Like a dating agency for artists with wild streaks, the Serious Sampler series puts together performers prepared to spend a night with a driven stranger - whether it takes them to heaven, hell, or just to the desire to get out of each other's way before somebody gets hurt.
Two pianists who had never worked together before - the classical virtuoso Joanna MacGregor and the young South African jazz musician Moses Molelekwa - picked up the Serious Sampler baton this time around. It was one of the pro ject's most ambitious and intriguing pairings. Molelekwa is widely hailed as the inheritor of Abdullah Ibrahim's mantle, a creator of hymn-like harmonies rolling under jubilantly jazzy melody lines, propelled by the leaping vitality of South African township music. MacGregor is comfortable in any company from Django Bates to Pierre Boulez.
Squeezed on to the sweltering Spitz's small stage, facing each other at two grand pi anos, they could have made their own kinds of music simultaneously but separately. But, in the spirit of the Sampler's mission, they found remarkable ways to intertwine them.
When Molelekwa played in a churning, post-boppish McCoy Tyner-like manner, MacGregor shadowed him with emphatic, clamorous chords - the sustained percussiveness of her playing was a characteristic of much of her work on the show. When they doctored the strings to produce drum and marimba-like effects, MacGregor sometimes sustained drumlike patterns behind her partner's gentler rhapsodising, sometimes spun glistening romantic arpeggios off the South African's chords when he turned to an insistent, brooding, left-hand riff.
A contemporary Japanese favourite of MacGregor's repertoire shifted gradually from its hypnotic rumble of harmony movements couched in sustained trills, to a looser and jazzier feel, and the traditionally African-jazz incantation of Molelekwa's dedication to his grandfather took on a softer liquidity in MacGregor's delicate hands. The only downside was that it lasted barely an hour. To judge by the reception, the audience would have liked twice as much.
