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Wednesday night was the debut of the Orchestra of the League of Composers/ISCM — an improbable eighty-five years after the organization’s founding. As Jerry pointed out earlier, the NY Times included strangely sweeping and sadly misinformed coverage leading up to the concert. However, this did little to dissuade an enthusiastic audience from attending the performance. They were treated to quite an evening. Below are a few highlights:

-Lou Karchin: An excellent choice as conductor. Lou did a fine job leading the orchestra in a varied and challenging program.

-Musicians: Anyone acquainted with new music in New York was apt to recognize a number of the area’s finest participating. It showed.

-John Schaeffer: Despite appearing a bit rumpled onstage, the radio host lent star power, a sense of flow, and good-natured humor to the proceedings. His interviews with composers before each of their pieces were played combined user-friendly setups of the music with questions designed to let the audience get to know a bit about each composer’s approach and personality.

-Elliott Carter: Having one of the venerable co-chairs of League of Composers/ISCM’s represented on the concert was a classy move. The evening included a stunning performance of In the Distances of Sleep, Carter’s first settings of Wallace Stevens for mezzo-soprano and small orchestra. Soloist Kate Lindsey shined in these songs at the Tanglewood Carterfest last summer. If anything, her performance here was even more lovely; assured, nuanced, and tremendously attentive to every detail of diction and dynamic.  Schaeffer interviewed Carter before the performance. In response to a query about his continued productivity, Carter replied, “I’ve become fanatic about it. I don’t have any jobs to do any more. I can sit in a room and write music all day, and there’s nothing that pleases me more!”

 

-Gharra: Christopher Dietz’s sheepish admission that he knew little about ISCM prior to winning their composition competition(!) demonstrated that the organization still needs to do more to get out the word during this time of revitalization and re-branding. Still, Dietz’s captivating music is likely to have made the audience forget the gaffe rather quickly. He came up with the title (meaning “desert storm”) after composing the piece – with the help of Google and in consultation with an Egyptian-American cab driver. But Gharra’s strikingly dramatic formal design and fluidly varied pitch language – which encompassed everything from extended minor-key passages to supple microtonal bends – was worthy of the appellation.

 

-Alvin Singleton’s After Choice was simpler in design, but eloquently so. A string orchestra piece, it consisted of intertwining arco melodies and pizzicati, often in two-part counterpoint or – even starker – played in unisons or octaves. Written in homage to jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins, it didn’t feature anything so overt as jazz inflections. Rather, Singleton based the piece on string parts from a previous orchestral work that Jenkins had admired.

 

-Julia Wolfe’s The Vermeer Room is filled with beautifully sculpted, imaginatively scored verticals. The harmonic language and orchestration proved quite persuasive. I’m not sure I ‘grok’ the piece’s pacing just yet; I want to give it a second hearing before weighing in.

 

-Charles Wuorinen’s Synaxis featured four soloists in a sinfonia concertante that draws on the Orpheus myths as loose touchstones, Schaeffer was eager for Wuorinen to more precisely describe the connections between musical and extramusical inspiration; but the composer made it clear that this was no piece of program music.  Instead, the audience was treated to a showcase for four superlative soloists: oboist Robert Ingliss, clarinetist Alan Kay, French horn-player Patrick Pridemore, and double bassist Timothy Cobb. Cast in four movements, Synaxis gave each a chance to play with abundant virtuosity. The bass part displayed particular flair, and required more than a bit of courage: jaunty leaps, high-lying passages, and fleet bowed flurries. With its combination of careful ensemble coordination and bravura showmanship, Synaxis seemed an apt – and appropriately ambitious – way to end the 85th season of League of Composers/ISCM. Let’s hope for more orchestra concerts during their 86th year!

Seems like just yesterday Kay and I were celebrating Carter’s 100th birthday at a conference in Paris.

 

 

But today is Elliott Carter’s half birthday. My feeling is that anyone who hits the century mark should celebrate the half birthdays with equal enthusiasm!

ISCM agrees with me. Last night, the debut of the Orchestra of the League of Composers/ISCM — an improbable eighty-five years after the organization’s founding — included a stunning performance of In the Distances of Sleep, Carter’s first settings of Wallace Stevens for mezzo and small orchestra. Soloist Kate Lindsey shined in these songs at the Tanglewood Carterfest last summer. If anything, her performance here was even more lovely; assured, nuanced, and tremendously attentive to every detail of diction and dynamic.

WNYC’s John Schaeffer interviewed Carter before the performance. In response to a query about his continued productivity, Carter replied, “I’ve become fanatic about it. I don’t have any jobs to do any more. I can sit in a room and write music all day, and there’s nothing that pleases me more!”

Should Providence be so kind, I’d be glad to say the same when I turn 100 1/2!

 

New Paths in Music presents

 

An Hispanic Festival

Elebash Recital Hall

Graduate Center – CUNY

New York

 

On Friday June 5th, New Paths in Music presented a concert of composers from Mexico, Argentina, and Spain: two of each. While the program centered around national identities, it contained music in disparate styles and for varying forces. DAVID ALAN MILLER, conductor of the Albany Symphony, led the New Paths Ensemble, a chamber orchestra of crackerjack contemporary players from the New York area.

 

ENRICO CHAPELA’S “Irrational Music” was a perfect curtain-raiser. The piece is based on Chapela’s explorations of irrational numbers; but this was in no way indicative of a dry or cerebral surface. On the contrary, “Irrational Music” pulsates with vibrant energy. Its frequent time changes and energetic tutti pileups were deftly negotiated by New Paths. What’s more, Chapela’s music set the stage for the rest of the concert; serving as a foreshadowing of elements grappled with throughout the concert. The evening was often about music of deft negotiations – balancing massed orchestration versus delicate linear writing and intricate metric shifts with visceral “dancing” rhythms.

 

“Colliding Moments” by ALEJANDRO VIÑAO, was for a smaller subunit of the ensemble. Composed for a 2005 concert in Paris, its chamber textures exhibited a Francophilic ambience. Some of the flourishes played by Christopher Oldfather were reminiscent of Messiaen, while violinist Sunghae Anna Lin, flutist Valerie Coleman, and clarinetist Alan Kay were given Impressionist solo turns. Viñao’s work also demonstrates a supple, varied metric layout; but it is a piece one’s likely to remember for delicate pirouettes rather than colliding timescales.

 

Spanish composer DAVID DEL PUERTO is also a guitarist; his knowledge of the intricacies of the instrument’s capabilities were well-displayed in “Zephyr.” A guitar concerto cast in a single movement, with fast-slow-fast subsections, it was a delightful showcase for the excellent soloist OREN FADER. Del Puerto excelled at making space in the orchestration for Fader’s solos, supplying fleet scalar passages as well as a central section of considerably supple lyricism. That said, there was plenty for the ensemble in the piece as well; transparent accompaniments were contrasted with powerful verticals. Once again, there was a marked emphasis on frequent, fluidly rendered time changes. “Zephyr” is a persuasive, attractive work; one hopes Fader keeps it in his repertoire.

 

GABRIEL ERKOREKA’S “Trance” draws upon American trance films as a touchstone, likening their post-surrealistic tone and simulated dream states to the piece’s musical explorations. The result was a tempestuous, expressionist, and volatile tone poem, more illustrative of disordered sleep than the meditative or transported states one often associates with trance in popular culture.

 

More appealing was GABRIELA ORTIZ’S “Amber Stained Glass Windows.” The piece charts the trajectory of a Monarch butterfly, migrating from the composer’s native Mexico to Montreal. Ortiz is a skillful orchestrator, creating limpid, shimmering textures that made particularly fine use of New Path percussionist John Ferrari’s formidable virtuosity. Miller deserves mega-kudos for preserving abundant clarity in this challenging piece.

 

Argentinean composer ESTEBAN BENZECRY was fortunate to have violinist ROLF SCHULTE performing the solo part in his “Evocations of a Lost World.” Schulte’s nimble execution of dizzying passage work and his ever present flair for the dramatic helped to distract from Benzecry’s frequently mawkish orchestration. Tribal “drums of death” and overblown winds, designed to be evocative of folk materials, instead gave the concert’s closer a bombastic, hackneyed flavor.

 

Still, the New Paths Hispanic Festival had a lot going for it; dedicated performances, stylistic diversity, and a program featuring several composers who deserve to be better known stateside.

 

Visual/Aural/Personal Discovery

 

Kay and I went down to Barrow Street to hear the second Keys to Future concert last night. In addition to some pieces with which I was very familiar, the program also included works that were new to me. Discovering a new piece or previously unfamiliar composer in a live venue can be thrilling; especially when Amy Briggs and Stephen Gosling are playing! It was an excellent show; my review of it should post on Musical America later this week.

 
We got to the Village a little early, and had time to enjoy a preconcert dinner and stroll around the shops on Bleeker Street. A browse through Bleeker Street Records reminded me of one of the reasons why I’m so glad that there still are a few brick ‘n mortar stores around; and why I’d be sad if they went away. ‘Digging’ for vinyl or CDs can reveal sought-after treasures; but it can also lead to pleasant digressions and discoveries. While looking for something else, one of the CDs I grabbed off of the rack struck my visual fancy. I have no idea who the band is, what style of music they play, or whether they are any good. The artist who rendered their booklet cover, on the other hand, had such a vivid imagination that it was worth the five bucks just to see if the music could compare.

 
One of the debates as we ‘go green’ and cut costs is about the efficacy of digital distribution; whether we really need artifacts or whether digital copies, with all their conveniences (and foibles) instead suffice. I have grudgingly converted to obtaining some recording acquisitions via digital download. Even with the current sonic compromises of MP3, the convenience and comprehensiveness factors of many digital stores are seductive. And the 30-second sonic snippets can be handy for triaging selections.

 
Still, the experience of digging through shelves of recordings in person and having some album art catch your eye, paging through the storybook of lyrics and wondering if the musical rendering will compare – that’s magical!

 
One of my favorite places to browse in the digital domain is Silber Media. The imprint specializes in experimental artists, particularly of the alt-electronica persuasion. A number of their artists are on tour this summer; dates below!

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