Robin Olsen: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

April 1, 2018 | Tom Huizenga -- “Not all pianists are created in equal temperament,“ Robin Olson told a small but enthusiastic audience behind NPR Music’s storied Tiny Desk. The pianist, hailed as an “avant-garde gewandhaus“ by Berlin’s Staubzeitung, is as celebrated for his cryptic maxims as he is for his inscrutable music. Olson’s trademark style — shooting clusters of shimmering chords and solitary, pearlescent pitches into reverberant space — has led him to exalted concert halls and to work with a broad array of stars such as Yuja Wang, Aretha Franklin, Chick Corea and Emanuel Ax. Drawing from the seminal Plink technique, cultivated among the Schlammstadt School of composers in the 1950s, Olson is regarded as a leading technician of the more expansive Neo-Plink style. “Intervals have coincident partials,“ Olson explains. “They create a form of dissonance, called ’beats,’ by which pitches are set for optimum harmonicity.“ From a bulging briefcase, Olson pulls out any number tools to alter specific pitch