Birthdays

Birthdays, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Miller Theater, Minimalism

Signal plays Reich at Miller

Opening Night at Miller Theater

Steve Reich Photo: Jeffrey Herman
Steve Reich
Photo: Jeffrey Herman

On September 15, Ensemble Signal, conducted by Brad Lubman, presented an all-Steve Reich program to open the season at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre. There was a sold out crowd, populated both by contemporary music devotees and over 200 Columbia students. Reich turns eighty later this year, and this is one of the many birthday concerts that will fete the composer.

 

Signal has recorded several albums of Reich’s music, including a 2016 release on Harmonia Mundi that features his Double Sextet and Radio Rewrite, recent works that demonstrate the undiminished energy and invention of their creator. The Miller Theatre concert focused on two sets of “variations,” composed in the prior decade: Daniel Variations (2006) and You Are Variations (2004). The amplified ensemble featured a superlative small complement of singers, a string quintet, a quartet of grand pianos, and a bevy of percussion and wind instruments. They were recording the concert, one hopes for subsequent release.

 

Daniel Variations is, in terms of instrumentation, the slightly smaller of the two. Alongside the aforementioned piano/percussion group, Reich employs a quartet of vocalists (two sopranos and two tenors, singing in a high tessitura for much of the piece), string quartet, and two clarinets. There are two textual sources for the piece. The first are the words of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who, while reporting on the conflict in Pakistan in 2002, was captured and killed by Islamic extremists. These are offset by quotations from the Book of Daniel, a text from the Old Testament of the Bible. The texts underscore Pearl’s Judaism and also his love of music (he was an amateur string player). Indeed, the last movement of the piece, “I sure hope Daniel likes my music, when the day is done,” is a trope on a Stuff Smith song, “I Sure Hope Gabriel Likes My Music,” found in Pearl’s record collection after his death.

 

You Are Variations finds Reich exploring texts from his spiritual roots, including Psalm 16, quotes from the Talmud, the Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, and Wittgenstein (Reich’s undergraduate thesis subject). Musical quotes are diverse as well, ranging from L’Homme Arme to a song by James Brown. The harmony is prevailingly in D mixolydian but unorthodox bass progressions and layering often give it a polytonal feel. From where I was sitting, the vocals seemed a little recessed in favor of the winds, something that I am confident can be worked out in subsequent mixing of the projected recording. It still worked live, giving the impression that the singers were sometimes supported by the ensemble and sometimes vying in a struggle for discernment of the weighty texts.

 

Lubman conducts Reich’s work with the authority of someone who has both an intimate knowledge of the scores and of the formidable musicians at his disposal. Reich seemed to approve. Taking the stage with trademark baseball cap firmly planted on his head, he volubly demonstrated his pleasure to everyone from Lubman to the sound designer. The percussionists, in particular, beamed as they accepted his greetings: they had done right by Reich.

Birthdays, Composers, Concerts, File Under?, Opera

Ardea Arts Celebrates Christmas … and William Mayer

HiRes_POSTER_One_Christmas_Long_Ago

Composer William Mayer turned ninety this past November. On Friday December 11th,  Ardea Arts has supplied him with a slightly belated birthday gift, and audiences with a treat, by presenting his one-act opera One Christmas Long Ago (1962). It will be performed in concert at Metro Baptist Church. The cast features baritone Ron Loyd, tenor Anthony Webb, and soprano Julianne Borg, conducted by Richard Cordova. Grethe Barrett Holby, a name well known to those familiar with American Opera Projects, supplies stage direction.

Grethe Barrett Holby
Grethe Barrett Holby

One Christmas Long Ago by William Mayer

December 11, 2015 at 7:30 PM

Presented by Ardea Arts

Metro Baptist Church

410 W. 40th Street, New York City

Tickets are $20 for general admissions and $10 for seniors/children 16 and under.

Birthdays, File Under?, Minimalism

Terry Riley is 80

Happy birthday to composer Terry Riley, who turns 80 today.

There are CD releases out this week to celebrate the composer. My assessment of ZOFO Plays Terry Riley appears in the CD Reviews section of Sequenza 21 and on my blog.

But wait, there’s more.

Nonesuch Records has done right by Riley. They have released One Earth, One People, One Love, a 5-CD boxed set of the complete recordings of Riley’s music composed for Kronos Quartet. The set contains a disc of unreleased tracks, Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector: Music of Terry Riley. For those of you yelling – “No fair! I already have the Kronos discs. I want to buy the unreleased recordings as a separate CD!” – Nonesuch is allowing you to do just that, separately releasing these recordings on a single disc.

Once again, happiest of birthdays Mr. Riley! May you continue to write the eloquently beautiful music we have come to know and love for many years to come.

 

Birthdays, Composers, Concerts, File Under?, New York

Thursday: John Cage Day at MoMA

I’ve been greatly enjoying Third Coast Percussion’s new CD/DVD release on Mode. John Cage: The Works for Percussion 2 captures some of Cage’s early music in which he assisted both in the development of the percussion ensemble but also formulated a musical aesthetic in which rhythm took primacy over pitch; “noise” became a welcome part of music’s sonic spectrum. Third Coast’s rendition of the Constructions (particularly the First Construction “in Metal”) and their beautifully filmed, lighthearted yet earnestly delivered version of Living Room Music are can’t miss contributions to the spate of Cage releases in his centennial year.

As luck would have it, we still haven’t worked out that “cloned reviewer” thing. On Thursday, August 9th, I’m heading up to the Berkshires to Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music. Down here in New York at MoMA, Third Coast are the featured performers for the museum’s “John Cage Day.” At 6:30, they will perform a set in the Sculpture Garden that features the New York premiere of Renga: Cage: 100, a group of short (5-7 seconds) pieces commissioned by Third Coast to celebrate the Cage centennial. Works by Augusta Read Thomas, David Smooke, Paul Lansky, and many others are fleetingly featured!


Austin, Birthdays, Chamber Music, Concerts

Happy Birthday to Austin’s New Music Co-op!

This weekend, the Austin New Music Co-op celebrates its 10th year of wild music with two nights of concerts. The programs will function partly as a retrospective on those years, reprising some of their most ambitious and unique projects, like last year’s massive US premiere of Cornelius Cardew’s “The Great Learning” (excerpted now with the Texas Choral Consort). Other group milestones on the program include:

Two of Morton Feldman‘s chamber works “de Kooning” and “The Viola in my Life”
Alvin Lucier‘s “Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas” for vibraphone and sine waves, as well as an installation in the lobby for “unattended percussion” and sine waves.
Excerpts of Earle Brown‘s “Folio” performed by chamber ensemble
Arnold Dreyblatt‘s 2007 “Kinship Collapse” commissioned by NMC

The New Music Co-op is also a cohort of composers, and a selection of their pieces will also appear on the programs:

Brent Fariss‘ “I apologize Julius, for judging you” for amplified chamber ensemble.
Nick Hennies‘ “Second skin with lungs” for snare drums
Keith Manlove‘s “Becoming Machine II” for voice and electronics
Bill Meadows‘ “Loose Atoms” for wacom graphics tablet.
Travis Weller‘s “Toward and away from the point of balance” for violin, viola, cello and custom instrument “the owl”

Here’s to many happy returns.

WHERE/WHEN/HOW:
Friday March 23rd 8pm &
Saturday March 24th 7pm

At the MACC (600 River St, Austin TX)
Advance tickets available now at End of an Ear (http://endofanear.com)
$17 one night / $25 both nights
Student and advance tickets discounted to $15 one night / $20 both nights

Birthdays, Experimental Music, Festivals, Interviews, Music Events

2012 Avant Music Festival: Preview and Interview with Randy Gibson

The Avant Music Festival, a 5-night event being held at The Wild Project in NYC between Friday, Feb 10th and Saturday the 18th, promises to be a compelling series of shows of music in the vein of avant-garde. Along with music by living composers Randy Gibson (whom you are about to hear from), Eve Beglarian (Songs From The River and Elsewhere) and Jenny Olivia Johnson (After School Vespers), there is a performance of Schoenberg‘s ground-breaking work Pierrot Lunaire and a 2-part show on Saturday the 11th celebrating the 100th Birthday of John Cage at 4 PM and 8 PM respectively (This concert, by the way, features Vicky Chow performing the great Sonatas and Interludes on prepared piano). Randy, who is one of the curators of the event, spoke briefly about the festival as well as himself. (more…)