Opinion

Southern African Music

By David Swickard

(03/06/2007)    The latest concert in the Music at the Old Town Church series was an engaging multimedia presentation directed and performed by the excellent Zimbabwean pianist Jeanette Micklem. Ms. Micklem also performed two works for solo piano at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church on Sunday evening to a deeply appreciative audience.   

    In addition, she presented a recorded performance of “Mwari Mukura” (“God Is Great”), a concerto for mbira (the traditional African thumb piano) and piano, orchestra, and chorus by Paul Renan-Zelezniak, a Zimbabwean composer, accompanied by photographic images of her native country.

    Ms. Micklem was born in South Africa but she grew up and was educated in Zimbabwe, where she was awarded scholarships for both academic and musical pursuits. She made her name as a performer, an accompanist, and a teacher within the southern African region, performing regularly throughout Zimbabwe and in the neighboring countries of Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, and South Africa.

    Through international concerts in Europe and America she also has successfully promoted Zimbabwean composers and performers, as well as being an informal good-will ambassador of her beloved native land.

    The subtext of the concert was that Zimbabwe has from its hopeful beginnings become a nation whose economy is in tatters, where poverty and unemployment are endemic and political strife and repression commonplace. The fortunes of Zimbabwe have for more than two decades been tied to President Robert Mugabe, who was once seen as a national liberator who wrested control from a small white community and put the country on a stable course.

    However, the present situation cannot be separated from the fundamental conflicts upon which it was founded. The former Rhodesia has a history of conflict, with white settlers dispossessing the indigenous population, guerrilla armies in turn forcing the white government to submit to elections, and the post-independence leadership committing atrocities in areas where it lacked popular support.

    As a consequence, the inflation rate currently exceeds 2,000 percent, and all parts of society are suffering its effects.

    The program itself harked back to an earlier and happier time. It began with a recorded 1990 performance of the mbira and piano concerto, executed by the chorus and orchestra of Musica Viva at All Souls Church in New York and commissioned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence.

    The recorded version, supplely conducted by Walter Klauss, was beautifully performed by Ms. Micklem and the mbira player Ephat Mujuru. Based on a standard hymn tune, it provides a rich interplay between the traditional modalities of the mbira and the composer’s innovative use of the conventions of contemporary Western classical music.

    Ms. Micklem in her comments rightly observed that the work can be seen as a programmatic celebration of the beauty of the panoramic vistas of Zimbabwe and as an aural dialogue about its biological and geological diversity. Indeed, the visual images that Ms. Micklem presented in her slide show hauntingly echoed the aural experience.

    The second part of the concert was Ms. Micklem’s live performance of two works that she persuasively argued were united in spirit and substance, although coming from diverse cultures and different time frames.

    The first, “Mbira Chorale” by Mr. Renan-Zelezniak, according to Ms. Micklem, reflects the timelessness and mystery of Africa — and is a unique application of the chorale form, taking inspiration from Bach. The second was “Jeux d’eau,” in which Maurice Ravel’s impressionistic piece “expresses the mystery of water” and, like Ms. Renan-Zelezniak’s chorale, uses timbre and patterned sound rather than a melodic line to achieve its effects.

    Her performance was a delicious combination of delicate but precisely articulated playing that subtly developed quiet passages of repose and poignant peace, coupled with a surprising physical and emotional strength in the more powerful passages.

    The passion reflected in her playing gave evidence of the immediacy and strength of her commitment to the music and to the land she loves. She is a pianist to be reckoned with and to whom more people should be listening.