by Mike Telin
This week No Exit will continue their season-long multifaceted exploration and celebration of Surrealism on February 9 at 7:30 pm in Gartner Auditorium with “Piano Dada.” The free concert takes an entertaining dive into the realm of dreams, the irrational, the unconscious and the inexplicable.
“We’re very excited about this concert because it is our Cleveland Museum of Art debut,” No Exit’s artistic director Timothy Beyer said during a telephone conversation.
The program will include five works for solo piano performed by Shuai Wang — Francis Picabia’s La Nourrice Américaine (fast) and La Nourrice Américaine (slow), Darius Milhaud’s Caramel Mou, Georges Auric’s Adieu, New York!, and E.L.T. Mesens’ Drie Composities Voor Klavier — as well as a video of Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist Anthem.
Beyer noted that with the exception of Milhaud, Picabia, Auric, Mesens and Tzara were not composers per se. “They were artists. But these are great pieces that represent the beginning of avant-garde conceptualized music, which is prevalent today — John Cage took his cues from the Dadist’s playbook.” [Read more…]
It’s got to be a daunting task to create something even more surreal than what we wake up to every morning in our 21st-century world, but Timothy Beyer and his No Exit new music ensemble are pulling that trick off with élan in their