The Prom on August 4 was presented by BBC Symphony Orchestra, along with the BBC Symphony Chorus and the Constanza Chorus, conducted by Hannu Tintu. It opened with Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna by Pierre Boulez, in commemoration of the centennial of Boulez’s birth. Written later in his life, when Boulez’s conducting career seemed to limit his compositional activity, Rituel is an austere ceremonial progression of textures and instrumental colors, lasting approximately half an hour. Both its structural strategy and its expressive effect are somewhat reminiscent of Stravinky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments. It was given a very effective performance with the appropriate concentration and seriousness. The other work on the program, Mahler’s Das Klangende Lied is a rather remarkable piece. Written when he was twenty, Mahler considered it to be the moment in which he found himself as a composer. It is remarkable both for the very great talent it demonstrates and for how really terrible it is as a whole piece. Both Brahms and Liszt, as heads of two different juries considering the work for performance, rejected it; they were both right.
The Prom concert on August 13, presented by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Eva Ollikainen, featured Before We Fall, a ‘cello concerto by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, with the very wonderful Johannes Moser soloist, surrounded by early twentieth century masterworks, Varese Intégrale, Ravel Bolero, and Stravinsky The Rite of Spring. The most remarkable thing about the Thorvaldsdottir concerto is its instrumental writing and orchestration. The ‘cello is several times put in registral situations with surrounding instrumentation which it would seem should completely bury it, but the soloist is always audible. There is also a remarkable use throughout the work of octave doublings. Everything is in the service of what the composer, in her note about the piece, says is the most important expressive concept of the work: “…the notion of teetering on the edge–of balancing on the verge of a multitude of opposites.” Before We Fall is a very compelling and beautiful work, although it could have used more of the fine sense of timing and pacing demonstrated by the Ravel and Stravinsky pieces on the concert.
Joe Hisaishi conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, joined by the BBC Singers, the National Youth Voices, and the Philharmonia Chorus for the Prom on August 14. The program consisted of two pieces of his, The Symphonic Suite The Boy and the Heron, in which Hisaishi was also the piano soloist, and The End of the World, both receiving their European premiere, and The Desert Music by Steve Reich. One is immediately struck on hearing Hisaishi’s music by the command of the sonorities and colors of the instrumental writing, and the immediate appeal of the musical ideas. The argument of the music is not always as continually engaging in The Boy and the Heron, despite its many pleasing qualities, possibly because it was written as music for the film of the same name by Hayao Miyazaki. The End of the World is a more independent statement, beginning initially with Hisaishi’s reaction to visiting the site in New York of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The work developed over several versions, increasingly concerned with the anxiety and chaos of the original attack and further with values of the aftermath of the event. The work concludes with Hisaishi’s effective recomposed version of the song The End of the World, recorded in the 1960s by Skeeter Davis. Although the program credited the lyrics of the song, which are by Sylvia Dee, it made no mention of the person who wrote the tune, Arthur Kent. The singing of countertenor John Holiday, the soloist in the work, was particularly beautiful and expressive. The concert concluded with The Desert Music by Steve Reich. A protest and warning against nuclear weaponry, the work, which was written between 1982 and 1984, practices the compositional procedures Reich developed leading up to Tehillim. Its workings and musical language were undoubtedly a precedent for Hisaishi’s compositional methods and style, so it was a very fitting companion on the program.
The Prom concert on August 15 was presented by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, joined by the men of the BBC National Chorus of Wales and Synergy Vocals, conducted by Ryan Bancroft. The advertisement for the concert featured The Ravel G major Piano Concerto, with Benjamin Grosvenor as soloist, and that piece, very masterfully performed, and followed by a barn burning performance of the third movement of the Prokofiev Seventh Piano Sonata as an encore, ended the first half of the concert. It began with a performance of Revue Music by Sofia Gubaidulina. Written when Gubaidulina was very much out of favor with the government of the Soviet Union, where she lived at the time, and when she was very desperate for work and for any means of financial survival, the work was initially conceived of as a sort of concerto grosso for jazz band, including electric guitars and vocals, and orchestra. The “jazz” it evokes is actually more the music of American sixties television music (the program note suggested Lalo Schifrin, particularly his theme for Mission: Impossible), filtered through Russian early twentieth century style and procedures. The result was both interesting and enjoyable.
The final work on the concert Dimitri Shostakovich’s Thirteen Symphony, Babi Yar, setting poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Since it is concerned with governmental oppression of a class of its citizens deemed unworthy and inferior, in the case of the work’s subject, Jews, and since its history is involved with governmental suppression of artists and works of artists which do not conform with the government’s agenda, the work seemed unsettlingly timely. Bass Baritone Kostas Smoriginas joined the men of the BBC National Chorus of Wales in a powerful performance of the work.
Martin Kuuskmann performs works for Bassoon and Orchestra composed by Tõnu Kõrvits, Eino Tamberg and Erkki-Sven Tüür, with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mihhail Gerts on Orchid Classics ORC 100384 ©2025 by Orchid Music Ltd.
Martin Kuuskmann (b. 1971) is an Estonian born, multi-Grammy nominated virtuoso bassoonist noted for his high energy, charismatic performance style across a wide spectrum of idioms and repertoire. To date, over a dozen concerti have been written expressly for him. In addition to maintaining a busy international recording and concertizing career, he holds the chair of Associate Professor of Bassoon at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music. I first became aware of Kuuskmann’s work in 2008, when I heard him perform Luciano Berio’s Sequenza XII for solo Bassoon during a one day festival of the complete Sequenzas held at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater. On that occasion I wrote:
“Martin Kuuskmann’s performance of Sequenza XII for Bassoon left me wondering why that instrument has not long since replaced the electric guitar as the instrument of choice for disaffected teenagers around the globe. Playing from memory and holding his instrument without the aid of a support strap, he laid down a 22-minute industrial pipeline of sliding, distortion-laden multiphonics that gave me the vivid impression of a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo emerging from one of Anselm Kiefer’s collapsed concrete labyrinths.”
Over the ensuing 17 years, that 2008 performance has remained fresh in my memory. In fact, anyone who knows me has probably at some point heard me recount the experience. So, I was especially pleased when Martin himself brought this new CD, containing 3 of the aforementioned 12-plus concerti that have been composed expressly for him, to my attention.
If it can be generally agreed that the portal to 20th (and now 21st) century music first opened in 1913 with Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, it’s worth recalling that that epoch-making work begins by emerging from silence with an extended, utterly bewitching, unaccompanied bassoon solo. I believe that Stravinsky’s decision to commence in this manner was not mere happenstance. If we think of individual instruments in the way that we think of actors – as dramatis personae in an extended narrative – surely the bassoon represents the complex and unpredictable character actor. Berio himself considered something like this view as essential to the creation of his 1997 bassoon Sequenza. He calls Sequenza XII:
“…a meditation on the circumstance that the bassoon – perhaps more than any other wind instrument – seems to have oppositional characteristics in its personality – differing profiles, differing articulation options, differing characteristics of timbre and dynamics.”
Considered as a group, the works on this CD can be understood as a sequence of three unguided tours traversing through and lingering on striking aspects of the full range of the bassoon’s aforementioned abundant “oppositional characteristics.” In this collection, only Eino Tamberg’s work assumes the time-honored multi-movement, fast-slow-fast formal layout typical of the classical and Romantic eras. But, in this instance, the formula is a springboard rather than a straitjacket.
The program begins with Tõnu Kõrvits’s (b. 1969) “Beyond the Solar Fields” (2004). The work is an unbroken, 17-minute span that, to my ears, contains in its musical DNA a deliberate evocation of the musical, dramatic and folkloric sensibilities that gave rise to Stravinsky’s Le Sacre. The piece is compressed in its time span, but wildly expansive in its perfectly timed deployment of swells and washes of ravishing orchestral color and pseudo-impressionistic harmony. I use the prefix “pseudo” here in its scientific, rather than critical/pejorative sense. Kõrvits’s harmonic language in these passages is derived from 20th and 21st century jazz and pop sources. There is no defaulting to the altered, free floating Debussy-isms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The resulting sound world is familiar, but entirely fresh, never recycled.
The especially evident in the striking moment at the end of the work where a recording of a woman’s voice singing a type of Estonian folk song called a Helletus emerges from the orchestral soundscape. According to Wikipedia, Helletus is not a specific song but a genre of herding call, a form of communication between shepherds and their cattle. The vocalizations are often “non-lexical”, using sounds rather than words to guide, summon or sooth livestock. The deployment of this strategy as a coda to the work is both haunting and rich in extra-musical associations.
As mentioned earlier, Eino Tamberg (1930 – 2010) constructs his Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra (2001) in the time-honored multi-movement format of the classical and Romantic eras. But in this case, an antiquated convention is deployed in the service of pushing against generic expectations. The piece makes no heroic efforts to resuscitate archaic harmonic formulas or reanimate deadened melodic sensibilities. Of course, this kind of Neo-classical approach sets the stage for an arch species of late 20th century ironic wit and self-awareness. In this regard, Tamberg does not disappoint. Each of the concerto’s four movements are marked with both the classical Italian language terminology for designating mood and tempo AND terse, idiosyncratic translations into English of those same designations:
1. Perpetuo moto (It Won’t Stop) Vivo.
2. Interludio – La danza irrequieto (Restless Dancing). Allegro irrequieto
3. Solo (Alone). Lento
4. Postludio – Perpetuo Moto (It Moves Again). Vivo leggiero
The overall form of the work suggests a circle. Two thematically related outer movements, 1 and 4, frame a pair of inner episodes in movements 2 and 3. Movements 1 and 4 are characterized by manic, flickering streams of notes. They are initiated by the solo bassoon and picked up by wildly varying combinations of instruments from within the orchestra. This high-speed, high-energy music always stays just this side of under control. The effect for the listener is both mesmerizing and thrilling.
During the inner episodes, the action winds down from frenetic, “Restless” dancing to a haunting lament from the bassoon. The 3rd movements long, singing passages are draped in pointillistic necklaces of keyboards and mallet percussion performing hushed, rapid arrangements of the earlier dance music. Tamberg was a late 20th century master, and the agile wit, humor and seriousness displayed in the concerto’s formal strategies is borne out everywhere and abundantly in the wry luminance of the music itself.
The Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra (2003) by Erkki-Sven Tüür (b. 1959) is eccentric in its formal architecture and, in this setting at least, unique in its gestation. The unique gestation consists of the fact that the entire piece is a re-write of Tüür’s 1996 Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, this time with the bassoon as soloist. While the reason for this state of affairs given in the CD’s liner notes by Kuuskmann involves a scheduling conflict, the practice of instrumental transcription has a history as long as music itself.
In overall form, the concerto is cast as a wildly asymmetrical pair of movements. Movement 1 is just under 17 minutes long, Movement 2 is just under 5. The piece begins with an arresting set of gestures. A sequence of chords is orchestrated in a bell-like manner, with one group of instruments providing the sharp attack of the imaginary bell’s clapper, and another the long, sustaining tones and overtones of the bell itself. The soloist emerges out of this resonating atmosphere, first appearing as one of the sustained tones, but gradually becoming animated with moving lines and figuration.
From there the music unfolds in a basically episodic manner. In fact, the concerto is something of a composer’s sketchbook of the ways in which an orchestra might accompany, oppose and/or be dominated by a solo instrumentalist – bassoon or cello. For me, the ultimate sonic impression is of a single 22 minute work with an extended coda beginning just before the 17-minute mark. But, the work’s formal asymmetry notwithstanding, the concerto ends as it began – as a sequence of bell strikes. It’s a compelling strategy which, in this case etches itself into the listener’s memory as a vivid, memorable musical landscape.
– Tom Myron, August 2025
Martin Kuuskmann (b. 1971) is an Estonian born, multi-Grammy nominated virtuoso bassoonist noted for his high energy, charismatic performance style across a wide spectrum of idioms and repertoire. To date, over a dozen concerti have been written expressly for him. In addition to maintaining a busy international recording and concertizing career, he holds the chair of Associate Professor of Bassoon at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music. I first became aware of Kuuskmann’s work in 2008, when I heard him perform Luciano Berio’s Sequenza XII for solo Bassoon during a one day festival of the complete Sequenzas held at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater. On that occasion I wrote:
“Martin Kuuskmann’s performance of Sequenza XII for Bassoon left me wondering why that instrument has not long since replaced the electric guitar as the instrument of choice for disaffected teenagers around the globe. Playing from memory and holding his instrument without the aid of a support strap, he laid down a 22-minute industrial pipeline of sliding, distortion-laden multiphonics that gave me the vivid impression of a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo emerging from one of Anselm Kiefer’s collapsed concrete labyrinths.”
Over the ensuing 17 years, that 2008 performance has remained fresh in my memory. In fact, anyone who knows me has probably at some point heard me recount the experience. So, I was especially pleased when Martin himself brought this new CD, containing 3 of the aforementioned 12-plus concerti that have been composed expressly for him, to my attention.
If it can be generally agreed that the portal to 20th (and now 21st) century music first opened in 1913 with Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, it’s worth recalling that that epoch-making work begins by emerging from silence with an extended, utterly bewitching, unaccompanied bassoon solo. I believe that Stravinsky’s decision to commence in this manner was not mere happenstance. If we think of individual instruments in the way that we think of actors – as dramatis personae in an extended narrative – surely the bassoon represents the complex and unpredictable character actor. Berio himself considered something like this view as essential to the creation of his 1997 bassoon Sequenza. He calls Sequenza XII:
“…a meditation on the circumstance that the bassoon – perhaps more than any other wind instrument – seems to have oppositional characteristics in its personality – differing profiles, differing articulation options, differing characteristics of timbre and dynamics.”
Considered as a group, the works on this CD can be understood as a sequence of three unguided tours traversing through and lingering on striking aspects of the full range of the bassoon’s aforementioned abundant “oppositional characteristics.” In this collection, only Eino Tamberg’s work assumes the time-honored multi-movement, fast-slow-fast formal layout typical of the classical and Romantic eras. But, in this instance, the formula is a springboard rather than a straitjacket.
The program begins with Tõnu Kõrvits’s (b. 1969) “Beyond the Solar Fields” (2004). The work is an unbroken, 17-minute span that, to my ears, contains in its musical DNA a deliberate evocation of the musical, dramatic and folkloric sensibilities that gave rise to Stravinsky’s Le Sacre. The piece is compressed in its time span, but wildly expansive in its perfectly timed deployment of swells and washes of ravishing orchestral color and pseudo-impressionistic harmony. I use the prefix “pseudo” here in its scientific, rather than critical/pejorative sense. Kõrvits’s harmonic language in these passages is derived from 20th and 21st century jazz and pop sources. There is no defaulting to the altered, free floating Debussy-isms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The resulting sound world is familiar, but entirely fresh, never recycled.
The especially evident in the striking moment at the end of the work where a recording of a woman’s voice singing a type of Estonian folk song called a Helletus emerges from the orchestral soundscape. According to Wikipedia, Helletus is not a specific song but a genre of herding call, a form of communication between shepherds and their cattle. The vocalizations are often “non-lexical”, using sounds rather than words to guide, summon or sooth livestock. The deployment of this strategy as a coda to the work is both haunting and rich in extra-musical associations.
As mentioned earlier, Eino Tamberg (1930 – 2010) constructs his Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra (2001) in the time-honored multi-movement format of the classical and Romantic eras. But in this case, an antiquated convention is deployed in the service of pushing against generic expectations. The piece makes no heroic efforts to resuscitate archaic harmonic formulas or reanimate deadened melodic sensibilities. Of course, this kind of Neo-classical approach sets the stage for an arch species of late 20th century ironic wit and self-awareness. In this regard, Tamberg does not disappoint. Each of the concerto’s four movements are marked with both the classical Italian language terminology for designating mood and tempo AND terse, idiosyncratic translations into English of those same designations:
1. Perpetuo moto (It Won’t Stop) Vivo.
2. Interludio – La danza irrequieto (Restless Dancing). Allegro irrequieto
3. Solo (Alone). Lento
4. Postludio – Perpetuo Moto (It Moves Again). Vivo leggiero
The overall form of the work suggests a circle. Two thematically related outer movements, 1 and 4, frame a pair of inner episodes in movements 2 and 3. Movements 1 and 4 are characterized by manic, flickering streams of notes. They are initiated by the solo bassoon and picked up by wildly varying combinations of instruments from within the orchestra. This high-speed, high-energy music always stays just this side of under control. The effect for the listener is both mesmerizing and thrilling.
During the inner episodes, the action winds down from frenetic, “Restless” dancing to a haunting lament from the bassoon. The 3rd movements long, singing passages are draped in pointillistic necklaces of keyboards and mallet percussion performing hushed, rapid arrangements of the earlier dance music. Tamberg was a late 20th century master, and the agile wit, humor and seriousness displayed in the concerto’s formal strategies is borne out everywhere and abundantly in the wry luminance of the music itself.
The Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra (2003) by Erkki-Sven Tüür (b. 1959) is eccentric in its formal architecture and, in this setting at least, unique in its gestation. The unique gestation consists of the fact that the entire piece is a re-write of Tüür’s 1996 Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, this time with the bassoon as soloist. While the reason for this state of affairs given in the CD’s liner notes by Kuuskmann involves a scheduling conflict, the practice of instrumental transcription has a history as long as music itself.
In overall form, the concerto is cast as a wildly asymmetrical pair of movements. Movement 1 is just under 17 minutes long, Movement 2 is just under 5. The piece begins with an arresting set of gestures. A sequence of chords is orchestrated in a bell-like manner, with one group of instruments providing the sharp attack of the imaginary bell’s clapper, and another the long, sustaining tones and overtones of the bell itself. The soloist emerges out of this resonating atmosphere, first appearing as one of the sustained tones, but gradually becoming animated with moving lines and figuration.
From there the music unfolds in a basically episodic manner. In fact, the concerto is something of a composer’s sketchbook of the ways in which an orchestra might accompany, oppose and/or be dominated by a solo instrumentalist – bassoon or cello. For me, the ultimate sonic impression is of a single 22 minute work with an extended coda beginning just before the 17-minute mark. But, the work’s formal asymmetry notwithstanding, the concerto ends as it began – as a sequence of bell strikes. It’s a compelling strategy which, in this case etches itself into the listener’s memory as a vivid, memorable musical landscape.
– Tom Myron, August 2025
Dave Seidel has released Intercosmic, a new album of electronic music featuring tracks recorded in studio and in a live performance at The Wire Factory in Lowell, MA on June 7 of this year. Over the years, Seidel’s works have exhibited a long evolution from classical drones to the present mix of industrial and synthesized electroacoustic music. Seidel has an extensive background in experimental music, beginning as a guitarist in the 1980s downtown New York minimalist scene and later performing in various festivals throughout the US.. Since 1984 he has concentrated on the composition of drone and microtonal electronic music. Seidel is based in Peterborough, New Hampshire and Intercosmic is his latest offering.
Sundering Void is the first track on the album and this begins with a deep buzzing A/C hum, as might be expected from La Monte Young. Other harmonics enter, both lower and higher with the lowest being almost a rattle. These sounds build in volume and as the piece proceeds, new sounds enter and exit, gradually changing the texture. Most of the sounds are in the lower registers and the overall effect is like that of intimidating industrial machinery. When this piece was performed live at The Wire Factory, it must have been quite a visceral experience.
Sundering Void, as part of an album with the title Intercosmic, it would seem to imply a great empty place, filled with a few spacey beeps and boops, Almost the exact opposite is true. This piece does evoke a vast cosmos, with sounds that are commensurately impressive, but their character is drawn from familiar 20th century mechanical processes. About 4 minutes in, for example, some continuous high pitches enter, like the sound of a failing wheel bearing. By 6 minutes, there is a sound like the shrieking wind. Everything sounds vaguely out of control and about to self-destruct. These are all powerful elements, but are part of a familiar sonic vocabulary that make for a more intense depiction.
Halfway through the piece, a low rumble dominates the texture and faint sounds of sirens are heard, wailing in the distance. The middle registers become great swooshes of sound and the overall feeling is unsettling. There is a sense of movement in all this, as if a great energy is being expended to travel through the inter-cosmos. This is enhanced at about 12:30 when a few spacey sounds are heard above the roar, providing a glimmer of cosmic feeling. There is little sense of direction or purpose at this point – all is consumed by a loud thunder of sounds in acknowledgment of the dynamic power needed to reach interstellar space.
By 19:00, higher pitched sounds now dominate as if we are in free fall. Perhaps the end of the journey is at hand. There is only a rough rumbling in the lowest registers. The deep sounds continue to fade away leaving just a few descending notes at the finish. Sundering Void is great ride, the more so because it speaks to us in familiar sonic language.
A Furious Calm is the second track on this album and is more harmonically centered. Seidel writes in the liner notes that this piece is: “ My version of a chaconne, an application of a bit of Henry Cowell’s ideas for rhythm… Written using a seven-note subset of a microtonal Meta-Slendro scale. Some effects are digital, but all sound sources are analog, as are some of the effects.” A Furious Calm is organized in four layers, each with its own combination of synthesizers, drones, modulators and synthetic percussion. The piece opens with a lovely drone in the middle registers as additional sustained tones enter in harmony. The overall result is warmly atmospheric and surreal. Deeper bass notes are soon heard, providing a solid lower foundation. Some percussion enters, sputtering against the main harmonic texture and adding a sense of randomness to the mix. As the piece proceeds, the sounds become fully organized, expressing a sense of purpose that borders on menace. As the dynamics build, there is a feeling of grandeur as might be experienced in the presence of a large pipe organ.
By 9:00 the texture starts to thin a bit, with higher, swirling tones heard above. The dynamics slowly decrease, implying distance. At the finish, the swirling tones dominate and then fade away. A Furious Calm is an impressive combination of raw power and delicate microtonal harmonies that combine into a wide variety of textures, organized into a series of effectively layered sounds.
Intercosmic continues to confirms Dave Seidel’s mastery of alternate tuning and electronic synthesis.
Intercosmic is available for digital download from Bandcamp.
“Not even Arvo Pärt’s Gregorian chants could save her.”
When life tears your heart out, music has a way of suturing it back into place before you lose consciousness for good. This is what it feels like to immerse oneself in Trozos De Mí (Pieces Of Me), the latest project from Bogotá, Colombia-based pianist and composer Valentina Castillo (under the stage name Uva Lunera). Having previously explored her idiosyncratic blend of minimalism, groove, and songcraft across a travelogue of studio and live settings, she has produced what is, so far, her most intimate and transformational multimedia experience.
Combining sound, text, and video, Trozos De Mí is a journey, not in the sense of moving nomadically from one place to the next but of exploring the same place over and over until it becomes something totally different by the scuff marks of footprints and the stains of blood (and other effluvia) left behind. It is the latter we follow into this, her second full-length album, which by virtue of its unraveling gives us plenty of fiber to twine around ourselves in empathic understanding of the ache it so honestly captures.
Through the machinery of eight major organs surrounded by the skin of an “Opening” and “End,” the figure we glimpse beckons with one hand and holds us off with the other. We sustain this push and pull like the tearing of a muscle. What at first announces itself as an excruciation morphs with each touch of the keyboard into a lull of healing. That cusp between debilitation and revivification is where Castillo is most in her element as a performer, so that her recollections of fierce romance rage like an oil fire on a stove sucked of its oxygen by the range hood of memory.
From the fragments of “Deleite” (Delight) to the reparations of “Podéis Ir En Paz” (You Can Go In Peace), she rounds the edges of every shard just enough to be holdable without cutting through the fingers. And what a blessing that is when those fingers are the primary salvation bringers in a world of broken instruments. In the manner of bodies close and electric yet playing out the dances and separations that define every infatuation, she gives herself to the moment, knowing that whatever pieces she loses are opportunities for the clay of retelling to take their place. In “Deja Vú,” especially, she molds those traumas of repetition into something grander, less hesitant. As hurt turns into laughter and back into hurt, she leaves the piano to dance—the only coping strategy that makes sense as she delves deeper into the missing time of her autobiography.
And so, from the throes of adulthood to the quietude of childhood, she wraps herself in “Una Mantita” (A Little Blanket), a lullaby that reaches like starlight through slatted blinds without ever touching her sleeping face. Instead, that maternal glow is interrupted by “Padre,” whose stoic malevolence carves a shadow of resistance. Couched in this forlorn image is the tale of a Catholic priest (“Yes! I’m not the only one who calls him ‘Father,’” she quips) who prompts songs of forgiveness in the daughter he abandoned. However, that forgiveness must be gifted to herself, so tender that it can only be felt, never seen. This paternal hurt reaches its breaking point in “Un Duelo, Una Pausa” (A Duel, A Pause), in which drummer Rafa Lozina evokes a body scarred by too many paper cuts, each page a blade of awakening.
In closing, we are swept into a theme song for moving on. With terms settled and corporeality mended, she looks back while keeping one toe dipped into a future yet to be sung. Thus, her state of mind is always present with the listener. She sits before you, face to face, holding your hands in hers, the only completion of a circuit needed for us to know its electricity.
Trozos De Mí is available to experience in full on YouTube here. Let yourself go, and it will catch you.
Chamber Music, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Percussion, Women composers
2025 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood – July 24 – July 28, 2025
Every summer since 1964, the Tanglewood Music Center presents its Festival of Contemporary Music. According to Tanglewood’s materials:
The Festival of Contemporary Music (FCM) is one of the world’s premier showcases for works from the current musical landscape and landmark pieces from the new music vanguard of the 20th century. FCM affords Tanglewood Music Center Fellows the opportunity to explore unfamiliar repertoire and experience the value of direct collaboration with living composers.
Over the four FCM concerts (of the total of six) I heard carefully honed performances by the Tanglewood Fellows, Fromme players and the Mexican percussion quartet Tambuco.
Gabriela Ortiz is the director of FCM this year, the latest in the many high notes that the Mexican composer is enjoying. In the past season, she was composer in residence at Carnegie Hall, Curtis Institute, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León; her commissioned works were premiered at New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, and she won three Grammy awards.
Ortiz’s FCM programming traced the lineage of Mexican composers from Chavez to Lavista to Ortiz herself and to her student Diana Syrse, showed off the versatile talents of the Mexico-based percussion ensemble Tambuco and the incredible capacity of the Tanglewood Fellows to learn and perfect carefully honed performances of a mountain of new music.
Two beefs: Each program ran at least 25% longer than its stated duration. Each was densely programmed, and the ultralong set changes between each piece (often involving dozens of percussion instruments) were not accounted for in the production schedule. Nor were the often-lengthy introductions by Ortiz.
And, rather than presenting a spectrum of works by a range of composers, Ortiz programmed a great deal of her own music with a smattering of other works to provide context. This was in contrast to previous years in which a broader survey of music was presented.
Ortiz’s music is high-quality and thoughtful, employing interesting sounds and techniques, rhythms and sonorities, often telling a story in vivid colors and gestures. But pretty much every piece wore out its welcome, going on long after I felt it should have ended, without bringing in new ideas or furthering the experience of the piece.
Which brought to mind a question that nags me from time to time – why don’t composers have editors? Authors of books have them. Journalists have them. But no one seems to be telling a composer, “Draw a double bar already, would ya?” Come to think of it, it may be the test of time that serves this purpose. There’s a lot of music written over the past 500 years that is justly neglected. Conversely, there’s good reason that many war horses in the canon have endured. It’s collective taste making, standing the test of time.
The program on July 25, “Mexico, Cuba, the U.S., and One Hundred Years of Percussion” featured, predictably, a barrage of percussion, and in every piece at least one unusual instrument was on stage. In Ortiz’s Rio de las Mariposas for two harps and steel drum, the disparate instruments blended surprisingly well. The glass harmonica gave Mario Lavista’s Musicas de Cristal a soundscape all its own. The soft slow music was enhanced by the ambient rustle of trees outside Ozawa Hall. Amadeo Roldán’s Rítmica V and Rítmica VI included a cascade of diverse instruments, the most unusual of which was a marimbula, a cross between a giant mbira (African thumb piano) and a cajón (a wooden box which the percussionist slaps with their hand). Hearing the mechanical sirens in Edgard Varese’s landmark Ionisation, was the peak of a memorable performance of that iconic 20th century work.
On July 26, the program “Music of Migration and Exile” included music by Ortiz and the Mexican-American composer Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon. This program, as all the others that I heard at the FCM, were marked by truly spectacular performances by the fellows. All around they play like much more seasoned pros, and with an enthusiasm and bravado that more experienced hands sometimes lack.
Zohn-Muldoon’s Suite from Comala is an extract of a larger work based on Pedro Páramo, a classic Mexican novella by Juan Rulfo. Zohn-Muldoon added guitar to this score for Pierrot ensemble plus percussion and guitar. The combination worked especially well in this alluring work, as the guitar sometimes aligned with the strings, and at other times with the percussion.
In addition to the programs I detailed above, the festival highlighted the talents of the American composers Ellen Reid and Gabriela Smith. It was great to hear some concert music from Mexico that doesn’t often get to U.S. stages. And there’s nothing like getting to revel in the sounds of contemporary concert music for four days, especially in the picturesque environs of the Tanglewood Music Center.
The Prom on July 31, presented by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Joshua Weilerstein, as so many of the concerts during this stretch of time, included a work of Rachmaninov, the Symphonic Dances, which ended the concert. It began with Symphony No. 2 by Elsa Barraine, a composer unknown before this point to this listener. Barraine was a French composer, trained at the Paris Conservatory, where she was a student of Paul Dukas. The fact that she was a woman and Jewish and politically active made her life, both personal and professional, difficult during the time leading up to the second world war. She survived the war, and in her later life taught at the Paris Conservatory and was a theater inspector for the French Ministry of Culture. She died in 1999. Barraine’s Second Symphony was written in 1938 and is subtitled ‘Voina’ (Russian for War). The tension of the time are inescapable in various ways, including that the second movement is a Funeral March. The work, which is relatively brief, lasting 17 minutes, is masterful, with a brilliantly transparent texture and orchestration. This listener is anxious to discover more of her music.
By far the dominant personality of the concert was the soloist, clarinetist Martin Fröst, who played in concertos by Aaron Copland and Artie Shaw. He came on stage with swagger and immediately owned the room. Not only was he selling things big to the audience, he was always in a very obvious way in just about continuous contact with members of the orchestra, causing one to wonder exactly who was actually conducting the orchestra. His encore, which consisted of his playing the first prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier while the audience, with some help from member of the string section of the orchestra, sang the tune which Gounod wrote for it to accompany, was really sort of magical, and in some ways the most memorable part of the concert. The Copland concerto, written for Benny Goodman, and therefore inescapably influenced by jazz (although written at a later time than Copland’s “classic” jazz pieces, the Piano Concerto and Music for the Theatre), seemed to this listened to be a very uneven piece. The first of the two movements, an expansive and expressive slow movement, is very very beautiful; the second seems somewhat aimless and repetitive. The Artie Shaw Concerto took its form, the form it was presented in the concert, as two sides of a 78rpm recording, and became a great hit for him. He is quoted in Alyn Shipton’s notes of the pieces as saying, “I didn’t really write anything–I just dictated a frame.” Exactly. Nonetheless, both the Copland and the Shaw provided Fröst with a platform for his playing, which was excellent in every respect, and his personality which is mammoth. The performance of the Rachmaninov which was the second half of the concert was excellent and beyond any kind of reproach, even if less magnetic than the music and playing of the first half.
This concert was followed by a late night concert presented by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by Tônu Kaljuste., which celebrated the 90th birthday of Arvo Pärt. Pärt’s choral music, which is more apparently placid and spacious, unlike his more active–at least on the surface–and aggressive instrumental tintinnabuli music, is expertly written and very beautiful. It’s also not terrible varied stylistically and musically. That variety in this concert, which included eight of his pieces, was provided by other people’s music, including works of Rachmaninov, (again) Bach, and the Estonian composer Galina Grigorjeva, but most noticeably by the Estonian composer Veljo Tormis’s Curse Upon Iron. All of the pieces on the program received performances that were apparently flawless, and characterized by gorgeous sound.
Rachmaninov was once again the headliner of the Proms concert on August 1, presented by The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kazuki Yamada. Yunchan Lim was the soloist in the Fourth Piano Concerto. With so much of Rachmaninov’s music featured—three pieces on three consecutive concerts in three days, one wondered if it was some kind of Rachmaninov year. The answer must be that every year is a Rachmaninov year. In the case of the concert on August 1, the pieces not mentioned were The Chairman Dances by John Adams and Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia. The Adams is a skillful and brilliantly orchestrated piece. A quotation from Virgil Thomson, “It’s the perfect appetizer. Nobody’s appetite was ever spoiled by it and nobody missed much by missing it.” might apply. An alarm of some sort interrupted by Rachmaninov, causing an unanticipated break between the first and second movements.
The Berio Sinfonia, aside from being one of his most important works, is also the archetypal 1960’s composition. It was written for and is dedicated to Leonard Bernstein, who conducted its first performance, and it features, in its third movement, a sort of collage of pieces and styles and elements, along with a text from Beckett, within the frame of the third movement of the Mahler Second Symphony. That movement is preceded by a movement based on scraps of from Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked, and another movement which is a memorial to Martin Luther King, an orchestration of a chamber work of Berio’s whose text is the phonemes of King’s name (in a sort of staggering racist statement Richard Taruskin criticized the piece because it could not have been understood as music by King–an assumption of his about King), and is followed, after an interlude, with a finale which Berio wrote, ‘might be considered the veritable analysis of the Sinfonia, carried out through the language and medium of the composition itself.’
This performance, in which the orchestra was joined by members of the BBC Singers, was brilliant and completely compelling, and as good as one could ever imagine happening, especially since the sound person who was in charge of the amplification of the voices, not only controlled that just about perfectly, but clearly knew the music and knew which parts of the texts needed to be heard clearly. Everything about the experience was exhilarating and memorable.
The performers for the Prom concert on July 28 were the BBC Scottish Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. The first piece, and, for a certain cohort, the most important was Earth Dances by Harrison Birtwistle. Written during 1985 and 1986, it is one of his major single movement pieces for large orchestra. The work features six strata, each with a characteristic intervallic “hierarcy,” register, and rhythmic characteristic. The interaction and progression of those strata, which defines its structure, produces a sense of a certain menacing quality and a sort of subterranean intensity, driving to a climax which Jonathan Cross in his program notes likened to that of the Sacrificial Dance in The Rite of Spring. The piece in the ends suggests that one might want to parse the title a little and consider whether it consists of an adjective and a noun or of a noun and a verb….or both simultaneously. In any case the piece has an almost overwhelming intensity which the performance vividly realized. It was followed by the Beethoven Third Symphony, also vividly realized.
The Prom on July 30 was advertised as being about the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto, with soloist Vadym Kholodenko, with no mention of the other two works on the program, Grażyna Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra (1948) and the Concerto for Orchestra (1950-54) by Witold Lutosławski, or the orchestra involved, the BBC National Orcchestra of Wales, or of the conductor, Tadaaki Otaka. Certainly from a box office standpoint that seemed to have been a good move, since the hall was packed, and the arena was just about completely shoulder to shoulder. The concerto actually includes the piano so often in the orchestral texture that it can be overlooked, and many of the most striking moments are actually orchestral ones, and these stood out due to the really uniformly beautiful playing of the orchestra. Kholodenko’s own playing, with a beautiful sound and great nuance was really much more prominent in his encore, Rachmaninov’s Polka de VR.
The concert opened with Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra, written in 1948, which is a sort of mid-century take on the Baroque Concerto Grosso. It begins with a lean and rhythmically propulsive movement followed by an intense and haunting slow movement whose thicker and more varied texture introduces solo parts, which become even more important in the frolicsome final movement. Paul Griffith’s program notes on the Lutosìawski emphasized its composer’s difficulties as a modernist in the political situation of the time in Poland before that very modernism became a token of Poland’s separation if not independence, at least aesthetically, from the Soviet Union. Following in the footsteps of the Bartok Concerto for orchestra in it’s apparent use of folk material and, at least ostensibly, more traditional tonal language, the Lutosìawski is dazzling in its orchestration and textural variety, especially in its final movement. The playing of the orchestra in the final work, as in the whole concert, was striking and memorable, for the unfailing beauty of sound, but most especially for the aptness of the quality of that sound for ever expressive moment.
In the past it was possible to hear these concerts on BBC Sounds anywhere in the world. This year they’re only available in the UK.
CD Review, Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Recording review, Recordings, Twentieth Century Composer
Tobias Picker
NOVA
Various Artists
Bright Shiny Things
Composer Tobias Picker won a Grammy for his 2020 operatic version of The Fantastic Mister Fox, and many pianists have first encountered him through the diatonic piece The Old and Lost Rivers. Picker has another side to his musical persona that is in no small measure reflective of his time as a student of Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, and Charles Wuorinen. The Bright Shiny Things recording NOVA includes chamber music that celebrates these high modernist roots, as well as forays into postmodernism.
The title work is the latter, a riff on both the appropriate accompaniment, at least in Manhattan, for a bagel and cream cheese, as well as a send-up of one of Franz Schubert’s most enduring chamber pieces, the Trout Quintet. The result is lively, with tongue in cheek humor giving way to expert writing for the instruments, the composer distinguishing himself as a performer, undertaking the piano part.
The recording sessions for NOVA were completed at various times, and some of the performers are no longer living. The late Lynne Harrell’s performance in Suite for Cello and Piano is memorable. He plays with yearning legato in“Serenade,” its first movement, and puckish pizzicato in “Daylight,” its second. Ann-Marie McDermott, who is still with us, also distinguishes herself, with expressive and assured playing throughout. The third movement, “Lament,” is more dramatic than doleful, and Harrell performs with incendiary phrasing. The suite’s final movement, titled “Alone,” is still a duo, but it is lonesome and solitary in its demeanor. Another departed musician, Peter Serkin, plays Three Pieces for Piano with sensitivity and virtuosity in equal measure, elucidating the complex phrasing of “Svelto,” its first movement, emphasising the dynamic and rhythmic nuances in the second, “Liberamente,” and, performing the assertive gestures of the “Feroce” third movement con brio.
Happily most of the performers are still around to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Pianist Ursula Oppens makes multiple appearances, with Charles Neidich in “Nocturne,” a brief, gentle duet, and solo in the more extensive “Pianorama.” Violinist Young Uck Kim and Emmanuel Ax collaborate well on Invisible Lilacs, a three movement piece with an opener marked “Fast,” which it certainly is here, a pensive “Elegy,”, and a concluding “Moto Perpetuo” movement that is impressively played.
The disc’s final piece, Blue Hula. features Speculum Musicae, a chamber ensemble that boasted some of the best performers of modern classical music. It is a formidable piece that suits them well, with a finely etched gestural profile of corruscating lines. As the piece progresses, its rhythmic drive increases, culminating in the breakneck pace of the third movement, marked “very fast.”
NOVA presents another side of Picker’s music, one that embraces complexity but sacrifices none of the directness of expression that characterizes his more recent music.
-Christian Carey
To progressive musicians, Robert Wilson will always be most closely associated with Einstein on the Beach (1976), which in addition to being Philip Glass‘s most masterful and iconic work, is the one that most optimistically proclaimed the future of new music theater, liberated from narrative forms and the affected European accoutrements of opera singing and traditional orchestras. That disappointingly few works in its lineage have subsequently managed to approach its impact suggests that it may have been more of an outlier than a paradigm shift—a pinnacle of American minimalism at its most monumental, succeeded by a drift toward postminimalism and neoclassiciam with Glass himself abandoning his avant-gardism to fulfill commissions for more conventional linear operas.
Wilson leaves behind a music theater project begun with Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, who has committed to completing it for an anticipated 2026 debut. We will look forward to UPSIDEDOWN: a journey as a late testament.
As it turns out, I had a personal connection of sorts with Wilson. He and my mother (then named Anne McCall) and her best friend (who later wrote books under the pen name Katya McCall Walter) were a close-knit group of three at Waco High School in the 1950s. She recalls helping him with his classwork there and during his brief enrollment at Baylor University (where her father was Chancellor) before decamping for Austin then New York. I discovered this by accident in 1984 after complaining to Mom—who taught psychology at Occidental College and didn’t particularly follow the art world—about Los Angeles’ failure to support Wilson’s ambitious Summer Olympics project. I casually mentioned that like her, he was from Waco:
“Robert Wilson? Robert M. Wilson.”
“Yeah.”
“I went to high school with a Robert M. Wilson. I helped him with his trigonometry. He said ‘McCall, I’m gonna flunk this class’, but he managed to get through it. He was into theater, I remember him putting rabbits onstage.”
“Really? Did you know he’s, like, the most famous experimental theater director in the world today?”
“No, I didn’t! Good for him. He was close friends with me and Carolyn. We were kind of a threesome. You know…[pause]…I think Robert was gay…”
“You got that right Mom!”
“…and his father was a pretty stern Methodist minister that I don’t think he had a good relationship with. He felt more comfortable hanging out with us because, you know, we didn’t care. He went to Baylor for a semester, then went to New York and that was the last I saw of him.”
Photo: Hilary Scott (courtesy of BSO).
2025 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music
Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra
July 28, 2025
LENOX – This year’s Festival of Contemporary Music was curated by composer Gabriela Ortiz. Born in Mexico City, Ortiz is one of the most prominent Latinx figures in twenty-first century classical music. Among other honors, she is composer-in-residence at Carnegie Hall and the Curtis Institute. Revolucióndiamantina, a recording of her music by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, won three GRAMMY Awards in 2025. This year, FCM has spotlighted music from Mexico, as well as that of women composers. After four chamber ensemble programs, including one consisting entirely of music for percussion, the festival concluded with a concert performed by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Wilkins and two fellows, Yiran Zhao and Leonard Weiss (Zhao is a former student of mine, so I will limit my remarks to saying that her teacher was proud). TMC is a student orchestra, but their talent and hard work abetted a high level of playing throughout. All of the concert’s music was written in the twenty-first century by living composers.
Bioluminescence Chaconne (2019), by Gabriella Smith (b. 1991), is built around overlapping ostinatos. String tremolandos are prominent in the beginning, and glissandos take on an increasingly important role. The piece has a gradual buildup to a powerful central section with brash tutti and stretches of syncopated percussion, followed by a return to its opening demeanor to conclude. Smith is a violinist, and it shows in the deft deployment of strings here. She has cited Bach’s D minor Chaconne as a touchstone, but its form repeats in a more symmetrical fashion than the shape of Bioluminescence Chaconne. The first word of the title may be more telling, as Smith has suggested that her experiences scuba diving, accompanying a team of researchers, was an inspiration for the piece. The piece works well, so well that next year the Boston Symphony Orchestra is playing it too.
Ellen Reid (b. 1983) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, and her piece When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist (2019) was commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic. In addition to a large orchestra, it features three sopranos in wide ranging wordless parts encompassing animated and sustained passages. Zoe McCormick, Kerrigan Bigelow, and Sarah Davis sang skilfully, blending well together and with the orchestra. Like Smith, Reid uses ostinatos, and these are contrasted with aching pitch slides and clusters. When the World… is likely her most dissonant piece, with both major and minor seconds featuring prominently in the motivic and harmonic material. Weiss brought out dynamic contrasts and imbued the legato sections with a strong sense of line.
Reid wrote When the World… for the NY Phil’s Project 19, which celebrated a centenary of women’s suffrage in the United States. Her program note suggests that it doesn’t directly reflect this issue, and is instead focused on an emotional artistic journey, delineated in stages not dissimilar to those frequently found in grieving, moving from questioning to anger to acceptance.
Ortiz had two pieces on the program, one concluding the first half and the other played after intermission. Guest flutist Alejandro Escuer was the soloist on Altar de Viento (“Altar of the Wind,” 2015), a concerto specifically written for him. Escuer’s proficiency with extended techniques is comprehensive, and Ortiz makes good use of them in the piece. Escuer’s approach is also attuned to rhythm, and he even moves a bit during interludes where he isn’t playing, underlining the dance rhythms so often present in Altar de Viento. Indeed, the percussion section once again got a workout, playing traditional dances and new music gestures with equal aplomb. The rest of the orchestra was game to groove as well, and Wilkins led them through myriad metric shifts with suavity and clarity.
Hominum, Concerto for Orchestra (2017), is an imposing half-hour long piece. One of Ortiz’s finest, it was premiered in 2017 by another exemplary student ensemble, the Juilliard Orchestra. There’s nothing about the concerto that suggests it was sculpted with emerging artists in mind, as it is quite challenging. Composers who write a concerto for orchestra usually provide each cohort of the ensemble with music that spotlights their capacities and instruments’ essential characteristics. Ortiz revels in exploring the many textures that an orchestra can achieve in the twenty-first century. The virtuosity that talented musicians possess is explored as well. Hominum is at turns vivacious, brash, reflective, and powerful, and served as a rousing closer for FCM.
-Christian Carey