The Musical Box: Musings on music from Walter Tunis

As the second set of his wildly expressive solo piano concert Saturday evening got underway at the Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center, Leo Genovese expressed a need for a “different” perspective. The remark was triggered by a musical stop through the glacial Patagonia regions of his native Argentina. What that seemed to translate into for Genovese was turning the concert setting at hand into a playground, one where his music would dance about in stark, spacious splendor before erupting into volcanic torrents of sound. The result: an extraordinary display of piano dynamics where mood, volume, lyricism, elegance and complete abandon were shuffled as efficiently as a deck of cards.

Genovese has long displayed a deep sense of musical curiosity in his playing. When he performed in Lexington last February as a guest addition to a trio led by saxophonist Jeff Coffin (a concert that, in turn, came less than two weeks after the pianist won a Grammy for Best Improvised Solo), his playing was largely reactionary. He unleashed a series of musical car chases initiated by the ensemble rhythms before him with music that was uproarious in terms of ingenuity, expression and sheer stamina.

On Saturday, with no one to dictate musical cues and nothing to react against, Genovese offered a vastly more comprehensive display of dynamics and invention. Sure, the pianist could go wild when he so chose, as he did readily during the performance stop in Patagonia. But there were also long sections where the playfulness was less overtly robust – sections where the right hand would sew together melodies of lullaby-like delicacy while the left would rumble at the opposite end of the keys, a simmering lower register storm just waiting to bear down on a disarmingly relaxed melodic stride.

The travelogue nature of the program guided the audience thematically from the epic metropolitan starting point of Buenos Aires through areas of environmentally challenged and ethnically displaced unease to a perhaps inevitable journey into Carnival.

Genovese referenced the latter as “the days of no sleeping,” where the sense of celebration could not be adequately expressed verbally. Instead, he let the piano do it for him – that and a sense of mischievousness where the reach was stylistically and literally wide. The dialogue his hands created at opposite ends of the keyboard (the musical equivalent of the familiar dictum “both ends burning”) was, like the entire performance, astonishing in its sense of completeness. Genovese juggled bits of traditional melodies, scraps of works from various Argentine composers and a healthy level of giddy improvisation. Despite such assimilation, the resulting musical hybrid never sounded tentative. In terms of tone, temperament and intent, the music sounded unendingly assured, as if all of the disparate approaches and source material were parts of the same composition to begin with.

Perhaps the catalyst for this musical joyride was the sense of spirit that appeared to be a very outward extension of the personality Genovese revealed during several between-song chats with the audience. The most locally inviting involved his sense of excitement at being introduced to the edible delicacies at a Lexington bakery earlier in the day. “What was the name of the place? Martine’s? Yeaaaaaah.”