(L-R) Damjan Krajacic and Robert Thies (Photo – bluelandscapesmusic.com).
For me, listening to Los Angeles-based Pianist Robert Thies sublime playing on Blue Landscapes, is like watching a lion play with the wind and a daffodil.
By Debra Penberthy
A lion, the wind, and a daffodil?
Allow me to explain. In September, I had the singular pleasure of attending Mr. Thies’ solo piano concert as part of the South Pasadena Public Library’s Restoration Concert Series. Taking the audience on a captivating “Voyage Through Europe,” we arrived transformed at the final piece, Ravel’s “Scarbo,” a work admired and feared for its extreme difficulty. Thies flawlessly handled the technical aspects while maintaining a direct and honest line of communication into the hearts and minds of the listeners. Thies is a giant. A lion with a gentle spirit.
This comes through in Blue Landscapes II: Discoveries, a set of improvisational pieces created with his duo partner, flutist Damjan Krajacic. Krajacic is clearly a masterful jazz flutist. He also has the capacity to shapeshift his playing of the classical flute and bass flute into sounds akin to the Japanese Shakuhachi and the Native American flute. That he and Thies have created music that forefronts beauty, openness, and simplicity and that they rightly claim will “quiet the mind and nurture the soul” seems to me an inspired act of wisdom and humility.
If this doesn’t make immediate sense to you, let me explain my lens. As a graduate of CalArts, always a champion of new music and an institution that trains musicians to perform the most difficult of works, in the world of “new” classical music I have often witnessed and sometimes been guilty of putting technical difficulty and the “challenging” nature of music above connection to audiences. This is sometimes called music for musicians. Thies and Krajacic have chosen just the right musical elements and simplicity to suit their purpose. And perhaps that is the essence of what people love of Thies as a pianist… He seems to know his purpose, which I believe is communication and transformation of a wide audience. Listening to pieces such as the “The Story of Your Heart” I navigated an interior landscape from deep wells of feeling and memory—loss, hope and acceptance, which for me took place on an imagined landscape of river, sky, and wind. Incidentally, Thies told me after I wrote the first draft of this, that his imagined landscape for this piece very much matched with this.
Goodness knows that in these troubled times so many are in need of beautiful imagery and a quieter mind. A space for hope and love to grow.
Join in attending the CD Release party at Boston Court Theatre.
> Find out more about Blue Landscapes here. You can purchase the CD here.
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