sixteen sticks & four hearts?
By Claudia Carlson

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Last night my friend Len, who always knows he can call me at the last moment, invited me to join him for a free percussion concert in the Winter Garden. By percussion I do not mean the construction going on at night in the pit of the World Trade Center... this was the uber talented and hip group So Percussion performing three pieces of new music. They played beads, coils of metal, flower pots, xylophones, and a variety of drums. The music was melodic, varied, enticing, and recorded live for the New Sounds Live radio program at WNYC 93.9. I loved it all, but by the last piece I was ready for it to end, percussion is not soothing, like mime or opera in subtitles, it takes extra concentration to enter their world. Funny how less makes more in art...by ignoring perspective or light source in painting or writing haiku, people take some choices away and what is left evokes all.

The talented Ms. Lisa Moore played a variety of percussive instruments and mostly the Steinway grand in the Martin Bresnick piece as images by Goya filled the stage. I did this sketch of her. But Arvo Part's Fratres for Percussion Quartet and Paul Lansky's Threads were just as wonderful, even without the pianist.

http://claudiacarlson.blogspot.com/

The Art of the Possible
By Ennis Smith

“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 – I desired not only her talent, but 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 her forearms.

After a break, Moore re-emerges bedecked in a Pradaesque morning coat; the armband was now an ascot. The piece was De Profundis, based on excerpts from Oscar Wilde’s 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. Wilde’s observations about imprisonment, solitude and their effects on the mind takes on universality – through the symmetry of text and sound, we journey into the minds of every man and woman who ever served time.

In this piece (originally written for a man) Moore communicates a Brechtian air. Certainly no similarity exists between her and Wilde, or any man. Yet, this journey on the wheels of Wilde’s words provide 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 provides a multifaceted resonance. 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 one 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.
(June 2003)