Illuminate Adelaide. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 18 Jul 2024
Pianist Joep Beving’s unique music has attracted an immense following over the last ten years, clearly filling a gap in musical literature and performance. His music can be as simple as a few repeated chords in the left hand and a few notes in the right hand to establish a melodic line, but it is entrancing — "accessible music for complex emotions" as he describes it.
Staged as part of Illuminate Adelaide, Beving’s solo piano recital involves subtly changing lighting by Boris Acket, which is manually operated, and the performance becomes a duet of sound and light. Lights slowly sweep the stage, seemingly in tune with the music. The lighting is moody like the music, mostly illuminating the piano but occasionally brightening.
Beving’s exquisite music draws the audience into a meditative state, and combined with the lighting, creates a dreamy, sensory, ultimately spiritual experience. His music is subtle, exquisitely beautiful and tends to be sombre, slow and rather mournful.
Sitting with his back to the audience, tall, long-haired, bearded and casually dressed, Beving is like a friend who has called in, offering a warm embrace. His music triggers our innermost thoughts and feelings, as he takes us on a personal journey through his own musical and emotional sensibility, a journey to which we can all relate. There was no program for the concert, and in his occasional addresses to the audience, Beving named only a few pieces he played, perhaps to emphasise the informal character of the performance.
Beving uses an upright piano with the front panel removed, with a thin layer of felt placed between the hammers and strings to give a warmer sound, a sound that would not be reproducible on a conventional concert grand piano. The piano is tuned very slightly lower than normal — the A is tuned to 432 hertz instead of 440 hertz, and the difference would not be noticeable for most people. This tuning stems from the idea that the human body responds to certain frequences or vibrations — in an interview, he suggested that the 440 frequency seems more connected to the head while 432 is more connected to the heart.
Beving learnt piano in his youth, but repetition injury interrupted his training, and it was years later before he returned to piano performance, releasing his first album in 2015 in his late thirties. Evidently, his return was precipitated by a moment of turmoil in his life, and perhaps his music was initially a way of approaching self-understanding.
Beving’s music has flavours of ambient, minimalist and popular styles, and he does not see his music as classical or as part of the classical lineage. His compositions seem to evolve from improvisations, rather than using any kind of system or formula. He cites as influences Philip Glass and jazz pianists Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans, and there are flavours of the music of Erik Satie, Chopin and Glass that can be heard. Perhaps these influences were absorbed in his youth when learning the piano. One is also reminded of many other pianists, such as Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, Debussy and Shostakovich, who search their souls while sitting at the keyboard and produce music that seems like a soliloquy.
His Australian tour is entitled Hermetism, after the name of his 2022 album, and the title refers to Hermeticism, a spiritual philosophy derived from writings attributed to the legendary Greek author Hermes Trismegistus which identify seven universal laws of nature: attraction or vibration, polarity, rhythm, relativity, cause and effect, gender and perpetual transmutation of energy. The album is recorded with microphones very close to the piano, creating a sound that envelops the listener, creating a similar feeling to the live performance.
Joep Beving’s magical concert at Her Majesty’s Theatre was a profound and delightful experience.
Chris Reid
When: 18 July 2024
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: Closed
