A&E
Ahn Trio returns to Hamilton for successful concert in Wellin Hall
By Alex Witonsky ’17
September 22, 2016
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Another weekend of arts and entertainment on the Hill. Some students partied in concrete cubicles on the darkside. Others rode the Bernie Bus to and from the downtown bars. Elijah Weisbrod ’17, G.P. Gernelz (a pseudonym) pursued a platoon of the Mohawk Valley’s Gray Army, filing into Schambach for a night of music, and I, hoping a performance by the world-renowned Ahn Trio could break up the monotony that reigned on Saturday, Sept. 17.
At 7:35 p.m., G.P.’s brusque guffawing over an espied audience member’s reading material, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Sympathizer (2015), was cut off when the Korean-born, Juilliard educated Ahn sisters arrived on stage into a strip-light purple. They assumed the standard positions for a piano trio: Lucia in back on piano, at stage left her twin Maria and on stage right Angella on violin.
According to the program, in two decades of touring the sisters have played in all 50 states and in over 30 different countries. Among the opera houses and concert halls, from New York’s Lincoln Center to Leipzig’s Gewandhaus and Istanbul’s Aya Irini, Weisbrod wondered aloud at how many colleges and universities the trio may have graced. Whereas a performance at the White House is seldom if ever duplicated––jazz musicians, rappers and orchestra players in one door and out the same (security’s tight)––the college circuit is far more forgiving when it comes to second invitations, serving as a revolving door and pit stop for artists. In her opening comments, Angella Ahn mentions that this is the group’s second appearance at Hamilton College in three years.
I assume that the Ahn Trio’s regularity of travel corresponds to an automatic professionalism: as stamps collect in the pages of Ahn passports, so too do the boundaries separating country from country and performance from performance dissolve. Yet, if the Ahn Trio’s quips, explanatory breaks and stage-chatter are in some way routine, like the freak charisma on display at a McCartney show, then it is only detectable by someone with a ruined conscious and critical eye. Here again G.P. Gernelz is of precious moral instruction.
G.P., your earthly concerns, unforgivable boredom and directionless ennui melted into the vermiculated concert air when Angella’s violin intoned the first note of “Skylife.” True to its name, “Skylife” is a sonic falling and a fevered, dreamy floating. Angella’s metal-throated violin tangles with Maria’s cello to describe a figure flailing and rising like a soap bubble just plucked by the wind from the wand. Beneath these strings’ prideful and graceless descent churns a cherry-rum sea of rumblings: it is Lucia’s piano wringing bulky sea creatures into the tune’s bathypelagic regions. The final moment of contact between sky and water is choreographed to splashdown on the downbeat. A corona of upset water is the upbeat of Angella’s violin, the last gleeful disappearance of the song and atmosphere.
With the exclusion of the last song of the first set, a rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing,” all of these songs come across as punch-drunk nocturnes––a little more dramatic than lullabies, but with the same narcotized lucidity of sadness, a little less structured, and given to a weird, kaleidoscopic turn of drift. A famous painter of portraits’ easel now exclusively reiterates a midnight arcade’s sullen rhythm of pinball collisions. At least, this is the image conjured at the end of “Sarabande,” when Lucia Ahn reaches deep into the belly of her Steinway to tickle its strings––an unnecessary embellishment, but one that worked for the nonce.
Sometime after the show, Weisbrod reminded me that part of the reason for the music’s uniform downbeat air and roving thematics is that the album’s (all the songs played were part of a preview) future recipient will be Lucia Ahn’s child. It is a series of lullabies, random midnight tunes. At least it was, until an ultrasound revealed the fetus’ preference for Kanye West.
Of the songs performed, the most mesmerizing was Pat Metheny’s arrangement of “Yu Ryung.” It was either Angela or Lucia who described that “Yu Ryung” is a Korean word for “nighttime things and traffic.” Here, the harried shuffling between violin and piano creates the impression of lone automobiles driven by squares of yellow light and not people, the people inside totally unaware of the infinite voyeurs viewing this transitory scene with quiet detachment in some grassy hillock, a lorgnette glued to their tireless eyes. Somewhere away from the city and sound.
The American penchant for all things English still alive and well, as David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” moved my failed writer friend G.P. Gernelz nearly to tears. Over the course of the five-minute song, the original’s intro, two verses, two bridges, two acoustic breaks, two guitar solos and liftoff sequence are smoothly rounded off by the piano trio. Owing to the ethereal quality of the trio’s tone of uber-human loftiness, the image of a hapless psychonaut drifting off into outer space is replaced by the image of a less fated, less mournful disappearance into the endless corridors of the thousand-star hotel: a white-bearded wizard on a broomstick, a gleeful gingerbread man encapsulated in a flying saucer made of jellies.
After another Bowie piece, “This Is Not America,” the trio played two bossa nova pieces, the 1961 groove “Insensatez” and “Só Louco.” The Ahn sisters left the stage after closing with Prince’s “Purple Rain,” the rude glow of the lights vaporizing an hour and a half of magic.
Weisbrod and the drunken Gernelz trudged off into the windy wet gloom. The Ahn Sisters will begin a five day recording session this Wednesday (yesterday, by now) for their new album of lullabies. Until its release, we will be looking for a new place to dream.