De-formation: Piano Variations

De-formation: Piano Variations is a purely instrumental offshoot of Galás’s complete setting of Heym’s poem – realized for voice, piano, and electronics, and premiered in Poland during 2017 [work-in-progress].

Her concentrated piano redux opens with lashing octaves, hammered so that resonant overtones spill over the top, seeping like blood; and after the opening tumult is thrown into abrupt silence, notes crack like bruises on skin. Whether by fortuitous accident or by canny design, the gestural and harmonic basis of Galás’s writing is like opening a memory box onto the pianistic soundscape of late 19th/early 20th century Europe. In the background, the wintery darkness of Schubert’s late piano sonatas and the rituals of Liszt’s Années De Pèlerinage. A buckling chorale could come from Busoni, and the motion of churning chromaticism from the first movement of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.

This oozing assemblage of compressed, deranged chromaticism is carried powerfully by Galás’ dramatically alert, unapologetically muscular and bangy playing, and by unusually vivid, close-up sonics, as though each piano string has been given a microphone of its own. The piece, let’s be honest, is not likely to win any prizes for subtlety. The clashes Galás provokes are between broad brushstrokes of primary colors, and there are moments when, for maximum musical – as opposed to theatrical – impact you’re willing the music to mediate itself by flipping over into dehumanizing atonality, an ultimate deforming of triadic shapes and patterns. But that said, De-formation: Piano Variations has undoubted presence and chilling focus; and burns itself out before, simply, stopping.