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The Music at Tippet Rise
Julien Brocal and Caroline Goulding are two young performers who disrupt the traditional expectations of scores with ground-breaking new interpretations without affecting the notes written by the composer. In many ways their representations are closer than ever to the music’s intentions. But a new wind is blowing; we are on the edge of a revolution in performance technique that transcends simple fidelity to the notes and which instead evokes the meaning, the mood, the landscape behind the score. A score is like a set of blocks with which we build structures to complement the terrain. Some people build mud huts, some Bauhaus and Brutalist boxes, some maritime sails and waves. And some have such vision that we cannot even begin to understand how their shapes will lead us into the future.
Julien is a pianist. As a composer, he is the child of Ravel and Mompou, both of whom he plays tonight. His own pieces share the same gentle ghosts of immanence, conjuring up the yearning of a fog or a wind, creating moods where music has never gone, and yet moods we recognize as being our deepest, most private emotions. Notes are merely clues of
the essence that lies beyond them. A composer can suggest that hyperreality, but performers either make it surreal, ultra real, or, when all else fails, simple.
Julien believes in gardening his pieces like flowers: planting them in the soil of a mind which has absorbed the landscape of the composer, his sufferings, his triumphs,
his silences—and then letting them flourish in the French countryside, in the soft autumn and stark winters of Catalonia, among the bells and birds, in the dark night of the soul of the great mystic Juan de la Cruz. His melodies are incantations, chants, meditations on being. They do not intrude or impress: they flow with the winds of dawn, they summon up the voices of silence, a nostalgia for imaginary places. He finds in the music of Ravel and Chopin the suggestions of these mythical kingdoms. His Chopin is on a level with the warmth and perfection of Dinu Lipati. Critics have tried to pigeonhole the surreal Impressionism of Brocal or Mompou as being somehow lesser than the fire-breathing chords of the Russian and German tradi- tions, but this misses the new world of meditative thinking
PRE-CONCERT READINGPETER HALSTEAD
WEEK ONE