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Grooving
on the Ivories
 IN
JUST 72 MINUTES, pianist Gloria Cheng delivers an ear-opening variety
of sounds, rhythms and moods. The thread that connects these 23 short
works by 23 different people is the rubric of 20th-century dance music.
Cheng’s stated intent for her latest CD, Piano Dance: A 20th-Century
Portrait (Telarc, 2000), was to have fun, to perform pieces representing
every decade, and “to show that these composers, widely considered
to be dead serious and esoteric, actually quite knew how to rock.”
That’s for sure. Not only rock; collectively they cakewalk, shuffle,
shimmy, tango, mambo, polka and waltz. Toss off a tarantella, mazurka,
conga, rigaudon and reel. One favors banging fist and forearm on the upper
keyboard (the polite term is “tone clusters”). Another cadges—er,
quotes—from Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” Bizet’s
Carmen and Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique, in the
same four-minute piece.
In short, Cheng, ’76, shows spirited imagination in her sources.
Besides spanning the century (from Alexander Scriabin, 1872-1915, to Joan
Huang, Miguel del Aguila and Donald R. Davis, all born in 1957) they hail
from 10 different countries: China, the United States, France, the former
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia, Denmark, Spain, Argentina and Uruguay.
Such a range of periods and cultures produces a richly eclectic program.
For example, not all tangoes are created equal, or by Latin Americans.
Cheng plays three very different ones, by Stravinsky, Samuel Barber and
Per Nørgård, whose intriguing Tortoise’s Tango (Without
Jealousy) features tango and waltz beats simultaneously.
Much of the music on this disc will be fresh to most listeners. However
well-known many of the composers are (among them Prokofiev, Bartok, Glass,
Ravel, Barber), Cheng avoided old chestnuts when she chose their works—apart
from a few familiar pieces like “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” from
Debussy’s Children’s Corner.
It takes a versatile musician to present such a recital. Cheng’s
great strength in this CD is an impeccable mastery of rhythm. She knows
how to rock.
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