Joep Beving performance delivers the power that extraordinary art can have to audiences
Presented by: Illuminate and Adelaide Festival Centre
Reviewed: 18 July, 2024
Joep Beving’s evocative piano mastery provides a slower, more meditative melodic moment within an otherwise busy and bustling Illuminate Adelaide program for 2024.
An unhurried yet dramatic beginning sets the scene for the evening as Dutch composer and pianist Joep Beving seats himself at a central piano on a smoky, barely-lit stage. One small light hovers above Beving, whose back faces the audience as he sits at a slightly askew piano in the centre of an empty stage. This simple visual highlight of Beving’s fingers dancing along the piano keys is a reminder to appreciate the simplicity of the emotionally arousing contemporary classical music that is created.
After four years, Beving returns to Adelaide, bringing his latest album (and his return to solo piano) Hermetism to Her Majesty’s stage, as well as a couple of audience-favourite songs from his previous nine years of musical creation. As he is trusted to do, this unbelievably talented musician and composer leads his captivated audience through a meditative and emotionally-connecting performance, leaving everyone in awe of the raw beauty of his music.
Alongside Beving’s captivatingly emotive piano melodies is the incredible visual addition of technical light sculptures by artist Boris Ackett, who also helped create the Hermetism album. Ackett’s aerial kinetic sculptures cohesively combine to create a more experimental form of musical performance that sets a new high standard for the musical scene.
At first, the light design is subtle and simple, just a small light contraption in continual circular motion pointing small, colour shifting lights out towards the audience. Intermittently, a very large, round warm yellow light slowly builds its strength from the back of the stage, rising to a powerful light that beams out to the audience – it’s almost like an uncanny bright sun slowly piercing through a dark night sky.
As the show progresses, Ackett’s kinetic sculptures suddenly come to life above Beving and his piano. Through the cleverly hidden technical skeleton, the lights upon the structure’s arms appear to gracefully move in an organic way, impressively flowing as if upon the exoskeleton of a flying creature. At times their movements generate the vision of stars in the sky playing and dancing together in rhythmic constellations – it’s all very magical and mesmerising.
In soaring sections throughout Beving’s piano performance, you’d swear that you were hearing the masterful instrumentals from a major Oscar-winning film, and an opportunity like this would be unsurprising to see in Beving’s future.
Beving’s small moments of interacting with the audience reveal his affable and refreshingly modest personality, with his dry sense of humour on show as he tells the audience when they’ll be attended to by him, and he removes the surprise of an encore by preluding it.
He also takes the time to gently explain the often humble background of a few select songs, some of which are quite intimate explanations. These vary from watching with loving, but perturbed eyes, his sleeping daughter, Lotus, and the parental need to protect your children, to the loss of a dear friend to cancer, and constructing their memory in music.
His mention of the light and dark of the world inspiring his musical practice is reinforced visually through the bold contrasts between light and dark throughout the night. It’s hard not to feel humbly inspired by Beving’s hope that despite the evil and ugliness that we’re seeing day-to-day, there is potential for things to get better. He relates this back to the spiritual philosophy of Hermetism and its focus on balance; that for everything that exists, the opposite must also exist, and so for all the evil we are currently witnessing, this will be balanced by the same amount of good.
After this amazing performance every audience member would be leaving the venue feeling physically, emotionally and spiritually lighter, and more importantly, more hopeful about the world – that’s the power that extraordinary art can have.
Reviewed by Georgina Smerd
Photo credit: Wouter Vellekoop
Venue: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Season: ended
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