Last night's final recital in the Aspen Music Festival's Winter Music
concert series featured young pianist Jonathan Biss.  At 23 he is a
Gilmore prize-winner and the first American to participate in the BBC
New Generation Artist program, among other awards.  Hugely gifted and
extraordinarily versatile, he navigated his way serenely through a program
ranging from Berg and Kirchner to Schumann and Beethoven.  The son of
violinist Miriam Fried and violist/violinist Paul Biss, he studied at
Indiana University and at Curtis with the great Leon Fleisher.  Watch
for him.

The evening's other attraction for the near-capacity audience was the
first appearance in Aspen of the Keyboard in the Sky projection system.
For those who are as unfamiliar as I was with this system, it's rather
like surtitles.  A discreet camera hung from the ceiling focuses directly
on the pianist's hands and projects a picture of a keyboard with hands
moving onto a screen hung well above the pianist's head.  As you might
imagine, with a camera directly above the pianist the effect is quite
single-dimensional and resembles nothing so much as a cartoon of hands
moving on the keyboard.  I was most interested in it before the concert
but as the evening started and I watched, I found myself feeling distinctly
queasy, a feeling shared by at least one audience member to whom I spoke.
As I pondered this I could only think of childhood motion sickness,
exacerbated by lying down and watching telephone lines and poles flash
by as the car moved.  I studied piano for a good many years but found
that I could not orient myself to the keyboard, unable to focus on middle
C.

Most people to whom I spoke found it distracting at best and others just
plain hated it.  Many people had to exert effort to look away and focus
on the pianist, while some simply had to look elsewhere.  The idea is
to enhance the recital- or concert-going experience; I await with interest
the completed survey of audience reaction to see how many found it
enhancing rather than distracting.

Jane Erb
Aspen, Colorado
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