People love tragedy, at least, in the literary sense, and Mozart and Schubert’s early deaths were certainly tragic. The death of the talented gay and black composer Julius Eastman (1940-1990) has many of the same elements of classic tragedy. With Eastman, who was also apparently self destructive in both his professional and private life, those elements included crack addiction homelessness, and dying alone in a Buffalo New York hospital of cardiac arrest.  It is certainly a juicy story. But none of this would matter if his work didn’t speak to people, and Eastman’s music, which was performed by Italian composer and pianist Luciano Chessa, Sarah Cahill and four other pianists, and two singers recently at the Berkeley Art Musician, spoke loud and clear.

Eastman’s case was certainly aided and abetted by the unique acoustics of Mario Ciampi’s concrete Art Brut structure which served Steve Reich and Musicians equally well when they performed and recorded his Four Organs and Phase Patterns there in 1970 for a long defunct Shandar LP. Eastman’s focus on the materiality of sound itself seemed to be both text and subtext of his music here. Two a capella pieces exploited this materiality in its most basic form. “Our Father” (1989), sung by tenor Kevin Baum and bass Richard Mix was a powerful evocation of the contrast between the eternal present–the open fifths they landed on–and the fleeting present of its shifting chromatic writing. The solo “Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc ” (c. 1981) (the succeeding “Holy Presence,”  for ten cellos, is on www.youtube.com paired with Dreyer’s silent masterpiece) sounded like a starkly reiterative “De Profundis” with shades of the Stein/Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1927-1934) in some of its intervals, mood, and text –“St Margaret … ” and Mix’s voice was so powerful that it seemed to be coming out of the floor, and not just because I was seated two yards away.

The two large scale pieces for six pianos which rounded out the program were equally powerful, though their political agendas were hard to discern. All music lives or dies according to its sound, and Evil Nigger and Gay Guerilla (both 1979) were stunningly communicative without clearly discernible agendas, and they were subtle, vigorous, and highly imaginative throughout. The piano band–which also included Regina Schaffer, Chris Brown, Joseph M. Colombo, and Dominique Leone–were also kept in time by the cells on their arranged-in-a-closed circle Yamaha uprights which gave them parameters–say “1:10- 1: 30 seconds “–and the performative aspect of “new” or any other kind of music is what draws people in. The beating patterns here were regular and non-regular; the timbres opposed, unified, diffused, dissolved. Time present, time elastic moving in and out of focus–prominence–in time. And it was a pleasure to see Leone’s reiterated G naturals up close, and Chessa having lots of fun with his part. The music steady, ritualistic–the returning seven note cadence figure in Evil Nigger–fresh, and always surprising .

And the sound? The pianos, separately miked from the back brought one this side of heaven.

As many of you know, the composer Mary Jane Leach has been instrumental in getting  Eastman work into the public eye.

We in the West like to think that music is a series of narrative events about me.  How did I, the composer or performer, feel today? Was I happy or sad? It’s more or less high drama all the time and the romantic tradition is, of course, all about the individual.  In the East things are different.  Or are they? These ideas came to mind when I caught the the Silk Road Ensemble Iranian kamancheh (spike fiddle) virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor and his drummer Behrouz Jamali, on tombak, performing a demanding 88 minute intermission-less program of Persian classical music, which the California Institute of Integral Studies presented on a crisp February evening at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre.  Philip Glass performed a similar marathon feat when he gave a 70 minute interval-free recital of his piano pieces at the city’s Novellus Theatre last year.

In both cases the music was clearly about time and its uses. Persian music operates as a very specific and highly balanced calibration of time as a fleeting yet permanent force. The closest thing in our tradition is the Baroque which demands an acute sensitivity to touch and line from the performer. How one realizes the unfolding melodic gestures in Persian modes–one, as in raga, is explored up close–separates the men from the boys. Kalhor, who’s been performing his country’s music since age 7, clearly knows his way around this block. His smooth and sustained bowing exploited the music’s quarter tone resonances–each mode contains 24 tones–and suggested a viola da gamba at times, with harp-like and reedy effects which he played as ornaments near his instrument’s double pegged top. Slow passages alternated with infrequent vigorous ones, though Jamali, who spent most of the time on the rug-draped space they shared like an enthralled devotee, supplied no gravitas and precious little rhythmic charge. Contemplative music from the West or East can pull the audience in, as did Jordi Savall and late great singer Montserrat Figueras and artists from both traditions as they did in their astonishing concert DVD/CD Jerusalem–City of Two Peaces,  recorded in Fes Morocco.  Drama–meaning something that excites the nerves and awakens the heart–should not be relegated to the legit stage.

The program’s ostensible subtext was the great Sufi poet Rumi whose poems chart the soul’s separation from and desire to connect with human love in order to reach the all-encompassing divine. The audience here responded warmly though not with the same ardor with which they embraced the  great Iraqi oud player and composer Rahim Al Haj at a previous CIIS concert. And audience response is always the litmus lest. As my late composer friend Virgil Thomson quipped when someone asked him what the best criticism is: “Loud and continued applause.”  Music should take us to heaven, and if we don’t feel it fully we’re just on a smaller, less exalted cloud.

Nothing stays the same for very long these days, especially in NY. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when Brooklyn Rider’s first violinist Johnny Gandelsman and I meet at 11th and University Place–once Dean and De Luca, but now Argo Tea Cafe. Gandelsman approaches and we slip into the cool of the cafe on a warm afterrnoon two days after the 10th aniversary of 9/11. He suggests Armenian tea, which chimes perfectly with the quartet’s repertoire — they’ve recorded Komitas Vardapet’s Armenian Folk Songs on their Passport CD on their In A Circle Records label — plus they’re all members of the Silk Road Ensemble which focuses on the cultures linked by the Silk Trade Route, which included Armenia. Brooklyn Rider’s about that same kind of inclusiveness, and it’s no accident that we meet at the Argo. For wasn’t that the name of the ship which took Jason and his men across uncharted seas to get the Golden Fleece?

Brooklyn Rider may not be after physical treasure but their wide repertoire clearly shows their love for music old and new. Gandelsman, 34, serves as the spokesman for the quartet because second violinist Colin Jacobsen, 33, and his cellist brother, Eric, 29, and violist Nicholas Cords, 37, can’t make it .

“The availability of all types of music is not just a generational thing because anyone with an interest can access the internet which brings the world closer together, and it makes you realize that differences are not as big as they seem.”

Gandelsman, who speaks in a firm, but moderate tempo, with faint traces of his Russian and Israeli roots (he emigrated to the US as a child) sees other commonalities. He calls the Persian Kayhan Kalhor, who’s also in Silk Road, ” a master of his insrument,” the kamancheh ( itals ) fiddle, and thinks that Brooklyn Rider’s unique, nearly vibratoless sound is, in a way linked to “ethnic” traditions like Kalhor’s.

“We definitely go for a more immdediate sound, and our approach to sound in general is that we try to sound like one person. We stack things verticallly.”

And this of course lets each voice emerge with maximum clarity, as parts of a unified whole. But are their musical interests the same?

“We share the same aesthetic and all of us have known each other for a long time –we’ve been playing together for over ten years, and with the quartet for about six years,” he says. But that aesthetic and love isn’t limited to the masterworks of the quartet literature, but to historically informed performances in the field of “period music”, which he says has “flourished in the last couple of decades,” which includes the Catalan Jordi Savall, the Dutchman Aner Bylsma, and the Italian ensemble Il Giardino Armonico.

Gandelsman is also eager to talk about their new 2 CD Orange Mountain Music set, Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass.

“What’s interesting is when we tour people love hearing Philip’s music– they’re not fools,” he says about the popular and (itals ) ever controversial composer whose work is often embraced by young performers who confront its challenges head on. ” It’s so emotional. We wanted people to get the immediacy of the little patterns which put you into a certain hypnotic state, like seeing a Persian painting up close.”

He’s especially keen on Quartet # 4 (Buczack ), which Glass wrote for his artist friend Brian Buczack (1954-1987), who died of AIDS — his fellow in Fluxus partner Geoffrey Hendricks commissioned it from Kronos who premiered it at NY’s Emily Harvey Gallery on the second anniversary of the artist’s death – the July 4, 1989. The violinist calls the second slow movement — there are three — ” a standalone piece, ” and its floating interweaving gestures, and subtle ultra precise voice leading are high water marks in Glass’ writing for strings. Gandelsman says Brooklyn Rider has concentrated on “color and texture” here, and that it’s as “profound as most Messaien ,and as spiritual as Bach.”

And their recording brings out the dance-like partnering and shadowing in Movement 1 in ways I hadn’t heard before in Kronos’ Nonesuch CD of # 2- #5. The young Brit quartet Carducci, on Naxos, which I haven’t heard, covers # 1– #4, while the also Brit Duke, on Collins, which I have, covers only # 1 — a bit like Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet, with its tenuous but equally beautiful repetitive gestures.

Any piece worth its salt should be able to take many different interpretations , and Gandelsman feels that Debussy’s only quartet — the justly famous and seminal 1903 g minor — is reflected in the Glass 4th. And Brooklyn Rider’s interpretation of the Debussy, which he says they’ve played a lot, brings out its headlong drive and murmuring intensity in ways that few others have — my Alban Quartet version is wonderfully yet predictably strict Viennese. My late friend Virgil Thomson’s quip that “the dead do not rest easy in Vienna” comes to mind. Colin Jacobsen’s hommage/take on the g minor –“Achille’s Heel” – a nod to Debussy’s middle name — with its exquisite trouvere-like opening melody, pungent inner voices, and focus on many different kinds of color and texture, is a fine “post modern” reflection on the great French master’s concerns in his quartet.

And speaking of any piece worth its salt, Brooklyn Rider will be performing one of the absolute summits of the quartet literature — Beethoven’s Op. 131 in C, on their October 31 Halloween concert at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. Gandeslman, who’s from the been there done that whatever generation, is quick to praise the virtues of the hardly on everyone’s lips now French quartet, the Capet, who played, and recorded, in various configurations, but always with founder, first violinist Lucen Capet, from the 1890’s to their 1928 disbanding.

“Some people would listen to a recording of them , and find it foreign and inappropriate,” Gandelsman says. But, he adds, what attracts him and Brooklyn Rider to the Capet’s sound is “the clarity of its style of playing, and their unique interpretation, and conviction.”

Which of course says a lot about this unique and utterly distinctive young group, which isn’t afraid of going its own way while still being mindful of the master quartets that have put their utterly unique stamps on what they knew and felt in their time.

We like to think that concert music is something other than sound we hear with others in a room. Of course it is, but music is a physical fact we encounter first hand and try to wrap our minds around later. The large and attentive audience at Philip Glass’ San Francisco Performance’s program of his solo piano works seemed to know the difference when they gave him a warm welcome even before he’d played a note at his from-memory 8o-minute intermission-less recital at YBCA’s Novellus Theater. Real affection like that for a composer, especially a controversial and popular one like Glass, is rare, and that’s just for starters.

Glass has never been a virtuoso pianist–he once quipped that he writes the hard keyboard parts for his ensemble’s music director Michael Riesman–but he’s a thoroughly engaging and utterly sincere one. He began with 6 Etudes – # 1, # 2, # 3, # 6 , # 9, #10–from his first book of 10 (1994-99), which are deeply personal, listener friendly yet demanding for the player who has to keep a steady pulse while executing often rapid and shifting figures in sometimes irregular metres. His approach here was miles away from his 2002 recording of the set for Orange Mountain Music on a Baldwin grand.  Here, he played on a Hamburg Steinway Model D, with its typically brilliant, hard Germanic sound. Glass has composed a lot since that CD, and the differences in how he hears now were everywhere apparent. # 1, with its fanfare-like opening which reappears in different contexts, sounded more dramatic, but not as smooth, the driving figures of unequal lengths in # 3, looser, almost improvisatory. But the real news was how the composer’s sudden attacks and releases, and frequent yet tasteful rubato– ritenuti and diminuendi–made these pieces in the moment fresh. And his pedalling exploited the massing overtones in a logical but non-systematic way, each sound adding sound to sound like rising floors in a house with interconnecting rooms. The repeated pull backs in tempo in # 9 like emotion refracted; the low hammered figures in # 10 like the insistent drone of an Indian harmonium, the ascending melismatic one an integral decoration in a complete structure. Glass’ Etudes  extend the classical tradition of Chopin and Debussy’s 2- book sets in an entirely individual way, though unlike Debussy he gives no clues to what they’re about.

The other pieces here were just as unique. The 1980 series of alternately lyric–static and active–dramatic variations, Third Series Part IV, which Lucinda Childs renamed and choreographed as Mad Rush–its opening figuration suggests Schubert’s song “ Du bist die Ruh “–were less exploratory than the Etudes, but very affecting, especially in the soft slow parts. It’s as much of a standalone piece as Glass’ 1989 Metamorphosis #1-# 5 series which he made from 2 separate scores– 1 for for Errol Morris’ doc The Thin Blue Line, and one for 2 concurrent Dutch and Brazilian theatre versions by different  directors of Kafka’s story Metamorphosis ( Die Verwandlung ). We heard #2–#4 –which picture its “hero “ Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning to find himself turned into a giant insect. Its fragile bell-like themes and suspended harmonies, which Glass played with great sensitivity, are a perfect transformation of Samsa’s spiritual state into sound.

Dreaming Awake (2006), which Glass wrote and recorded as a limited edition benefit for his Tibetan  teacher Gelek Rinpoche’s Ann Arbor, Michigan retreat center Jewel Heart, is a logical yet rapidly changing lyric piece whose warm fluid harmonies draw on the discoveries the composer made in his BAFTA-winning score for Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours, which suggest the here and gone feeling of the heart’s many facets with consummate grace.

Stage / film / dance timings are ultra precise and Glass’ playing of his accompaniment to Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” which formed a part of their music theatre piece made from  Gins poems Hydrogen Jukebox (1989), with his late friend Ginsberg reading it on tape, and Glass’ timings and reading was both precise and enormously affecting. And Glass charmingly offered 2 perfectly played encores–“Night on the Balcony” from his co-written with Gambian kora composer-player Foday Musa Suso score for JoAnne Akalaitis’ 1989 production of Genet’s play The Screens, and “Closing” from his deservedly popular 1983 CBS records debut  Glassworks.

A packed house at YBCA’s Novellus heard a revival that same evening of Glass’ score for his 1979 collaboration with choreographer Lucinda Childs and late artist Sol Le Witt, Dance–he provided the film– which her newly formed company performed to a Philip Glass Ensemble recording of the 5 -part  piece, though only Dance I and III – in different keys and combinations for solo voice, winds, keyboards,  I bright with flutes and piccolo, III darker with saxes playing chords – and Dance V–for organ , mistitled here as Dance II , were done here. I’ve had Glass’ original Tomato Records LP of Dance I and III, and the full 2-CD 5-part set of Dance for years. And so it was a very great pleasure to see the general dances of I and III bracketing the solo of Caitlin Scranton in Dance II ( IV ) with Childs’ magisterial performance projected on a scrim over hers. The dancers rapid from the flies quick moments found and lost . Just like life.

Life is about conflict, and so is opera. And what could be a more dramatic subject than the French Revolution when keeping your head wasn’t an abstract issue, but a life and death one. Francis Poulenc‘s 3-act grand opera Dialogues des Carmelites (1953-56) was acclaimed as a masterpiece at its 1957 La Scala premiere, and it’s easy to see why. It gets at the heart and soul of its subject through the person of a high strung girl from a rich family, Blanche de la Force, who decides to become a Carmelite nun to escape life, and her internal revolution – or enlightenment–from not knowing who she is or what she wants, to full knowledge and decisive action–is a perfect match for the external one. The inevitable is set in motion.

Why inevitable? Because from the first note to the last the forces of history drive the piece forward and, in Poulenc’s very Catholic view, God has preordained the outcome. None of this would matter if the  music failed to make Georges Bernanos’ fine book and its characters come alive, and come alive they do, in an extremely varied yet conversational style not unlike that of the Debussy of Pelleas (1893-95, 1901-02). Dialogues is also the biggest installment in Poulenc’s series of sacred works, from the chorus only Litanies a La Vierge Noire (1936), to the chorus with large orchestra Stabat Mater (1950), and Gloria (1959), which an expert cast delivered here with power and point.

The role of Blanche, whose mood swings are all over the place–one moment she’s impulsive, the next calm, scared to death, childlike, sincere–can’t be easy, but soprano Sarah Meltzer, in one of several roles not doubled here, made these aspects fuse, her delivery solid, varied, her technique secure. The role of her best friend Sister Constance who’s cheerful, but not shallow, was superbly sung by light soprano/ soubrette  Elise Kennedy, her clear as a bell tone, diminutive stature and strong stage presence a welcome contrast to Meltzer’s, and the rest of the cast in this great but largely dark piece. (more…)

Musical programs come in all shapes and sizes, just like people. But getting a program to make sense is what separates the quick from the dead. The San Francisco-based new music chamber group sfSound usually puts on provocative programs, and their latest one, on Sept 19th at our town’s Community Music Center in the Mission, presented different kinds of musical energies, and made perfect sense.

It’s never wise to serve something heavy before the main course, and Swiss composer Beat Furrer’s 5 minute Ayer (1991), though not exactly lightweight, didn’t tax its audience unnecessarily. Sure, it was somewhat demanding–for the players–but also mercurial, with linear and disjunct material, plus a broad range of colors, which Matt Ingalls, clarinet, Christopher Jones, piano, and Monica Scott, cello, dispatched easily.  The succeeding 9 minute group improvisation by John Ingle, saxes,  Jones again on piano, and Kjelll Nordeson, percussion, was thicker in texture, but not especially memorable.

Hans Thomalla’s 14 minute Lied (2008), which the composer described in truly informative program note, made a far stronger impression. It didn’t sound particularly Germanic–meaning Angst-ridden or drily didactic–but was instead carefully balanced–the sections functioned like strophes in a song–and full of sonorous contrasts, especially in the tenor sax part–John Ingle again–which had a long slow sequence of closely related pitches. The piece wisely avoided closure–is anything ever really resolved?–which made it doubly poetic, with Ingle capably supported by Nordeson, vibraphone, and Jones, piano.

Matt Ingalls’ Improvisation for Solo Clarinet (2010) was both minimal–constructed from the most basic elements like scales and detached notes–and more complex musical ones like difference / combination tones, which thudded at unexpected intervals from the speakers on the stage floor.  And, like any good improv sounded both spur of the moment and composed, and Ingalls’ easy virtuosity held the audience spellbound for 17 uninterrupted minutes.

Philip Glass is famous–some would say notorious–for pieces of long duration, and his first opera with Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach (1975), which lasts over 5 hours,  is easily one of his most seminal works, and a landmark work in recent new music. And the entire ensemble here–with the addition of Stacey Pelinka, piccolo, Kyle Bruckmann, oboe, Matthew Goodheart, electric ogan, Hadley McCarroll, electric organ and voice–she served as Glass the conductor by nodding her head dramatically before the next complex figure–and Diana Pray voice, made Train 1, from Act 1, go by in a flash , even thought it lasted 25 minutes. Glass’ work requires perfect ensemble and the ability to play, evenly, at breakneck speeds –it begins at met. 92, and moves up to met.126. The carefully prepared modulations and textural changes were breathtaking, and joyful. And it was an unalloyed pleasure to hear the great composer working his magic, and the audience respond with way deserved cheers.