It used to be that everybody grew up in their hometown and stayed there. But now we're expected to be everywhere at once via cells, PCs with IMs and cams, so that even the best and brightest seem to be floating rudderless in a narcissistic dream of me. You'd think this would be the case with pianists Rami Khalife and Francesco Tristano Schlime, who were born nine days apart in September 1981 � Khalife in Lebanon, and Schlime in Luxembourg � but this is happily not so. Khalife and Schlime, who met when they were students at Juilliard, are very serious young artists. Rami plays all over the world with his celebrated father Marcel Khalife's ensemble Al-Mayadine, and sometimes with other players like Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh; and Francesco Tristano, who won first prize in the Concours de piano xxi siecle, Orleans, France, in 2004, gets lots of solo and orchestral dates, mostly in Europe, though he also gave an ambitious and well-received solo concert this February at New York's Carnegie Hall. You'd think that with all this going on, they'd be scattered. But when finally reached by phone � speaker-phone, no less � at Schlime's Barcelona apartment, they couldn't have been more focused, and happy to discuss their new Nagam Records CD, Pop Art.
"We deliberately chose not to have the classical image of the piano," Khalife says, and Schlime agrees. "We're involving the tradition to another level."
They know that tradition inside out. Both have repertoires extending from Bach, and in Schlime's case, to Italian modernist Luciano Berio (1925-2003), as well as the American techno composer Carl Craig, and in Khalife's case his countryman, 46-year-old Abdallah El-Masri, who wrote his dramatic and technically demanding Piano Concerto for him in 2003, which he's recorded with the Symphony Orchestra "Globalis" on Nagam. But their goal on Pop Art seems to be to take both received and recent traditions to an entirely different place, and this extends to how they've recorded it. "The extremes are on both sides, right and left speakers, and in the middle register," Khalife notes, which puts you right inside the physically weighted space of the music.
This may sound abstract, but the experience isn't. Instead you're immersed in the immensely varied emotional temperatures and colors of the CD's 11 pieces, which both artists agree are "50% improvised and 50% planned structures." It's this tension between the fixed and the unfixed moment that gives their CD its poignancy and power. Khalife and Schlime have also used poems by their friend l.3.K as springboards for their imaginations. His "Monument," which begins, "My dear citizens, the hour is solemn. Be afraid, death is ahead," has big, forbidding chords and dark, contrasted lines.
Yet everything here isn't dark. "Preludes" is a parody of Bach's keyboard preludes, with harmonies the German master would never have dreamed of using, while "Haiku," with its snatches of pentatonic scales, could be an update of a very inward Impressionist piece by Debussy or Ravel. Khalife calls their program "very meditative and intimate music which reflects about experiences," while Schlime says that this may come from the "totally peaceful" visit they had with Rami's relatives in his father's hometown, Amchit, not long before they recorded their CD in June 2006 near Paris. But then the Lebanon War came on July 12, and peace flew out the window. "Did it affect anyone you know?" I ask, and Rami answers, "Yes, friends of mine in the south, they suffered obviously from the bombs. "
It's clear that this is an aspect of our troubled present which somehow shadows their work. But as Schlime confidently asserts early in our talk, "Rami and I always go in the same direction because we know exactly what to do." And Rami? "We're curious and want to discover everything in life. We play with our full hearts and bodies. Art should be seen and felt in the maximum way in the planet." Not a bad agenda for two 20somethings who, instead of being "over it" like most of their peers, are fully engaged and very definitely alive.