<<  -- 5 --  Jennifer I Paull    'SKY POETS PAINT THE SHELTERED CURVE TO FIND'

Mezey and Rabushka layer compositions of imagination-tangents, feelings and sentiment within their beautiful, bijoux frames. This is surely one of the greatest tests of the artist, to capture the essence with discipline of span, excising superfluous waffle and padding, reducing to a bouillon and concentrating the flavour deliciously?

Timing and rhythm reflect luminescence and faith. Both artists include spirituality consciously and subconsciously in their work. One can feel the awareness of nature, the presence of personal philosophy and belief without one grain of pompousness; that deadly ingredient guaranteed to deflate any lofty soufflé in a microsecond. Sagging, lull and boredom are hues of ink undipped by their computer quills.

'Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.' -- Antoine de Saint Exupery (1900-1944), French airman, philosopher and author.

Several years ago, I read Anthony Burgess' book, The Piano Players. It is a short, very poignant cocoon, a miniature set inside a frame within a frame: Provence and the North West of England. Burgess originated (as do I) from this industrial, often despised region. It is as rich in its tradition of creative artists as it is unfashionable with the Jet Set. The music of the male voice choirs of Wales is paralleled in this relatively neighbouring proximity by the proliferation of the Brass Band as an art form in itself. Some of the playing is staggering.

Rabushka's Trombone Concerto couldn't be a better obligato for a setting of The Piano Players translated into film, or a spoken reading of Burgess' heart-wrenching, textual time capsule.

Paintings come out of Rabushka's vivid, contrasting score, just as they do from his shirt pocket! The lavender-scented warmth of Provence in the South of France, and the dusty grime of England's industrial North, blend as ink to fill Burgess' pen. He walled a municipal allotment garden of the days of the silent screen and those who sought to accompany it with their own dimensions of illustrative sound. He plants his mosaic of highs and lows, miseries and brief moments of success in the struggle to survive poverty and cruelty. His characters personify determination and inventiveness. They battle within the confines of a particular musical art form that is lost to us in the sophistication of today. Its passing nevertheless prepared the stable doors for a stampede of wild unicorns.

'Many live in the ivory tower called reality; they never venture upon the open sea of thought.' -- François Gautier (born 1950), French journalist.

Rabushka's deeply melodic, melancholic waters are rippled boldly as joy and hope bubble energetically to the surface in contrasting, triumphant juxtaposition. His musical geography is as incongruous a brassage as the fashionable South of France and the unfashionable North of England, the setting of Burgess' chosen Picture Palaces.

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