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.
