Pianist Girma Yifrashewa performs at the Bethesda Blues and Jazz Supper Club. (Josh Sisk/For The Washington Post)
Girma Yifrashewa has a website at:
http://www.GirmaYifrashewa.com and is featured at AfriClassical.com
“There
is no place in Ethiopia where Girma could do this!” an immigrant from
Addis Ababa explained during Sunday night’s intermission at Bethesda
Blues & Jazz Supper Club. “People there don’t pay attenton to
classical music. It’s all cultural, traditional music.” Pianist and
composer Girma Yifrashewa, then, is as unique in his homeland as he is
in the United States: a man who has studied the European piano
repertoire and has applied its devices to Ethiopian traditional music.
At the club, he showcased both traditions in one of this year’s most
mesmerizing concerts.
Yifrashewa made headway in the States with
the release of 2014’s “Love & Peace,” featuring five original
compositions for solo piano. (NPR named one piece, “Sememen,” its song
of the year for classical and jazz.) But with the exception of the
opener, a somber new piece dedicated to the recent Ethiopian victims of
the Islamic State, his first set on Sunday was all repertory. His
choices, though, were very revealing: heavy on Chopin (who wrote three
of the seven selections), with his static harmony and dense latticework,
and nearly all waltzes, including Tchaikovsky’s “Autumn” and Liszt’s
“Consolation No. 3,” as well as his own composition.
This formed
important context; waltz time (3/4 and 6/8) is very important in
Ethiopian music, and Chopin, as became clear in the second half, is a
major influence on Yifrashewa’s composing. They were also beautiful
performances in their own right, Yifrashewa employing a tenderness of
tone and light rhythmic touch that added heft to his more emphatic
attack on pieces by Chopin and Schumann.
The second half opened
with another waltz, James Lee III’s “Memories of Axum.”
Comment by email:
Comment by email:
Hi Bill, Thanks for the follow up! Really appreciate. I am about to play here in New York in two hours! Thank you once again Bill! Girma [Girma Yifrashewa] PS. I am so happy about the review! Thank God!
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