This article was originally published on Cleveland.com
by Daniel Hathaway
CUYAHOGA FALLS, Ohio — If Conrad Tao and The Cleveland Orchestra were being paid by the note for their mind-boggling performance of John Adams’ “Century Rolls” at Blossom Music Center on Saturday evening, the Musical Arts Association might well have flirted with bankruptcy.
The centerpiece of a program that included Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “Something for the Dark” and Jan Sibelius’s “First Symphony,” Adams’ 1997 work was inspired by the 20th-century technology that fueled player pianos and other musical devices, from street organs to mechanically bowed violins.
Slots punched onto long rolls of heavy paper fed through a playing mechanism, pneumatically activating levers that produced notes. While pianists have only ten digits at their disposal, you can punch as many slots into a paper roll as you have notes to play them, and superhuman feats become possible.
Not only possible but astonishing in such a live performance by human musicians as this one — perfectly coordinated by the cool-headed conductor David Robertson. Tao — an animated pianist who doesn’t just play every rhythmic motif from jagged punches to sublime bits of melody, but truly embodies them — joined the Orchestra in bouncing ever-mutating melodic and rhythmic patterns off each other in the opening movement (untitled).
They chilled out in the goofily titled second movement, “Manny’s Gym” (Manny = pianist Emanuel Ax, and Gym = Gymnopedie, after Eric Satie’s simple, archaic piano pieces that this resembles).
The third, “Hail, Bop,” is a pun on the name of the bright Hale-Bopp comet that skirted Earth in 1997, as well as a reference to the foot-pounding boogie-woogie that follows a return to the jagged rhythms of the first movement.
Showing not an iota of fatigue after this rhythmic marathon, Tao waved away the torrent of applause, relaunched his iPad, and gave the audience his own version of Art Tatum’s 1953 arrangement of Howard Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” as a bonus selection.
The concert began with a captivating performance of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “Something for the Dark” — which is also something of a concerto for orchestra. Built up from ever-changing layers of color, the piece starts out with bright hues, then becomes somber. Interesting pairings of percussion instruments, especially the coupling of harp and celeste, take on an ethereal sound world that accentuates the colors of the piece.
David Robertson and the Orchestra gave the 12-minute work a persuasive reading, and Robertson brought Snider onstage to receive a warm round of applause. How nice it was to hear a program that featured works by two living composers.
After intermission, the orchestra grew larger, swelled by students from the Kent Blossom Music Festival, who joined their mentors for a side-by-side performance of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 1, ending the evening with a fresh palette of colors — Scandinavian ones this time.
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