Alice Zawadzki‘s sheer stage presence and her assuredness as a musician increasingly blow aside all doubts and questions. Whereas it was surprising to witness them a decade ago when she was getting started, these days the main risk is that such attributes and abilities are all too easily taken for granted. I checked, and, yes, the solo performance we witnessed was something she was trying out for the very first time, a completely new venture.
Perhaps a mathematician can explain to me if… or how… a first conjecture and a formal proof can ever be one and the same thing. All I know is that on Monday evening…they were. Her 30-minute, four-song set as the opener for Tigran Hamasyan in the Barbican Hall settled the audience from the first few ‘graffiato’ bow-strokes on the violin, and the whole hall was held, rapt, throughout.
No loops or effects, just voice, violin and drum for the first three songs: the long-phrased original “Low Sun Lovely Pink Light”, the Ladino/Sephardic song “Dezile a Mi Amor”, and “Superior Virtue”, another original. The only external element – a drone getting louder (sound design by Alex Roth) – was introduced for the fourth and final song, another original “Get Thee to the Trees”.
If this premiere set left any questions at all, it was these two: the first would be why any festival director seeking a 30-minute act requiring minimal set-up ahead of a main act in the next couple of years would want to look any further than Alice Zawadzki’s new solo show? And the second? How could they possibly not book it?!
When I go to concerts on my own, I sometimes try to imagine what someone who knows me and my musical tastes well would be saying from the next seat. And in this case, I couldn’t help thinking at regular intervals that any one of my sons would be laughing out loud – albeit in a slightly concerned way – and then saying exactly the same thing: “That’s not your kind of drummer at all, is it Dad?!” They know me.
Mark Garstka, from the prog metal band Animals as Leaders is a strong, dominant musician. He has described himself in interviews (link) as “one-track-minded”, with “full focus”. The episodes in which he was involved, driving cross-beats hard and overpowering the band, seemed a far cry from the delicate world of folk tales that Tigran Hamasyan described at length in the superb long interview which Rebecka Edlund did for us when she met Tigran in a park in Romania last year…
Yes, Tigran is a fascinating artist with a vision, authenticity, and headlong virtuosity to spare. Yes, brothers YessaÏ and Marc Karapetian know every twist and turn of the stories he wants to tell….but when their more reflective episodes serve merely as temporary calm before the next full-on rhythmic assault.. they are – for me at least – all too quickly forgotten. That is the opinion of one writer, and can be no more than that. The audience responded to those episodes above all, and indeed to the gig as a whole, by giving loud and enthusiastic encouragement.
