'ISABEL ETTENAUER': Playing With a Lot of Toys, but for a Serious Purpose
By Allan Kozinn
29 September 2006, The New York Times
It wasn't so long ago that the pianist Margaret Leng Tan had the market for toy piano recitals sown up. But these days several universities have held toy piano festivals, and just last month the new-music pianist Emily Manzo closed a recital of contemporary keyboard music, at the Spiegeltent at the South Street Seaport, by moving to the piano's tinkly-voiced nephew to play John Cage's Suite for Toy Piano (1948).
Now they seem to be everywhere: on Tuesday evening Isabel Ettenauer gave a recital of toy piano music, "The Joy of Toy," at the Austrian Cultural Forum. She had at least six toy pianos with her; every time you thought you'd counted them, she pulled out another.
They came in all sizes, shapes, colors and materials, from a miniature black concert grand to tiny red wooden boxes and powder-blue plastic ones. Ms. Ettenauer also used chimes, a whistle, a music box and a rubber tube, through which she vocalized during Hannes Löschel's "Konferenz der Armseeligkeit" (1998), for the standard piano, toys and tape.
Ms. Ettenauer played the Cage suite in a reading quite different from Ms. Manzo's. Instead of delineating its movements, as Ms. Manzo did, Ms. Ettenauer played the suite as a continuous work. She also used a piano that allowed her considerable dynamic nuance, at least by toy piano standards.
Apart from the Cage and her own endearingly quirky arrangement of Johann Strauss Jr.'s "Wiener Blut Waltz," offered as a built-in encore, the works that Ms. Ettenauer played were composed for her. Some, like Karlheinz Essl's "Kalimba" (2005), exploited the sparkling timbre of the toy piano by using the recorded sound of the instrument to thicken the counterpoint.
Stephen Montague's "Almost a Lullaby" (2004) used wind chimes and a music box to add variety to the simple, strophic melody that underlies and propels his score. Vanessa Lann's "Is a Bell ... a Bell?" (2004) is a propulsively rhythmic score, but its real charm is its use of two toy pianos with different timbral qualities to suggest orchestration, of a sort. Geoff Hannan's "Cover Versions" (2001), for four toy pianos stacked like organ keyboards, proved less consistently engaging.
Ms. Ettenauer was at her best in works with a comic edge. In Rob Smith's "Schroeder's Revenge" (2001), fragments of Beethovens's "Moonlight" Sonata quickly begat chaos. And Joe Cutler contributed "La Maison de Fred," a trippy drama in which Ms. Ettenauer spoke all the roles (in different voices) while playing an alternately chordal and complex accompaniment.