Lyrical Clairvoyance Dares to Rewrite Music History: Gabriele Strata at Westminster Cathedral Hall
Penning a new language in performance art, the virtuoso scribed a 21st-century chapter in melodic execution through interpretations of Brahms, Chopin and Clementi.
At another performance playing Liszt’s “Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasie quasi Sonata”, taken from Strata’s YouTube channel.
Hazy aches spark shaking digits in the shock-stunned: insulation saving us from overcharge. Starved of our verbal skills, we self-preservingly succumb to mental numbness to lull physiological parades to sleep. As pioneering neuroscientist Benjamin Libet proved, the ties between the conscious and unknown are ticking time bombs: loosened sutures on a wound.
Penetrating without thought, the art of music stirs our nuclei at greater speed and ease than literature or film or painting: one non-verbal medium thrilling a subconscious other. Its realisation defies caption; sending wordless signals to its mortals like a speechless god. At odds with decades of performances of varying electromagnetic wavelengths, the 21st-century pianist must contend with popular interpretative schoolings in the confines of a score: a daunting task.
Rhapsodic arcs of pedal shifts stretch under virtuosic Gabriele Strata’s fingers. According the chords human form in a recital hosted by The Chopin Society UK at Westminster Cathedral Hall, the music worshipper rewrote five works by three composers – Chopin, Clementi and Brahms – to extract a new musical grammar unknown to the melomane’s ears.
Interpolating Chopin’s Nocturne No. 1 in F minor (Op. 15) with surreptitiously evolving notes and diffident delays, Strata painted an anxiety-ridden stream-of-consciousness derailed by threatening brusque rushes in the left hand; incarnating through precise enunciation the mind’s warring selves. Its neighbour No. 2 in F-sharp major stylised arpeggiated chords: feasts for the ear in which each note emerged distinct before dissolving into triad wholes. Holding certain dotted notes for longer than convention’s preferred length, the innovative pianist applied a novel punctuation to the piece: its right hand captured images of a shy debutante approaching then rebuffing high society at a ball. A sterling sonorous articulation beautifully phrased our human limits.
Dosing the third Nocturne in G minor with a like juxtaposition, Strata volleyed volumes of proportioned amplitudes to showcase the distinction between poised self-presentation and a consternated soul. Roaming blocks along the keyboard for a new home, lone notes in the right hand shuffled out of earshot thanks to measures of a consummate musicianship.
Fifty years before the typewriter began to introduce new symbols to recorded text, Clementi wrote his Sonata Op. 40 No. 2 in B Minor: here treated to a dapple’s spray of an ascending chord in the first “Molto Adagio e sostenuto – Allegro con fuoco e con espressione” movement. Plopping like a host of collapsing raindrops, it assumed a new role in the canon of familiar notation: the coinage of a figure that could surface as entwined glissandi signs or something like the writer’s section symbol (§). Classical apices peaked with post-AI delicacies in this awe-tasting novelty.
Thundering chromatic scales singed nerves with tingles in the movement’s second half; note-by-note igniting every goosebump. Stumping other players’ stunts, the craftsman let loose delicately paced crescendo cadences before conceding to petite notes gentle like a newborn’s rattle. Pristine stumbles made up Strata’s trills: exquisite ornaments created with unstillable perfection.
Stirring beats of melody as tinkling as the crystals of a chandelier, the pianist adorned Brahms’ Sonata Op. 5, No. 3 in F minor with both precious aplomb and the crazed chords of protest. “Allegro maestoso,” the first movement, featured chords of consecutive notes that intoned serene shimmers: disharmony made the sublime. Accelerated unions of the hands regaled the right with gracious bass clef prefaces in imitation of refined acciaccaturas.
Inserting juicily suspenseful semi-colons into rhythms of the “Andante espressivo” second movement, Strata spaced the figures out to accent undiscovered chords – unsealing trinkets hidden by neglectful predecessors. Hypnotically exotic, these deserted facets were accorded new life courtesy of virtuosic handling: a basso continuo-like left hand hard-pressed to bridle the right; the mirror effect of sequential chords rendered identically in the “Scherzo”.
Through the recital Strata unstrapped raptly a stylistic language many of his peers take decades to perfect. In 1966 the thirty-two-year-old Glenn Gould was asked by critic Humphrey Burton what it meant to exercise composers’ wishes. Avant-garde Gould answered, “If one is going to pursue performance, at a time when the greatest performances of the past and in the present have been made permanent in the record catalogues for everyone to hear, one must indeed recompose it.” Experiment is omnipresent through the takes of this portrayer: an arresting, fearless monument to music.
All hail Gabriele Strata the composer-pianist.