Classical Music

Classical Music, Critics, Music Instruments, Strange

Useless for shooting

From the entry on “Musical bow” (p. 351) in Sybil Marcuse, Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975).

“See also: adingili, adungu, aeolian bow, andobu, arpa-che, bagili, bajang kerek, balu, bandingba, barikendikendi, bawa, bazombe, bendukudu, benta, bentwa, berimbao de barriga, beta, bikefe, bobre, bogonga, bombo, bucumbumba, bumba-um, bum-bum, burum-bumba, busoi, caramba, carimba, chizambi, chunga, cora, darkun, dende, didilavy, dingba, dongeldongel, dumba, egoboli, ekitulenge, elem, elingingile, enanga, fengcheng, gabus, gamakha’s, ganza, gedo, goaramba, gora, goukha’s, gourd bow, gualambo, gubo, gubuolukhulu, gulutindi, gunga, guru, gwale, gwaningba, hade, h’onoroate, hunga, hungo, ibigumbiri, igongs, ikoka, imvingo, inkinge, inkohlisa, ipiano, isankuni, isiqwemqwemana, isitntola, itikili. itumbolongonda, jejilava, jul, kabarome, kakulumbumba, kaligo, kalirangwe, kalove, kalumba, kambaua, kambili, kandiri-kandiri, kandiroe, kan’gan, kanutitsunanikoya, kashane, katungu, kedondolo, kha’s, kidrigo, kijonga, kilibongo, kilingbindiri, kilingilam kinanga, kitingbi, kitingi, koali, kodili, koh’lo, kongo, konko, kpwokolo, kudungba, kumbili, kimguleme, kinkulkawe, kupu, kwadi, kwendibe, lalango, lekope, lengope, lesiba, ligubu, lingongo, lipombo, lontana, lugube …”

by Richard Buell
Boston, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Music Events

Letter from Boston: Keep those hordes away

Achtung!

If you read something contrary here previously, consider this an update. The Lily Pad in Cambridge has been closed temporarily to obtain proper codes and licenses; they hope to re-open soon. Therefore, the Earle Brown FOLIO event scheduled for tomorrow night, Oct. 20, by the Callithumpian Consort will be rescheduled on a future date.

* * * * *

One conclusion that a body might draw from the Callithumpian Consort’s outing last week in Boston is that what some contemporary music needs — and richly deserves — is a near-empty concert hall.

No, seriously. Would Earle Brown’s “Sign Sounds” and John Luther Adams’s “songbirdsongs” have been anywhere near as atmospheric if the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall had been — sickening thought — full? Ah we happy few, all forty (40) of us.

The point comes up because of the way that “songbirdsongs” in particular relies, first, on silence, both in itself and as background; and second, on space, not just in the sense of there being a sort of aerating nimbus around the sounding notes (i.e., good acoustics) but room enough, measured in linear feet, for a pair of piccolo players to go wandering about inside and outside the auditorium making like birds.

These weren’t Messiaen birds, they were Adams birds. A nice thing about an Adams bird, if one can generalize, is that if it feels like modulating a bit that’s what it will do — just a little. And that’s as far in the direction of grandiosity as they ever get. Jordan Hall being three storeys high and with lots of doors to enter and depart from, there was a blessed abundance of perches.

So described, “songbirdsongs” might have you wondering about what’s been helpfully labeled the Cringe Factor. Yes, the titles that the piece’s sections bear — “Morningfield Song,” “Apple Blossom Round,” “Wood Thrush,” “Joyful Noise,” “notquitespringdawn,” “Mourning Dove,” “Meadowdance,” “August Voices” — do suggest a New Agey niceness that will not appeal to all tastes. And there were moments when you felt the composer was really pushing it (must all this be so calm, sparse, and Alpha-wavey?) but then what should land on us but an expertly timed, shock-cut, irruptive coup de theatre — so that’s what all those percussionists were on hand for.

Forget about the Cringe Factor then. Cumulatively, there turned out to be a much greater variety of tone color and strategy in “songbirdsongs” than might first have appeared. Examples: the quiet vibraphone roll teetering on the edge of audibility — you had to crane to see where it was coming from — that produced the oddest, near-electronic sort of hum; “Mourning Dove,” with its literalist sighing bent notes; the “Apple Blossom Round”; and the noisy bits, which in this context had the feel of natural disturbances.

How much of this sort of thing is too much? Reactions will differ, but evidently not a very great deal. “Relaxing but not insignificant” (John Schaefer) is one take on Adams’s music, “You either love it or like it” (Evan Johnson) another.

Finally, a matter we’re not exactly sure that the composer consciously intended. Toward the end of “songbirdsong,” as event placidly succeeded event, your reviewer became aware of a steady, silent pulse beneath it all — something like 50 ticks to the minute. The instrumental attacks were variously on or to either side of the pulse, but mostly on. It was there, wasn’t it? Or was it the brain that was supplying it? Or both?

The performers, excellent all, were: Nana Aomori, Jessi Rosinski (piccolos), Jeffrey Means. George Nickson, Joseph LaPalomento, Daniel Zawodniak (percussion), Stephen Olsen (celesta), Gabriel Diaz (violin).

* * * * *

Earle Brown’s “Sign Sounds,” which mobilized some 18 players plus conductor, raised certain questions if you thought about them as the music was going on, but somehow didn’t if you didn’t. The questions would have been: What, precisely, is in that score, and of what kind and how much, and did it matter?

It’s irresistible to quote Paul Griffiths, that indefatigible and learned pro, on the subject of Brown’s music:

“His aim was not the empty space of Cage, nor the quiet space of Feldman, but the decisive object — not the extinction of the composer, nor the liberation of the performer, but the creation of a well-made piece, one that would have a sure identity for all the variability of form and detail introduced by means of indeterminate notation. The more indeterminate the notation, the more the identity of the piece would have to be visual …”

— “Modern Music and After: Directions Since 1945” (Oxford University Press, 1995).

In this particular performance of “Sign Sounds” there was a sense of the piece being assembled and set up out of blocks of air, right there in front of you — and in that loveliest of musical work places, Jordan Hall. How everything did sound — the sprinklings of celesta, some very in-tune string harmonics, the lyre-like punctuations of the harp, a swinging brass choir, and the quartet of mallet-wielding percussionists who, when the texture allowed, created one doozey of a great splash (like New York Modernist flung paint? Just a thought.)

Near-stasis then a flutter of activity — it was at these extremes, it seemed, that all these colorful sonic possibilities were being realized. At one point a series of staggered entrances had you listening for, of all things, a fugue. A fugue! But shouldn’t ghostly traces of such things be appearing in Brown? His worklist does include after all, though from early on, a fugue and a passacaglia.

In any event, the piece went over like you wouldn’t believe (40 pairs of hands clapping, all belonging to the right people), and there was an encore: a fragment of what had gone before, sounding pretty much as we’d heard it the first time.

The heroes and heroines of this performance were: Jessi Rosinski (flute), Will Amsel (clarinet), Amy Advocat (bass clarinet), Adam Smith (bassoon), Andrew Stetson (trumpet), Dylan Chmura-Moore (trombone), Hester Ham (piano), Minji Noh (celesta), Franziska Huhn (harp), Ethan Wood and Heather Wittels (violins), Ashleigh Gordon (viola) David Huckaby (cello), David Goodchild (bass), Jeffrey Means, John Andress, Joseph Becker, William Holden (percussion) and Stephen Drury (conductor).

* * * * *

First on the program was Alvin Lucier’s “Ever Present,” which as a late arriver (accursed Harvard/Dudley bus) we were reduced to experiencing from outside one of the windowed doors leading in to the auditorium. The flutist, sax player, and pianist all looked quite at peace with themselves, not having very many notes to play and perhaps for other reasons as well. Anyway, we didn’t hear any. But wait, was it the overhead lighting in the corridor that was giving off that high-pitched technological noise? Or ventilation gone haywire? No, silly, it was one of Lucier’s beloved electric gizmos.

RICHARD BUELL can be reached at rbuell@verizon.net

by Richard Buell
Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Music Events

It’s All About Love

nextconcert5.jpg

The program is called All About Love so it’s only fitting that there be something old and something new when the Metropolis Ensemble opens its second season Thursday night at  8 pm at the spectacular Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts.

The “old” part of the concert will be supplied by Claudio Monteverdi’s dramatic three-voice “operatic scena” Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorind.

It’s the dramatic tale of battle between two lovers, Clorinda (a Moor) and Tancredi (a knight-Crusader) which could benefit a lot with items such as a clitoral sucker.  (Lucky for us all these Muslim-Christian conflicts are a thing of the past).

The “new” is composer-in-residence David Schiff’s song cycle, All About Love, set for tenor, mezzo-soprano, and chamber ensemble, and based on a collection of texts from Petrarch, Louise Labé , Melville, Marina Tsvetaeva, Keats, and Proust.

I’m not quite sure how they pulled it off but Schiff and musical director Andrew Cyr have lined up four of the hottest young singers in town to perform the program–tenor Thomas Glenn; mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn; soprano Melissa Fogarty and baritone and stage director Daniel Neer.

The Metropolis Ensemble, a non-profit chamber orchestra dedicated to unique and daring programming, was formed more than a year ago with idea of bringing together New York’s best musicians to perform in downtown venues and create programs that support new music in audience friendly environments.

“New music should be a cultural event, a celebration, and we aspire to make our concerts such events, where ambiance and context, as well as the social aspect (we worked hard to get wineries to donate free great wine, so it’s kind of a great value to attend, and a very party like feel) is an important element of the mix,” Cyr says.

The Metropolis Ensemble is a terrific organization with an ambitious agenda and, I might add, one of the sponsors of the Sequenza21 concert. It would be great if a lot of our regulars turn out for what is sure to be a terrific program.  If someone would like to review it, I may be able to get you in free.

Thursday,  October 19, 8 PM at The Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts, 172 Norfolk Street, New York, NY 10002, 212-529-7194. To purchase tickets for “All About Love”, please visit www.metropolisensemble.org or call 917-930-6106.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles, Music Events

Last Night in L.A.: The Many Facets of Brett Dean

Last night’s Green Umbrella concert of new music was the first concert in Los Angeles solely comprising Australian music, and it was a real success.  As the second part of the Phil’s recognition of Dean as composer, he was given freedom to select the program and his own role.  So we saw Brett Dean as composer, as performer on viola, as conductor, as commentator, as programmer, and — in all of these — as effective communicator.  This was an evening that deserved to be recorded and made available for download so that more than the thousand in Disney Hall last night could hear this music and those performances.  Dean, himself, is poorly represented on recordings.  I find several including Dean as performer on viola, but only three containing a short composition each.  To add to the pain, the most recent of these was a commission from the Berlin which is included on Rattle’s new release of Holst’s “Planets; the work, “Komarov’s Fall”, is on the recording — but Dean is not identified as composer so that an Amazon search on Dean will fail to find the work, and an iTunes search will locate the recording but fail to tell you which “song” is the reason for the match.

The major works of the evening were Dean’s.  In the first half we heard his “Voices of Angels” (written in 1996, the oldest work on the program, as Dean pointed out).  He wrote the work while still in Berlin, premiered by Berlin colleagues in the small hall of the Philharmonie.  This work is for Schubert’s quintet:  violin, viola, cello, bass, piano; by coincidence we heard the “Trout” on Monday night, and “Voices of Angels” (of similar length) could hold its own on a program including both, a program intended for less adventurous ears.  I suppose the caveat is that the players must be good enough to handle the advanced techniques asked of them by Dean. 

The climax of the second half of the concert was Dean’s “Pastoral Symphony” (2000), written on his return from Berlin to Australia and his rediscovery of Australian spaces and natural resources, specifically including its birds.  Also impacting the piece was his recognition of the loss of environment from expansion and modernization; in the music a bucolic environment at the start of the work becomes largely supplanted by construction, by shopping centers, by freeways.  The work is a 20-minute movement for a small chamber orchestra with prominent winds and percussion:  3 violins, 3 violas, 2 cellos, bass; flute, oboe, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, tuba; 2 percussion, piano; sampler.  I joined what seemed to be almost all of the audience in liking this work very, very much; however, as Dean told the audience, by a large margin this was the largest audience for a new music concert he had experienced — and the most responsive.  We liked it.  Salonen was just a few seats away; he like it, too.

The program began with the first U.S. performance of Liza Lim’s “Songs Found in Dream” (2005), commissioned by the Salzberg Festival and premiered by Klangforum Wien.  Lim received a Phil commission, writing “Ecstatic Architecture” for the first season in Disney Hall.  I wasn’t enthusiastic then, and the newer work last night didn’t communicate to me.  My wife says the problem is with me; she said that the work clearly evoked the images in aboriginal art and in petroglyphs, and she was surprised I didn’t hear this.  Lim’s web site includes music of three of her compositions.

For the second half of the program Dean introduced his younger (27) colleague, Anthony Pateras, who came on stage looking as if he’d much rather be in a club or a studio, and not in this large auditorium with audience sitting in orderly rows.  (His web site gives a clue of why he might feel that.) He seemed much more relaxed when he returned on stage to acknowledge the continuing applause after his first work; later, after performing the second of two pieces, you could see him having his own “Sally Fields” moment:  “They like me, they really like me!”  I hope someone was taping this for his records, a few years from now.

The first Pateras piece was “Chromatophore” (2003) for amplified strings (2 of each instrument).  The name comes from the pigment cell used to change colors by chameleons or fish.  Through technique and amplification the work uses strings almost as percussion instruments; sustained tones (i.e., traditional string sounds) are minimized.  The work was developed through improvizations, and while it now has a written structure, each player has cells in which independent playing is required.  Within the approach of limiting sustained notes, the work explores the pitches of thee common diatonic scale.  The music was challenging and stimulating.

Pateras’ solo work was a movement from a work-in-progress, “Continuums & Chasms, Movement vii”.  This is for fully-prepared piano, in which each note of the piano is altered.  For this work, Pateras seemed to structure the alterations into clusters: in some, sounding of a pitch was minimized; in others, the pitch and tonal color were altered in various ways, producing gong-like effects, for example.  He uses very rapid fingerings as he moves across the keyboard, and the uses of different types of sound creates very interesting colorings.  Both Pateras works were performed in U.S. premieres.  I lack the language to convey how interesting these pieces were as music, not merely as sound. 

The re-birth of Monday Evening Concerts is achieved!  The brochure for the 2006-2007 season has been released and is shown on the web site.  Four concerts!  I only wish that at least one of the four concerts was for local new music and that another was for other American new music.  My private campaign is for them to hire Kyle Gann as one of the curators.  Well, maybe next year.  Just having the program alive is accomplishment enough for now.

by JerryZ
Classical Music, Composers, Los Angeles, Orchestras

Last Night in L.A.: Brett Dean (Part 1)

Six years ago, Sequenza21 published an interesting interview with Brett Dean.  The violist who was once the youngest member of the Berlin Philharmonic was beginning to be recognized as a composer.  This was about the time he made his first appearance with members of the LA Philharmonic in a “Green Umbrella” concert of new music, performing his work “Intimate Decisions” for viola.  S21, typically prescient, gave a lede to the interview stating that if you hadn’t heard of Dean yet, “You will.  You will.”

This season Dean is the first contemporary composer to be given a spotlight by the LA Phil, in two programs.  Yesterday’s subscription concert featured Dean’s “Viola Concerto” (2005) with the composer as soloist and the full orchestra conducted by Salonen.  Salonen brought out a microphone to introduce Dean to the audience, commenting on how rare (these days) it is to hear a composer performing his own concerto, much less to be so accomplished in both performance and composition. The Phil was one of the co-commissioners for this significant work.  Dean relates that it was initially written as only two movements, but that he then felt the piece needed an introductory movement to provide a frame-setting for the musical ideas.

The first movement, “Fragment”, establishes Dean’s sound, quietly growing in space.  “Pursuit” then places the solo viola in a chase with the orchestra.  Dean’s notes for the work refer to this movement as what could have happened if Paul Hindemith had played in a band with Tom Waits, an interesting idea.  There are occasional respites from the chase, including a lovely and technically-demanding cadenza which also includes elements of bird calls.  The relationship to Australia’s spaciousness and to its birds is a recurring element in several of Dean’s compositions.  “Veiled and Mysterious” returns us to space and quiet of the first movement.  The viola seems to meditate, and then it leads the orchestra into a re-examination of ideas of the first two movements.  The viola, finally at peace, enters into a closing dialog with the English horn.

Dean made great use of sonic color from his orchestra, and the sound in Disney Hall was responsive.  In the third movement, for example, a solo cello begins the orchestral accompaniment, with tremolo from violas; a second solo cello joins in, then a third, then a fourth.  Other strings join the tremolo and then add their own lines.  Bowed percussion add cool, metallic sounds to color the interactions.  This is attractive music, music willing to be introspective as well as active, music able to take advantage of quiet as well as to build sound.

The program for the concert built in color.  Haydn’s Symphony 82 (“The Bear”) began the program.  Following intermission, Salonen conducted a sonic spectacular bringing out every possible color in Ravel’s orchestration of “Pictures at an Exhibition”.

On Saturday, the LA Opera did a really good job of community outreach.  They presented two performances of a new work “Concierto para Mendez” with music by Lee Holdridge and libretto by Richard Sparks.  This is a musical celebration of the life of the trumpeter Rafael Mendez; it combines elements of documentary, opera, and concerto for trumpet.  Soloists from the Opera provided the singers and the LA Opera Orchestra provided the musical continuity and support.  Mendez had an amazing life:  dragooned into Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army as a trumpeter at the age of 10; immigrant to the United States as a laborer at 20; discovered as a musician and becoming a member of the Russ Morgan and Rudy Vallee orchestras; injured in an accident and having to readjust and retrain his embouchure; first chair trumpet for the MGM Orchestra, the best of the studios, at 35; starting a life as soloist and teacher at 40.  Six local trumpet students were selected to appear as his students in the work.  The performances were free. 

by JerryZ
ACO, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Some of the Notes and Rhythms I Love

corey.jpg  For all the allusions to chaos and complexity in the American Composers Orchestra’s Orchestra Underground concert at Zankel on Friday night, the evening was a surpisingly mellow–dare I say it, even melodic–affair.  If new music is going to be this much fun to listen to there is a real danger that people are going to start coming to concerts.  

This is not to say the program was not adventuresome, just that it contained some unexpected crowd pleasers.  The guy sitting next to me, a visiting pianist/composer from St. Louis named Ken Palmer who came strictly for the Ives opener (Ken had written his dissertation at Yale on the Concord Sonata), even allowed that he would like to hear a couple of the pieces again and ventured that this weird Corey Dargel dude could be some kind of “breakthrough something or other” hit.

The evening began with orchestrated versions of Charles Ives’ Four Ragtime Dance, Nos. 2 and 4, originally composed for piano.  The thievery from Scott Joplin and Hubie Blake would be offensive if it were not so disarmingly obvious and re-mixed with church songs and marching band ditties with such consummate wit.  By the time we got to “Bringing in the Sheaves” (or “bringing in the sheep,” as we sang just to be naughty when I was a kid), everyone in Zankel Hall had a grin on their face.

The chaos part of the evening was supplied by Brad Ludman’s Fuzzy Logic, four short movements of dazzling electronia augmented by Lauren Bradnofsky on amplified cello and various orchestral instruments, as well as a dandy video by Boom Design Group.  I liked the way each of the movements began on a confident, assertive trajectory, became more convuluted and accelerated until they split apart, and then dissolved with a kind of a whimper.  Not sure what it means except maybe it doesn’t matter where you begin you’re going to wind up lost anyway so you can stop anywhere.  Silvestrov does that, too, although his music starts out tentative before it totally wimps out.  

Michael Gandolfi’s two-movment piece As Above was also a video collaboration (with Ean White), with the first short movement called “Touch” based on natural images and the second called “Electric” based on more urban images.  Touch was more chaos, a kind of jerky musicial cubism, based on the science of fractals, but Electric drew from vanacular musical languages, including rock, blues and some super-infectious “flying down to Rio” Latin rhythms.  It had a beat and you could dance to it.

The major complexity element of the evening was supplied by Michael Gatonska’s After the Wings of Migratory Birds, a brilliantly rendered tone poem based on the composer’s re-imagination of the sounds made by swallows gathering in migratory flocks–the way they sound when they move at the same time, the way they all flap their wings in unison, the way they suddenly fall perfectly still at the same time.  The orchestration was dense and often breathtaking, with some stunning moments of pure beauty in the strings.  I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that this is a La Mer for the age of complexity.

Susie Ibarra did a piece on a drum set which was short and not too loud, qualities I appreciate in a drum solo.  The evening ended with Evan Ziporyn’s Big Grenadilla, a concerto for bass clarinet, which he performed admirably himself with impressive breath control.  Ziporyn’s music is so competent, so assured, so well-constructed that I really, really hope to like it someday.  I’m sure the fact that it leaves me cold is my failing, not his.

One of the several fun points of the evening was the beginning of the second half when a recording of Charles Ives hammering away at a piano and singing some hardy patriotic World War I ditty was played for the amusement of those assembled.  The recording was a little blurry but I could have sworn Ives said “That sucked” at the end.  It couldn’t have been that, although the sentiment was certainly accurate.

And, of course, the hit of the evening–the peoples’ choice–was our own boulevardier Corey Dargel, who brought down the house with a tres amusant song called All the Notes and Rhythms I’ve Ever Loved about composer boyfriends who, knowing that he can’t orchestrate, steal his stuff and use it in their own pieces which is a kind of “sadistic, back-handed compliment.”  It was the usual Corey brilliant mix of satire and truth. 

My new friend Ken in the next seat over is right;  Corey is destined to become some kind of “breakthrough something or other” hit.   Anybody need an intellectual Peter Allen?

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Uncategorized

4 sentences about classical music that I don’t mind reading

There seemed to be an universal agreement with Soho the Dog when he posted his famous 8 sentences, but on half of them, he was either being way too literal or just wrong.  

“Jazz is America’s classical music.”
Yeah sure, Johns Adams & Corigliano and their peers are this continent’s contributions to the field of classical music, but this, dear fellow, is what we call a metaphor. In this case, it applies to the fact that jazz is an aesthetic that is entirely unique and has risen to the serious-minded plateau of traditional classical music. Why is that so hard?

“Mozart and Beethoven were the popular music of their time.”
There is no 200-year-old equivalent of Justin Timberlake. The pop star is a 20th century creation of a nascent mass media. These composers were, by any measure, more important to their contemporary cultural life than anything that exists today in the classical community. The estimates are that somewhere between 20 and 30,000 people flocked to Beethoven’s funeral. Franz Stober even painted the thing:
 

Lady Di, sure. But can you imagine people turning out like this when Philip Glass checks out?

“Orchestras need to do away with tuxedos because they’re stuffy and outdated.”
Not to mention that they’re utterly absurd. Orchestras started wearing this crap because that’s what the audience wore (There’s a lovely scene in the old movie ‘Tales of Manhattan’ that perfectly illustrates the sartorial peer pressure which gave rise to this tradition). But when do you ever see an audience in white tie these days? In what universe does it make sense for an orchestra to continue to dress this way?

“Composers today only write music for other composers.”
An absurd generalization, of course, but it does put its thumb on the fundamental issue that arises out of classical music being so cloistered: there is no general audience for new classical music in America.

by Jodru
Classical Music, Concerts, Music Events

Dispatch from the Used Book Cafe

Tonight’s joint performance at the Used Book Café by Hilary Hahn and Chris Thile was an essay in the satisfactions of virtuosity. Any concert-goer who can no longer thrill to the sound of lightning-fast fingers should go his or her way and leave the rest of us to our fun. For sure technique is not all. And for sure the steps to acquiring a technique that can thrill are becoming more brutal and inhuman to mount by the year. And, also for sure, much that is essential to extraordinary music making is often lost on the climb. Some may even grumble that Hahn and Thile fly only so high as they do because they travel light.

But tonight, sitting through solo and duet renditions of Bach, Tartini, Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple, and others, one happily forgot the old complaints about virtuosity and sat back contentedly in the rush of arpeggios, trills, tremolos, and scales. One smiled at the clear joy Hahn and Thile took in collaborating with a fellow musical athlete of the first caliber, someone who could play along tight no matter how blazing the tempos dared. This isn’t to say the country whiz kid winging his way through the classics and the conservatory prodigy tentatively testing the waters of folk music always made for an effortless couple: Thile’s Bach got pretty runny, and Hahn’s bluegrass was a little green. But the super-abundance of talent on display more than made up for the moments of musical awkwardness. Hahn and Thile charmed and dazzled through the evening, and we all cheered. Both artists have new CDs out, and let’s hope they both sell lots and lots of them.

P.S. On a more somber note, Tower Records is officially breathing its last. I’m not up for a eulogy tonight (lectures yet to prep); but the “Going Out of Business” signs in the windows of the grand store by Lincoln Center are making me feel a little bummed.

by David Toub
ACO, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

The Year of Brad Lubman

Brad Lubman has been involved in the new music scene for nearly two decades but this looks like his breakthrough season.  Conductor/composer Lubman makes his guest conductor debut at the helm of the  American Composers Orchestra Friday evening at  Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, when the ACO kicks off its 30th season with its first Orchestra Underground Composers OutFront! concert.

In addition to leading the orchestra in music from Michael Gatonska,  Evan Ziporyn, Michael Gandolfi, Susie Ibarra,  Charles Ives and our own wunderkind Corey Dargel,  Lubman will conduct the world premiere of his own Fuzzy Logic, for woodwinds, brass, percussion, synthesizer, piano, and amplified cello and video. Lauren Radnofsky is amplified cello soloist and Boom Design Group creates the visual designs.

The program will be repeated at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia on Sunday, October 15 at 7:30pm.

If you miss those shows, Lubman’s  new music group Electric Fuzz will be gigging Friday, October 20, starting at 7 pm, at Joe’s Pub Electric Fuzz was formed in 2006 by performers and composers who played together as members of the Musica Nova Ensemble at the Eastman School of Music.  The group is currently collaborating with Boom Design Group, a team of virtuoso visual artists and web designers, who draw on their own performance backgrounds to produce improvised and interactive video installations.

The Joe’s Pub event will feature the premiere of a new Lubman work named for Electric Fuzz; plus Jumping to Conclusions, a quartet with electronics; and several pieces for violin, cello and synth that Lubman has co-composed with ensemble member Lauren Radnofsky. Music by David Lang and Pierre Boulez rounds-out the event.

Lubman has enjoyed a busy and multi-faceted career, but is probably best known among new music insiders as a gifted utility infielder who can deliver a superior performance from any world-class orchestra or ensemble on a moment’s notice, a talent honed by having been Assistant Conductor to the mercurial and (in my view) inexplicable Oliver Knussen at the Tanglewood Music Center from 1989-94. 

This is his well-deserved chance to bat cleanup.

by Jerry Bowles
Boston, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

The Callithumpians are Abloom Again

The Callithumpian Consort is at work again at 8:30 pm tomorrow night at NEC’s Jordan Hall  in a slightly premature celebration of the 80th anniversary of Earle Brown’s birth (it’s actually December 26).

They’ll be playing Brown’s Sign Sounds, a rarely heard masterpiece of open form from that resides somewhere on the frontier between serialism and improvisation.  They will perform the piece several times, and have assured us that no two performances will be alike.

And they’ll also be continuing their exploration of Alvin Lucier with his  Ever Present, for saxophone, flute, piano, and sine waves (which they describe it as “infinitely slow expansion of the music between your ears”) and John Luther Adams’s songbirdsongs, a JLA masterwork from the 1970s. 

The Callithumpian Consort has just recorded the complete songbirdsongs under the direction of the composer. Watch for the CD release.

And don’t miss Evan Johnson’s review of the latest Earle Brown recording on the CD Review page.

by Jerry Bowles