Sometimes, blending works. Think of the gene pool, which is diversified and strengthened through cross-breeding. Or trip-hop, the old laid back Bristol sound that buzzes with an electronic mind but beats with a hip hop heart. Now, we’ve got rap-rock, electronic-folk, and Madonna and Britney doing each other – and most of the time, they’re utter crap, painful exercises in washed-out disingenuity. Thus sets the scene for the bumblebee-fingered Maksim, who enters stage left into a musical wasteland, a radio fall-out zone, attempting what not many have tried and even fewer have succeeded at.
Classical piano music, of the traumatic childhood piano teacher kind, cozies up to techno, or rather, visits it at some dank alley and pays it a few bucks as an "escort" service to gatecrash the nearest party. Ooh, why hasn’t anyone thought of that before? Actually, they did, remember Vanessa Mae, that feisty and cute Asian musician who shredded up the electric violin? Yes, we do remember her… what happened to her?
Mel Bush, the guy "behind" Vanessa Mae and Bond, found a new whiz in Maksim Mrvica (pronounced Maravitsa), a young award-winning Croatian pianist. Now, Maksim by himself is pretty much incredible. I don’t have the right to put down anyone who’s got true talent, musical at that, and I don’t mean just being able to carry Total Eclipse at the karaoke. He plays classical piano with an almost punk attitude – playfully, insouciantly, sometimes flamboyantly, but always with a respect for the masters that came before him. And he’s got the clothes to match – leather wristbands, multiple rings, piercings and tattoos. He’s almost like a normal person – he listens to dance music, has gone raving in his youth and nods his head to Carl Cox and the like – except that he grew up stabbing those chopsticks in the midst of a rainfall of grenades, to the beat of bombs exploding, and the accompaniment of shrieks and terror. How did all this affect his music? It only further drove his determination to succeed, to make something out of himself, and out of a war-torn Croatia.
Maksim was already making quite enough money touring and performing the straight-up classical stuff. But a pretty face like his, I suppose, would be quite wasted on fusty old professors and Mozart snobs. Claiming to be "experimental," he hooked up with Mel Bush, and the rest is discography.
At the meet-and-greet press conference on Wednesday, I got to have a few words with the deep-voiced, six foot six inches tall, married Croat. He is affable, down-to-earth, and still retains some of that wide-eyed wonder mixed a with deep knowing wisdom that only Eastern European and Third World citizens seem to have. But not before we were subjected to an endless video loop of Maksim’s live concert in some Euro-tack nation. He tickles the fancy keys of the grand piano like an old but still frisky lover; he lifts his head for a miniscule second, looking distantward with an intense smirk as if struck by divine, mad inspiration. He plucks at notes with pointed index fingers, mimicking a bad typist, while nubile young babes shake their violins or dance tippy-toed around the stage. He is in control of his instrument, he culls forth the voices of long dead European musicians and makes them his own. He entices the sensual rhythms of Cuba as well as the melancholic melodies of Croatia, rising and falling in thunder and waves. It would have been pleasing, even to classical music ignorami, if not – and this is really my only complaint – for the cheap-sounding beats laid beneath the ivories. Damn, if you’re gonna remix something as timeless as piano, you’d think you wouldn’t fall back on production that sounds like upbeat elevator muzak or Disney-to-Broadway renditions.
Other artists seem to have had amazing facelifts with producers like Mirwais, Missy, Moby and Timbaland, but I assume Mel Bush was going for the most bland crossover appeal possible. My only burning question for Maksim was about how his old classical purist fans took to his new image. He said that his piano prof was very happy, and a lot of the old people quite enjoyed the album. He did admit that he had gained much more fans than he had lost. True dat, I’m sure a lot of kids have been piqued by the trendy-looking Maksim’s somewhat anachronistic passion for the golden oldies, leading them to explore other stuff and perhaps demand piano lessons from their parents (also creating a larger demand for more acts like Maksim. So what’s next? Yodel-hop? Three Tenors on Ice?).
For some reason, classical music always remained classical, never kind of seeped into the pop minds of bubblegum kids and their music, save for the few instances of patawa sampling. Skakespeare has been modernized wonderfully so many times, corsets are still fashionable, and hell, ever since Warhol souped up tin cans, the separation between "high" art and "low", or popular art has dissolved into the repetitive, simulating mess culture now finds itself in. Unfortunately, classical music can never shake off its powdered wigs, its elitist roots, its superiority complex. Almost anyone can pick up a guitar, slam three chords and form the next garage Strokes-Stripes type band. We’ll always know where they came from – the garage. But it takes a special discipline to study the old canons of masters who couldn’t record what they wrote, who couldn’t instantaneously playback the concertos they performed. Here were people who were commission by kings and queens to create grand, enlightening art that would represent the soul of a nation, and not just a soul.
As someone who has a deep and meaningful relationship with classical music, someone who has given much for his music and sincerely wants to push it forward in the third millennium, it would be a shame to be packaged and received on the same frivolous level as Britney Spears and her ilk, and be subjected to the same fickle, undiscerning attentions of pop’s young fans while alienating a minority of true aficionados. Making classical music "accessible" is thus not as simple as merely adding some synths to a virtuoso, maestro performance. It is a start, however, and God bless Maksim for trying.