ROmerican Avant-Garde at Carnegie Hall
Piano recitals have a funny way of surprising you. I walked into Weill Recital Hall on Halloween night expecting a standard contemporary music program, and instead got something that felt more like a conversation between two countries separated by an ocean but connected through music.
Dinu ROmerican Avant-Garde concert paired American composers with Romanian works, showing how musical ideas have traveled back and forth across the Atlantic for over a century. The concept sounds academic on paper, but watching it unfold in performance, it made complete sense. John Cage's meditative In a Landscape opened the evening, and by the time we got to George Enescu's Carillon Nocturne at the end, you could hear the through lines.
The program spanned almost 90 years of composition, from Enescu's 1916 nocturne to Remus Georgescu's 2004 miniatures. What struck me was how much these pieces had in common despite being written decades apart by composers who never met. The same sense of experimentation, the same willingness to push boundaries while staying grounded in something recognizable.
Mihăilescu brought in Philippe Boaron for one of the pieces, and watching two pianists work through a score together is always fascinating. The quick glances, the shared breathing before a new phrase, the way one person's energy feeds into the other. It's a different kind of performance than solo work, more collaborative, more conversational.
From a photography perspective, solo piano recitals are one of the harder things to shoot. There's not a lot of visual variety, it's just a person at a piano for 90 minutes. At Carnegie Hall I'm shooting from a distance with a long telephoto lens, I'm not allowed anywhere near the stage. The challenge is finding those moments that make the images feel dynamic despite the constraints. A shift in posture, a particularly intense expression, the angle of the hands on the keys. Weill Recital Hall's warm lighting helps, but I'm still working to create visual interest from what's essentially a static setup.
The program notes explained that this concert came out of the pandemic, when live performances stopped and everyone had to rethink what it meant to make music for an audience. Two years of canceled concerts, of performing to empty halls or not performing at all. This felt like a return to something essential, just a pianist, a piano, and people who showed up to listen.
The range of the repertoire meant constant shifts in mood. Leonard Bernstein's tribute to Aaron Copland felt warm and nostalgic, while Jacob Druckman's The Seven Deadly Sins leaned into dissonance and theatrical gestures. Aaron Copland's Four Piano Blues brought everything back to something more grounded, more recognizably American in a mid-century way.
After hundreds of concerts at Carnegie Hall, I still get excited about recitals like this one. The format is pure, no elaborate staging, no costume changes, just someone at a piano playing music they care about for people who want to hear it. Some venues feel like just another gig. Weill Recital Hall never does.
