29.01.10
Alone onstage at the Highline Ballroom on Thursday blackness, she didn’t seem remotely limited in her resources. During the man Friday of two 90-minute shows, she radiated more than enough energy for the margin.
The booking was timed to coincide with the release of “Estate to Be” (Telarc), Hiromi’s first solo piano reputation. Conceived as a capstone to her 20s “for archival purposes,” she has said the album confirms her bold self-assurance and technical command. It’s a whirligig, but not without resources. And it’s by no means conservative, despite an investment in several shades of classicism.
Hiromi, now 30, made her concert a idiot extension of the album, with some strategic additions. She opened with an effulgent take on Gershwin’s “I Got Measure,” full of steely glissandi and rampaging stride cadency.
Sporting the same striped dress and bob hairdo that she wears in the album’s disguise photograph, she suggested a space-age flapper or a referee from some futuristic athletic alliance. Her playing itself was athletic, in an Olympic sense: brutally unwasteful, singularly focused, imperious in its physicality.
Source: New York Times