Composer, arts administrator, educator, and now, festival curator, Laura Kaminsky is exactly the type of advocate contemporary music needs to ensure its survival. Until recently a dean at the Conservatory of Music atPurchase College/SUNY (she remains on the faculty), she’s currently Associate Artistic Director at Symphony Space. Since her arrival, Kaminsky has done a great deal to enhance the music programming at the venue.
“Symphony Space has long been known for its literary events. But in recent years we’ve been hard at work to create an increased role for music in our programming: both in terms of performances and in our educational activities. We’re trying to create a home at Symphony Space for all different kinds of music. I’m particularly pleased with our incorporation of Latin American music into various projects. We are lucky to have both classical composer Tania León and jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill and his Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestrainvolved in our programs.â€
Despite the currently gloomy economic times, she’s helped to organize an ambitious weeklong undertaking spotlighting contemporary music: Composers Now. It all started with a conversation she had with León.
“Tania pointed out that poets and playwrights generally have a much greater public presence than composers. Oftentimes performers become the focus of an event and, apart from their music, we don’t get to know the composers too well. So, we decided to help to organize a festival that gives composers in New York a public face.â€
The Composers Nowfestival has involved dozens of presenters, ensembles, and organizations. And Kaminsky is quick to eschew any notions of single-minded leadership, remarking instead that, “This was very much a team effort. I lived for a time in West Africa and I learned there that it really does take a village. The idea of Composers Now took shape gradually and somewhat informally, beginning as a series of conversations over lunch or a cup of coffee with various area presenters and arts professionals.â€
“It seemed as if it was just as we were getting started that the economy took a drastic turn for the worse. For a little while, our informal group of organizers was reluctant to broach the issue, but eventually we started to talk openly about the funding challenges we were all experiencing; about being nervous about the future of our organizations and of this project.â€
“I learned something very valuable from those conversations: when people trust each other enough to speak the truth, great things can happen. Once we had had voiced our concerns, we were able to set about finding ways to make Composers Now a reality. By getting creative, we found a solution. The organizers were able to find a week in the ’09-’10 season when we could all commit to programming contemporary music or involving composers in some way.â€
Kaminsky and company didn’t look at this as an event exclusively open to composers of concert music. In likeminded spirit to her work at Symphony Space, Composers Now has welcomed a wide range of styles and genres, including Latin American music and jazz. Within the confines of its contemporary classical programming, the composers highlighted have been from a similarly catholic array of styles, ranging from a concert by ‘downtowners’ Bang on a Can to a Composers Portrait of Benet Casablancas at Miller Theatre.
“If all goes well, we want Composers Now to stretch beyond the boundaries of New York City in coming years. I don’t see why this shouldn’t be a nationwide program that raises awareness of composers with events throughout the United States.â€
If a village’s worth of arts presenters can achieve what Composers Now 2010 has done in NYC, imagine what arts organizations across the whole country could do?
Despite the impending snow this weekend will be a packed one.
I’m attending the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’sconcert this Saturday at Carnegie Hall. Pianist Angela Hewitt will be appearing with the ensemble, performing as soloist in Bach’s Concerto for Piano and Strings in D minor. Christopher Taylor will be the piano soloist in the premiere of a new work by Peter Maxwell Davies. The latter piece, Sea Orpheus, is a trope on Bach’s chamber concerto style, using Brandenburg #5 as its inspiration. Dvorak’s E major Serenade for Strings and Stravinsky’s Basel Concerto round out the program. I’ll be reviewing the concert for Musical America.
For those of you who didn’t see it, Michael Gordon published a must-read article in the NY Times yesterday. Titled “The Accidental Music Lesson,” it chronicles Gordon’s recent visit to Miami Beach for a performance by the New World Symphony of his Gotham Symphony. While there, he visits his high school to give a talk about being a composer, meeting a former instructor and musing on the gifts and lessons he was given by other teachers. Gordon is a class act here, thanking those who provided him formative experiences, even ‘accidental ones,’ with graceful prose and colorful anecdotes.
I met with composer Lou Karchin today to discuss his opera Romulus. A CD recording of this comic one act work is forthcoming on the Naxos imprint. I’ll be writing up the interview for the liner notes.
Composed in 1990, Romulus is a charming work. But like most contemporary operas, it took a while to find a company willing to produce it. In fact, Karchin waited seventeen years for a complete staging at the Guggenheim as part of its Works and Process series.
When I expressed surprise to Karchin at the length of time between composition and premiere, he replied,”Actually, a number of composers have had to wait seventeen years – or more- to see an opera to the stage.”
Opera composers have to be multi-talented, understanding both music and drama, and willing to multitask. But today, Lou reminded me of something else: they have to be patient too!
Nothing gets me in the Christmas spirit like choral music. Kay and I were fortunate attend the Tallis Scholars’ concert at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, part of Miller Theatre’s Early Music series (full review to come).
While there’s no media on the web of the repertoire they performed at St. Mary’s, I couldn’t resist sharing this lovely performance of Palestina’s Nunc Dimittis, courtesy of YouTube.
Dvořák wrote his Piano Concerto in 1876, nearly two decades before his watershed work in the genre, the Cello Concerto. And while the later work is superlative, with this stirring new Bridge recording pianist Vassily Primakov makes a strong case for the Piano Concerto to have a place in the repertoire as well. The piece is reputed to have an unidiomatic solo part. But Primakov for the most part plays the original version of the work, preferring it to later editions which reconfigure some of the passage work.
Brahms has long loomed large as a strong influence on Dvořák’s music; this seems to be the case here, especially in terms of rhythmic construction. The first movement of the concerto features innumerable delightful hypermetric twists and turns as well as syncopations galore, maintaining a supple profile that recalls Brahms at his wiliest.  The middle movement is quite lovely, with a pastoral-sounding horn solo and elegant wind-writing set in counterpoint against diaphanous piano passages. The Bohemian dance music of the finale creates quite an impression as well, allowing concerto to give way to symphony for a short period of time before reasserting the soloist’s importance with some dazzling dotted rhythm interjections and coruscating runs.
This is an excellent piece to showcase Primakov, who balances sensitive dynamic contrasts and nuanced phrasing with con fuoco virtuosity where required. He also successfully inhabits selections from the more innig Poetic Tone Pictures, allowing them to be sensuous, even pictorial, without ever seeming overly programmatic.
Max Richter’s 2002 debut CD Memoryhouse has recently been reissued on Fat Cat records. It’s a timely reminder of how the worlds of ambient pop, field recordings, and contemporary classical music have been converging throughout the past decade, creating a post-classical crossover style that still seems to be in ascent.
There’s a lush beauty to the proceedings here. Gauzy strings mix with nature sounds in a reverberant imaginary soundscape to stirring effect.
Richter’s employment of classical instruments alongside samples has also prepared him well for cinematic work. He’s recently composed the score for the film Waltz with Bashir. While one wishes him much success in this venue, one hopes that the orchestra and theater feature prominently in his future plans as well.
The Zenph Studios “reperformance” software is being used to bring vintage piano recordings to life: the project includes CDs of Art Tatum and Glenn Gould. Â The latest in their series is a solo disc of famous Rachmaninoff performances. And while any recording will fail to capture the live experience of sitting in the same room as Sergei, this disc supplies a result that sounds a good deal more vivid than previous CD remasterings.
Here’s roughly how Zenph works. The data from old recordings is collected by the software, capturing the nuances of a particular pianist’s interpretations. The resulting information is sent through an acoustic piano, effectively ‘reperformed,” and recorded by modern equipment.
It may not be the last word in remastering approaches – one suspects there will always be a quest for the ‘absolute sound of being there’ – but the apparition Zenph conjures is a great deal better than one has any right to expect from a “reperformance.”
For audiophiles and Rachmaninoff devotees alike, this is a surefire conversation-starter.
Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose
BMOP Sound CD 1011
Composer Louis Andriessen turns seventy this year. In a disc celebrating the composer’s septuagenarian status with a quartet of recent works, the Boston Modern Orchestra project, conducted by Gil Rose, suggests that several through-lines between established tendencies and new collaborators have kept the Dutch composer’s work fresh, vibrant, and engaging.
One of Andriessen’s latter day champions is mezzo-soprano Cristina Zavalloni, an Italian vocalist equally at home in jazz and concert repertoire. This flexibility recalls the composer’s collaborations during the 1960s with vocalist Cathy Berberian – Andriessen often served as her accompanist. “Letter from Cathy†makes this connection explicit. Andriessen sets a conversational, yet revealing, 1964 letter by Berberian for Zavalloni. The piece combines acerbic orchestral verticals and slinky jazz singing mixed with pensive Sprechstimme; a complicated palette reflective of the disparate array of emotions expressed in Berberian’s brief missive.
Andriessen’s vivid characterizations also encompass bells – and trains. A brief occasional work, the Bells of Haarlem, celebrates the reopening of a famous concert hall in the Netherlands. Its orchestration is a tintinnabular feast for pitched percussion.
Passegiata in Tram in America e Ritorno is one of two settings from Canti Orphici by Italian poet Dino Campana (1885-1932). Andriessen captures the myriad noises of an old locomotive underway. At the same time, Zavalloni and violinist Monica Germino inhabit the inner malaise of the poem’s narrator. They prove an affecting pair, adopting Campana’s emotional disquiet with a poignant balance of passion and grace.
One can readily see why Andriessen was eager to create a larger work based on Campana for the duo. La Passione is a hybridization of double concerto and cantata with a Stravinskyian twist. Stravinsky is a frequent touchstone for Andriessen; he has said that he conceived of Passione as reflective in some ways of Stravinsky’s Agon. One can certainly hear strains of this in the piece’s brass fanfares and its copious cross-accented ostinati.
Zavalloni and Germino echo the haunting emotional turmoil they adopted on Passegiata in dovetailing duets of supple melancholy. But here the emotional turmoil looms even larger; the poems depict Campana’s descent into madness and subsequent institutionalization at a sanatorium. Correspondingly, Andriessen gives the accompanying orchestra swaths of stark verticals and powerful polytonal harmonies. The visceral immediacy of La Passione suggests that Andriessen is thriving at seventy. Indeed, he is exploring some of the most fertile ideas of his compositional career.
Justin Rubin chairs the Composition program at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. He’s been fortunate to find advocates for his music among his faculty colleagues at UMD. In particular, bassoonist Jefferson Campbell has commissioned and championed a number of his recent works. They comprise most of the program on Nostalgia, Rubin’s Innova disc.
In this postmodern era, many composers, even the Neoromantic ones, eschew overt nostalgia or sentimentality. They prefer to compose quasi-tonally, but in a passionate or heroic vein. One can understand why ‘heart-on-sleeve’ signatures might be approached with care. But Rubin’s music manages a tenuous balance: channeling the nostalgic without ever cloying. This is certainly abetted by Campbell’s sensitive, seamlessly accurate playing. He strikes just the right tone on the title work, allowing its gentle melodies to be poignant but never overwrought. He performs with considerably incisive flair on the wide-ranging and intriguing solo piece Recitative Styrienne and with percussionist Gene Koshinski on a series of elegantly neoclassical Bagatelles for Bassoon and Marimba.
Un Temps Calme, on the other hand, is in a more contemplative vein, channeling the language of Messiaen and supplying Campbell with long, supple melodies of considerable loveliness. Also noteworthy is the Hindemith-tinged Variations on ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland,’ a piece based on an old Lutheran chorale. Clarinetist Patrick O’Keefe and pianist Shannon Wettstein are a nimble pair. Alongside Koshinksi, they also provide a sterling rendering of the shimmering, all-too-brief trio Il Momento Iussureggiante per tre musicisti.
Rubin is a composer whose oeuvre already suggests that, musically speaking, one can put new wine in old bottles without detriment.
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