July 22, 1998

Marilyn Nonken: Weaving Bits of History with Strength and Taste

By Paul Griffiths

photo by Tom Dallal

Pianist Marilyn Nonken's concert on Monday night at the Flea included both the earliest work she plays (Schoenberg's Three Pieces Op. 11 of 1909) and the slowest (Alvin Lucier's Music for Piano with Pure Wave Slow Sweep Oscillators). What she prefers is new and fast, and she does it well. She has agility, stamina and thoughtfulness. She also has loyalty, as she showed in playing again the composition by Jason Eckardt, "Echoes' White Veil," that she performed at Merkin Concert Hall earlier this year.

Her Schoenberg performance was highly persuasive and indicative of her strengths and her tastes. As she explained beforehand, the pieces are startlingly new in that they belong to the first year or so of atonality, and at the same time reassuringly old. She brought out these qualities, but with the adverbs reversed.

The start of the third piece certainly had a good Viennese-waltz swing, but in general Nonken seemed most committed to the music's novelty and left some of the most Romantic gestures sounding pale and lost. This was interesting. So was her intelligent underlining of motivic links that made these pieces belong together.

From her more usual repertory, she included, besides Eckardt's work, Salvatore Martirano's "Cocktail Music" and a new piece written for her by the British composer Michael Finnissy: "North American Spirituals." Like much of Finnissy's piano music, this weaves a skein of transformation and embellishment around shadows from the musical past, shadows thrown here by 18th-century American hymns, African-American music (ragtime as well as spirituals) and Ives. These support what is generally a gentle stream, though one that can abruptly turn into a cascade or suddenly stop for long periods of silence. The effect is at once celebratory and wary.

In the very different world of Lucier, Nonken was thoroughly absorbing. His piece depends on interactions between the piano's sound and two pure electronic tones, which move very slowly away from the middle of the keyboard in opposite directions and back again. As they track across what the pianist has just played, they seem to pick up the sound and bend it or create acoustic beats with it. The piano changes in front of your ears, as much as it does when this excellent performer sweeps through Schoenberg.

 
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