Last night’s concert introduced us to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Douglas Boyd.  The major work was Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, transcribed for a chamber orchestra by Schoenberg in 1921 for a chamber orchestra of 14, and completed by Rainer Riehn in 1983.  I didn’t like this.  At over an hour in length, it wasn’t a condensation.  “Listen to all of Mahler’s pretty melodies without all those messy instruments getting too emotional.”  (Yes, I recognize that Schoenberg’s motivation was to try to bring a contemporary work to a local audience, even if he had to strip things down to fit the resources available.  Something similar is given as a reason for condensing books.)  The singers were good, but I thought the piece made a marvelous case for our copyright laws.

The concert opened with “Chinese Opera” by Peter Eötvös, which is neither Chinese nor opera,  Instead it’s a strikingly colorful work for 26 instruments (mostly wind).  To me it’s a work about off-stage music, about how much drama and suspense and emotion and feeling can be created to support actions on stage.  You can hear clips of the work at Amazon.  Missing from these clips is the stereophonic space created.  Eötvös separated the pairs (or triplets) of instruments, placing them across the stage and gave them parts that were off-set in timing or that gave song-response lines so that we had a wall of sound before us.

Saturday afternoon’s concert was a triumph for Pierre-Laurent Aimard.  This was a program constructed by someone who had thought about music and the meanings and feelings behind the sounds.  The first half of the program took a series of works by widely different composers, and Aimard performed the pieces without pause, creating an arc of connections and feelings across generations and works that seem to have no connection.  Schumann: 5 Morning Songs (1853); Bach: 2 fugues from Art of the Fugue (1749); Carter:  Intermittances (2005) and Catenaires (2006); what linked these works?  Yet Aimard created a flow.

After intermission Aimard gave an astounding performance of the Charles Ives “Concord” Sonata (1909-1915).  A narrator was included (in addition to the viola and flute), reading appropriate sections from Ives’ Essays before a Sonata in which he described the subject of each movement and discussed his intent for the music he was creating.  Given that the Concord is such an episodic work, this use of narration wasn’t an interruption but an amplification.  Now for a lot of pianists this incorporation of the narration would be risky because the pianist would then have to pay attention to Ives’ words as well as to his written notes.  Aimard, however, seemed to welcome the challenge of fully realizing the intentions of the composer.  At the conclusion of the final, “Thoreau”, movement the pianist held his position, motionless.  A few seconds went by.  A minute.  More.  In the quiet you heard the birds in the trees, the occasional sounds from the playground in the park and the movements in the street.  (John Cage would have approved.)  Finally the spell ended and the applause began. 

Pierre-Laurent Aimard is music director for this year’s Ojai Music Festival, and his program for last night explored music in which the piano is used as a percussion instrument, while also continuing the use of multiple pianos begun last night.  With Saturday morning set for his solo program, his work yesterday evening was as a colleague.  The percussion group Nexus played in all three works of the program, as did his colleague Tamara Stefanovich on piano.  For the past several months Stefanovich has been Aimard’s fellow-player of choice, having filled in for another pianist who suffered what sounds like tendon problems and had to withdraw on short notice from a program with Aimard.  Once the partnership began, they obviously found that they could enjoy similar interpretations and motivations concerning important work.

The concert began with Bartok’s too-seldom-heard masterwork, Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), a work written at the height of his musical and physical strengths.  It’s a shame that without an orchestra or even a violin or two the work fits so poorly with most programming decisions.  There are some pretty good recordings of this work still in print, but last night seemed an exceptionally good performance.

After a rearrangement of the stage, Peter Eötvös then came on stage to conduct his new Sonata per Sei (2006) for two pianos, sampler (played by Helena Bugallo from Bugallo-Williams) and three percussionists.  In its first version the music was Concerto for Acoustic Piano, Keyboard and Orchestra, written for the 125th anniversary of Bartok’s birth.  This revision, giving its U.S. premiere, makes the homage to Bartok (and to Bartok’s sonata) even more obvious.  This is a chamber work that would probably benefit from a conductor, not merely to compensate for inadequate practice by the ensemble.  The piano parts seem extremely difficult, and the work is full of rhythmic interactions.  In fact it was fun to watch the faces of two of the percussionists who probably wouldn’t be good poker players: they beamed with pleasure at some of the piano and percussion riffs, even when they were just listening to the others in the group.  The music is full of instrumental color, and it is easy on the ears but much harder to understand on first listening.

After intermission the Los Angeles Master Chorale, four vocal soloists and an additional piano came on stage for the most vibrant performance of Stravinsky’s les Noces (1913-1923) I have heard.  Eötvös conducted, and the result emphasized the folksong origins of so much of the work.  Everyone around me seemed as swept away by this performance as I was.  It was one of those Ojai evenings in which everything seemed to click.  Can you get four better pianists for the Stravinsky?  Can another chorus to better than the Master Chorale?  Is there a better percussion group than Nexus for something like this?  And where did Tom Morris, the managing director of Ojai (formerely with Cleveland) find so appropriate soloists?

I should mention that it’s nice to find someone in an office job who still has some chops.  The performance of the Stravinsky needed one more percussionist, on cymbals.  Tom Morris made his Ojai debut as percussionist.  Of course, as his bio shows, he had kept his hand in all along.  It just shows that a Wharton MBA doesn’t overcome every other tendency.  Word around the Festival is that Morris is extending his contract with Ojai for at least four more seasons.  Based on how this festival is shaping up, that’s very good news for us.

The 61st Ojai Music Festival opened last night.  Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams, returning after their success two years ago in their performances of Nancarrow, gave us a great survey of modern works for two pianos with works by Stravinsky, Ligeti, Sciarrino, and this season’s featured composer, Peter Eötvös.  (Us amateurs have trouble coming to a decision as to the best mispronounciation of his name.)  But let me start with the featured composer, glad I can write the name and not try to speak it.

The second half of the program opened with his Cricketmusic (1970) a tape of cricket sounds, the perfect opening for an evening performance at Ojai.  This moved directly to the two pianists playing his Kosmos (1961, 1999 rev.), for which the Soviet space flights inspired the teenaged composer.  Yes, it’s a young work, but it’s good stuff and it was given a vibrant performance in which two pianos had been positioned in the front corners of the Ojai stage so that we could hear the space as well as the notes.  The pianists moved back to center stage for a performance of Ligeti‘s masterful Three Pieces for Two Pianos (1976), making the extremely difficult seem effortless.  The second of the pieces is his Self-Portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin in the Background), his homage to the Americans whose work he had discovered.  (His eventual discovery of Nancarrow’s work seems obvious in the first piece, Monument, with its layers of different time intervals.)

In the first half of the program Bugallo and Williams performed two of Stravinsky’s versions for two pianos of his own works for ensemble.  The first work was Septet (1953), written when he was beginning to form his own interpretations of twelve-tone concepts heard in so much of the music he heard at Ojai and at the fore-runner of LA’s Monday Evening Concerts.  Bach and Schoenberg don’t co-exists that easily in the work, but it’s interesting to hear his exploration.  Salvatore Sciarrino’s Sonata for Two Pianos (1966) came next:  a work that’s a study of as many variations as possible of ornaments, a work providing a sweet between the two works of Stravinsky.  And then the Stravinsky “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto (1938) in its two-piano version, a masterpiece in that version as well as in the instrumental one.  Bugallo and Williams have recorded six of Stravinsky’s two-piano works, and I recommend the CD to any fan of Stravinsky or of duo pianos, Stravinsky in Black and White.  It’s not merely that the works are given good performances by two pianists who seem to inhabit each other’s piano shapings; the works give you a different view of Stravinsky and his creativity.  The architecture of the work seems much clearer in the piano versions, and it’s fun to think of how Stravinsky, the expert instrumentalist, would use the colors of other instruments.  (And of course their recording of Nancarrow is worth having.)

The concert closed with a performance of Ligeti’s Poeme Symphonique, the famously infamous work for 100 metronomes.  For the Ojai performance the metronomes were positioned in nine groups (I think because the ones I could see had 11 each) around the audience, with an amplifier for each cluster.  At first there was a lot of conversation, but the talkers gradually got more of the spirit of things.  By the time the work was down to about a dozen metronomes, the audience was paying attention, listening to the patterns.  The trail-off from five down to one, then to zero was fun.  It was much more enjoyable than watching the video on YouTube.

John Schneider and his group “Partch” gave their annual REDCAT concert of Partch’s music last night.  The program included Partch’s film of U.S. Highball:  A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip (1958, film completed in 1968).  The program began with the eight hitchhiker inscriptions of Barstow (1941/1943/1968); this interesting site provide clips of different performances of the first inscription.  The second half of the program included rousing performances of Ring Around the Moon (1950) and Castor & Pollux (1952), both involving the seven instrumentalists in the group.  The audience jumped up and called their approval at the end.

There were ten Partch instruments (in addition to the voice):  the Adapted Viola (1930), the two Adapted Guitars (1935 and 1945), the Kithara (1938), the Chromelodeon (1941), Harmonic Canon (1945), Diamond Marimba (1946), HypoBass (1950), Cloud Chamber Bowls (1950) and Bass Marimba (1950).

Two of the instrumentalists, Vicki Ray and David Johnson, were key in Tuesday night’s concert by Xtet at the County Museum.  For me a high point was The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine for orator, piano, violin and cello by Aaron Jay Kernis.  (Amazon’s sound clip doesn’t include the oration, so it lacks the flavor of the piece.)  The program began with three songs to Shakespeare by Stravinsky, and included three songs by John Cage and Morton Feldman’s lovely The Viola in My Life 2.  Phil O’Connor, Xtet’s frequent clarinetist/saxophone, presented the premiere of his new work War Again(st) ? (T)error!, a work of several episodes which didn’t seem linked to the title but which kept active.

This week’s Los Angeles Philharmonic program honored 1960, with three works composed in that year, a composer of a fourth (and major) work who was born that year, and performed by a soloist born that year.  I’ll start with the last point.  The soloist was Dawn Upshaw.  Adjectives are inadequate.  Looking up quotations to find some marvelous comment on “dawn” wasn’t useful.  I simply cannot imagine another singer performing the two works at any level approaching her artistry.

The program was constructed around two works for singer with orchestra.  First, before intermission, was Time Cycle (1960) by Lukas Foss.  A good summary of the work is here, and sound clips from the Bernstein recording are here; Upshaw’s performance sets a higher standard than in this recording.  Then after intermission, there was a performance of Golijov‘s Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra (2002), a beautiful work comprising works written separately and for other uses that have been brought together and reorchestrated as necessary to make a cohesive song cycle.  The central work is “Lua Descolorida” (Colorless Moon), written originally for Upshaw and later incorporated into the Pasion segun San Marcos.  Upshaw has recorded the original version of this song, with piano, and the Pasion has a version with orchestra, for which a clip is available from iTunes, but not from Amazon.  The current cycle surrounds this work with “Night of the Flying Horses”, originally written for a film, and “How Slow the Wind” which combines two Emily Dickinson poems.  In the form we heard yesterday, Golijov has written one of the major works for vocalist and orchestra in the literature. 

The concert opened with Samuel Barber’s Toccata Festiva (1960), for organ and orchestra, written for the new organ in Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, later recorded by Philadelphia, among others.  Simon Preston played the Disney Hall organ, and the work provided lovely fireworks to serve as a compatible introduction to the Foss.  The evening ended with Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story”, which was given a joyous performance.  The members of the orchestra even seemed to enter into the spirit of snapping their fingers and calling out “Mambo!”.  Once again Alexander Mickelthwaite had stepped in for an ailing colleague, and he did well.

Saturday night was the closing concert of this year’s “Jacaranda” series, with a well-shaped program of Berg, Mahler, Schoenberg and Schubert in a tribute to Vienna.  Mark Robson played the Berg piano sonata and accompanied bass-baritone Dean Elzinga in six “Wunderhorn” songs by Mahler.  Gloria Cheng played the Schoenberg Six Little Pieces and performed with the Denali Quartet and Elzinga as narrator in a brilliant performance of Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte.  The Schubert Song of the Spirits Over the Waters for eight men and five low strings served as a closing benediction.  Next season’s Jacaranda series of eight concerts will feature Messiaen.

One of the treats of the Los Angeles Philharmonic programming in recent years has been a series of related concerts on a particular theme of 20th and 21st century music.  The theme might be a composer (Schoenberg, Stravinsky), or it might be a style (minimalism).  This year’s special theme has been “Shadow of Stalin”:  music of the Soviet Union before, during, and after the controls placed on music style and content.  A nice range of programs has been established: five programs by Philharmonic musicians; a symposium; two films; an all-night re-mix with visuals; contemporary underground pops; and a youth orchestra concert.

Last night’s Green Umbrella concert took the sub-theme “Music After the Thaw”.  The first half of the program comprised two works by Sofia Gubaidulina.  The early “Concordanza” (1971), written when she was 40, is a masterful chamber work for four strings, five winds and percussion.  While it is one of the few published works written before she was 50, the sheer control of language and technique expressed in the work (and the sheer volume of work published after she was 60), makes me wonder about all of those unpublished works that had to have lived in her mind before she was able to communicate more openly.  “In Croce” (1979) has several allowed versions:  for cello and button accordian (bayan), for various instruments, and for cello and organ, which was performed last night.  I was blown away.  Most of the recordings seem to be for cello and bayan, but I found one clip for cello and organ, which approximates what I heard in Disney Hall last night.  Ben Hong on cello and Mark Robson on the WDCH organ made this pairing of instruments a beautiful thing to hear.

The last half of the concert was Alfred Schnittke’s “Symphony No. 4” (1984), a 42-minute work in one movement, a work that deserves multiple hearings to begin understanding its patterns.  The work is written for 9 strings (2 vn1, 2vn2, 2va, 2vn, 1cb); 7 winds (f, o, c, b, h, tr, tb); 4 percussionists on pitched percussion; plus celeste, harpsichord, and piano; and vocal quartet (satb) with important solos by tenor and mezzo.  The work has an attractive surface of sounds; it seems quite accessible.  But beneath the surface are slow, repeated, medidative ideas.  These ideas are restrained; they seem to remain private at first meeting.  The vocal line is without words; the original text, a setting of Ave Maria, was removed to avoid censorship of the work.  Certainly this (and other Schnittke works) provide guidance as to the general nature of the meditations in the music, but understanding would come only with familiarity, I think.  I’ll find a version to listen to; it seems to deserve more hearings.

Alexander Mickelthwaite, the Phil’s outgoing Associate Conductor, did his usual fine job in leading the ensemble works that began and ended the program.

On Sunday, April 27, KUSC will broadcast (and stream on the internet) the program with Dudamel conducting the L.A. Philharmonic.  It was an exciting performance, and I hope that comes across when broadcast.  For those of you in the center of the known universe the broadcast will begin at 7:00 pm.  For those of us in more adventurous climes, it begins at 4.  The program is Dances of Galanta by Kodaly, the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto with Bronfman, and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.  That’s on KUSC, with links for PC, Mac, and iTunes. 

And do try to see and hear the Viola/Salonen conception of Tristan, despite the exorbitant prices being charged by Fisher Hall.  If you can only see a single act, the visuals in the third act are a powerful addition to the music, those of the first act occasionally distract from the plot, and those of the second act, beautiful as they are, seem to lack the focus of the other two.  But the whole thing in one evening is the most powerful.  A new Tristan has been brought on, and he’s getting excellent reviews. [JerryZ]

Julius Eastman’s Crazy Nigger (1978? 1979?) was given its West Coast premiere last night at REDCAT.  Three members of California EAR Unit gave up their usual instruments (flute, cello, percussion) for the piano to join their pianist Vicki Ray in giving the work its four-piano interpretation.  While the score doesn’t specify a particular instrumental combination, it was recorded by Eastman with four pianos, and this recording was the one that brought the work to the public.  It would be interesting to hear Crazy Nigger in a different configuration, but it would certainly take more than four musicians to give the sonorities so central to the work.

It would have been interesting to have heard this last year in association with the minimalist festival, and the performance of In C in particular.  Eastman worked for something very different from Riley, and he gave the performers both more freedom and more structure.  Structure was provided by specifying notes to be added, in sequence, and by stating specific times for moving from section to section in the work. (Each pianist had a clock by the score.)  The players had freedom, or the ensemble had freedom, to decide how to provide the notes.  The work begins like In C, with a repeated sequence of the pitch; instead of adding melodic cells, however, Crazy Nigger builds sonority.  First, the core tone is supplemented by that note in different octaves.  Then, gradually, another tone is added.  The color changes.  Another tone.  Another.  The sound becomes three-dimensional, not quite solid, but shifting and shimmering.  Finally, for the climax of the work, six additional pianists stepped on stage one by one, going to a keyboard to add six additional pitches to the structure.  Fifty-five minutes have seldom seemed so short.  The EAR Unit deserve a lot of credit for their interpretation.  With the audience seated so that they could see the hands of all four pianists, it was easy to see which person took a little longer to make sure that her hands were correctly placed for the right note, but their interpretation used the skills of each and used them well. 

I think I saw Alex Ross; his blog this morning shows a photo with the wall of Disney Hall and the coral tree in the garden, so I know he was in town.  Perhaps he’ll comment.

Last night the Los Angeles Master Chorale gave the premiere of Requiem by Christopher Rouse.  This is an excellent work.  It is beautiful.  It is emotional.  It is powerful.  It is dramatic, and it is peaceful.  This is a Requiem that sets a standard for composers of the future while holding its own against compositions of the past.

Jerry Bowles gave us the link to the video recorded by Grant Gershon as summarized the work for his Board; it’s worth hearing again, so here’s the link.  David Salvage reported Thursday on his interview with Rouse, so scroll down and re-read that.  Rouse provided notes on the work for inclusion in the program; those notes are here.  In addition, the program included these notes by Victoria Looseleaf.  I encourage you to read them all.

Instead of trying to paraphrase what others have written so well, let me tell you what impressed me, just a set of individual thoughts and feelings without trying to bridge among them.  Rouse gave us an exhilarating range of colors, tones and emotions.  He found an emotional core within each section of the requiem, and he used his choral forces (and his percussion) to help the audience feel the content.  He included his audience in the feelings and beliefs so that we were not merely sitting there listening to a ritual.  I was grateful for the pause after the emotional power of the “Lacrymosa”.  The demands on the chorus are huge; the work demands extremely good singers, and it provides compensation for the work.  We could see the expressions on the faces of the members of the Master Chorale (101 last night) and the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus (57, I think).  What focus and concentration.  What joy, and pleasure, and relief as they stood there and had the waves of applause surround them.  Sanford Sylvan was the excellent baritone soloist, handling the range of pitch Rouse asked of him while letting us understand the words. While the music Rouse gave him was less inherently interesting to me than his choral work, he was used to remind us of loss and the need for requiem.  I really liked Rouse’s ending, in which the threads of the Everyman soloist and the choruses intertwine and, for the first time, the soloist sings the church verse while the chorus becomes the person dealing with loss and recovery. Gershon did a great job as conductor.  Oh, I wish that last night’s performance was recorded. (There is word that KUSC-FM will broadcast the performance, and when I find out when the broadcast will be, I’ll submit a posting so that you can listen.) 

Some final comments.  If I were in New York, I’d make sure I have tickets for Thursday’s premiere of Rouse’s Wolf Rounds at Carnegie Hall.  I don’t have enough Rouse recordings on my iPod; how could I forget what a good composer he is?  If Requiem doesn’t win Christopher Rouse his second Pulitzer, there is one great piece out there still waiting to be heard.  I thank Soli Deo Gloria and John Nelson for commissioning this work.

The Master Chorale and Grant Gershon really did a good job in communicating that this would be an important evening of music.