Banshee at the piano (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Banshee at the piano

2:21pm Tuesday 30th June 2009

• Print
• Email
• Share
• Comments(0)

One shouldn’t expect this immensely challenging festival to produce anything ordinary. This concert was totally extraordinary; intense, gripping and deeply moving.

The opening was high drama: Dark, red overhead spotlights on an otherwise blacked-out floor-level stage, the piano silhouetted and Banshee, a female spirit in Irish mythology usually seen as an omen of death and cloaked head to foot in black and masked, initially motionless in the dim red distance.

The figure moved slowly to the piano; eerie shrieks and wails of the witching spirit emerge through a variety of strokes on the piano strings.

That done, an ebullient Keyworth appears within seconds at the back of the auditorium, “Good evening,” and bounces down the stairs. For, of course, it was he…

The piano is a complete instrument, not merely a keyboard, and in Aeollan Harp (Henry Cowell) and the three volumes of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos Keyworth evokes a myriad of pizzicato effects and music from selected strings inside the piano.

Eerie, chilling, soothing – everything. Corsham Festival, in fact…

• Print
• Email
• Share
• Comments(0)