Incitation to
Desire
Yvar Mikhashoff (piano)
plays Tangos composed for him
New Albion
NA073CD [70.07]
Amazon
USA
Yvar Mikhashoff is a name to conjure with for those who used to attend
the Almeida Festival in London each summer during its heyday in the '70s
& early '80s. Yvar was the prime mover responsible for its innovative
and unique programming. Introducing many American composers to UK, he played
a leading part as pianist in chamber music and will always be remembered
for his marathon thematic piano recitals. The last of those given in Islington,
when he was already debilitated from the illness which was to kill him, was
devoted to the topic of death, and was a brave and typically exuberant occasion
which no-one present will ever forget.
A prodigious sight reader, Yvar Mikhashoff devoured music with an appetite
only equalled by his others; his musical interests embraced all categories
with uncommon catholicity of taste. The notes introducing this celebratory
CD in his memory do not gloss over his lamented death from AIDS before he
was 50, a major loss in many continents - he 'knew everyone in new music
and managed to roam the globe as composer, performer, commissioner, advisor
and producer'.
In an earlier incarnation he was a professional ballroom dancer and that
led to his persuading all his composer friends to write a tango for a project
which succeeded his Waltz Project of the '70s. Eventually there were over
a hundred tangos, many of them given at a three-day concert in New York,
1986.
This last CD, recorded in 1992, gives a true impression of Yvar the pianist
at his versatile best. His knowledge of the dance physically as well as musically
undoubtedly contributes to bringing this larger-than-life figure vividly
and as he was before those who did not know him. Those chosen for this collection
include Bennett, Cage, Copland, Foss, Nancarrow & 13 other composers
not known to me, mostly American. They cover a vast stylistic range, from
near-traditional to avant-garde, whimsical to the lascivious Incitation
to Desire of Chester Biscardi. One of the most sensational is by David
Jaggard, who progressively elaborates the second half of the tango's 4th
beat. Cage's Perpetual Tango is a re-write of Tango perpetuale
by Satie. Dane Rudyhar at 90 was reluctant to compose a new tango in 1985,
but completed for Yvar an unfinished one he had begun in 1915! Aaron Copland
too, in his old age, dredged the past for a tango from a ballet of 1935,
arranging this example of the tango-boleros of the thirties for solo piano.
Nancarrow's Tango? in three staves & three interchangeable rhythms,
is of course 'nearly imposssible for human hands', but not for Yvar's!
Mikashoff's basic tone is hard edged, with quite sparing pedalling, and although
he was not one to always worry overmuch about the subtlest nuances of tone
and phrasing, that did not preclude quiet and sensitive playing when needed,
as here in Jackson Hill's evocation of Japan Tango No Tango. On this
last of his many CDs one can especially enjoy his precision of rhythm and
commanding gestural authority. The sequence works well, and leaves you easily
convinced that the Tango, brought back into esteem by Piazzolla, remains
as viable to fire the imaginations of composers of the 21st Century as were
the waltz and mazurka in the past, and with greater potential than Ragtime,
which has had such a vogue again and features in the 'magnificently, hilariously
schizophrenic' final item by Robert Berkman.
There was an apt tribute to Yvar Mikhashoff in two recitals of his tango
collection at the Almeida Festival 2000,
reviewed
by S&H. I have no problem in concurring with the
writer of the liner notes that this CD celebration of 'the dance of desire'
is 'a telling memorial to an extraordinary pianist'.
Peter Grahame Woolf
