Reviews / Interviews
A rich and rare experience.
The style of a concert-dialogue is, for our current time, an appropriate way of bringing the works of the past closer to the audience.
LA NACIÓN
The Inspiration of the Musical Geniuses with Maestro Daniel Levy
MúsicaClásicaBA / Nahomi Martínez
These activities, which should be constant and form part of a continuous audience training programme, allow us to present these geniuses with a different point of view, to tell the story with a different depth, to explain with words and feelings. There, in that space, it is not necessary to have an academy or to know about forms or tonalities to connect with the life of another and, much less, with his music.
The Delicate Art of Listening to Sounds
CANTABILE / por Alejandro Stilman
Internationally acclaimed pianist and master of listening, Daniel Levy returns to Buenos Aires for two performances. The diary of an artist-researcher of "what music tells us without words".
From Inspiration: Knowing, Learning and Listening
ASSOCIATION OF MUSICAL CRITICS IN ARGENTINA / By Donato Decina
I was fortunate to be able to attend the second of these talks and it was truly a revelation to appreciate the talent and inspiration of Clara Wieck, of whom very little is known, obviously overshadowed by the strong personality of her husband, Robert Schumann.
Concert-Dialogues
GOEN / Perla Zayas de Lima
The difficult marriage between words and music is confronted by the pianist Daniel Levy during three meetings in which he will focus on the theme of Musical Inspiration, in relation to the works of three composers, Bach, Clara and Robert Schumann, and Brahms.
This proposal is in itself an enormous challenge as it seeks to relate "confessions and thoughts" about the creative world of these composers with the works that emerged from that original moment. How can inspiration be explained in words through a logical argumentation?
Daniel Levy maintains that he will resort neither to the mental intermediation of musicology, nor to musical history and criticism to enable the audience to connect from the mental and emotional with the mental and emotional of the creators:
The Concert Dialogue is a musical experience based on the intimacy between the performer and the audience through a communicative bridge that presents the intuitions of the composer and his creative world. An inner itinerary that links the chosen works with subtle threads.
This involves a triple dialogue: Levy's with Bach, Schumann and Brahms; Levy's with the audience, and the audience's with the three composers, an objective which in the field of the performing arts, especially in the theatre, is the highest aspiration to be achieved, as the now canonical theories of reception show.
It is the composers, the performers and the listeners who form an indivisible and necessary unity of the artistic ceremony, so that that which initially resides in silence becomes audible. This primordial work, followed by the effort to create an architectural structure to the sounds, is what gave birth to the works that today we call masterpieces and which were non-existent without this inner substratum: that of INSPIRATION.
Two words are key to this declaration of principles: ceremony and inspiration.
Receivers and creators connected in a space of high symbolic value that opens up to the possibility of forming a rhythmic and harmonious soul - as Protagoras aspired to - through rhythm and musical harmony... Inspiration as the ability to instantly grasp the plan of an artistic work, bypassing the intermediate phases of association and reasoning, but which does not exclude "effort", theoretical reflection.
This approach to the singular creative processes of these four artists (I include Daniel Levy himself, who does not avoid the self-referential) will allow us to generate an auditory imagery and that authentic participation that generates the distance of the gaze, the availability of all the senses. His talent not only as a composer, but also for "establishing an intimate connection with the audience" and his research into the emotional, intellectual and spiritual effects of music and its after-effects on human relationships", endorse this.
Clara and Robert Schumann in Concert-Dialogues
GOEN / Perla Zayas de Lima
From a musical point of view, I would like to highlight the artist's ability to turn the space of an auditorium into a reverberating sound space of shared vibrations. He is a master not only in the execution of the scores, but also in the way he organises the conditions of the passage from verbal discourse to the language of the music emanating from the instrument, or from a recording, and from both to the visual field (facsimiles of scores that the audience can hold in their hands). The performance of Clara Schumann's rarely performed pieces (and practically unknown even among music lovers) is complemented by Levy's exposition of her standing at the piano, whose concepts can easily be transferred to the field of other arts, among them, the one on which I am focusing my research: the theatre.
According to Levy, the case of Clara Schumann, of whose work only a part is known, which, at the same time, is almost exclusively disseminated by female pianists, is significant. This is not only due to the individual choices of the virtual performers, but also to a decision by the organisers to impose a certain repertoire.
In these Concert-Dialogues, Daniel Levy combines the rigour of his approaches with clarity of exposition, capacity for synthesis, absolute mastery of his piano technique and humanist fervour. In short, he possesses what the critic and narrator Ernesto Schóo called "loving intelligence".