Composers

Composers, Concert review, File Under?, Minimalism, New York, Piano

Simone Dinnerstein in Recital at Miller Theatre

Simone Dinnerstein in Recital

Miller Theatre – Columbia University

December 8, 2018

Published on Sequenza21.com

By Christian Carey

NEW YORK – On Saturday, December 8th, pianist Simone Dinnerstein made a return appearance to Miller Theatre to perform an intriguing and eclectic solo recital. The stage was set with subdued lighting, with electric “candles” placed throughout and, over the course of the evening, small shifts of color. Ms. Dinnerstein, dressed in elegant, flowing attire, created an atmosphere through her performance demeanor as well. The recital was announced with no intermission and the pianist paused from playing only once, midway through, to acknowledge applause and take a brief break. However, by otherwise starting each piece immediately after the final notes of the one it preceded, she communicated clearly that this was not to be an event in which musical continuity would be broken by applause between numbers. Thankfully the audience complied, mutually agreeing to allow the atmosphere to envelop them too.

Dinnerstein played two pieces by the Eighteenth century harpsichord composer Francois Couperin, one at the beginning and another right before the break. This is the first time she has programmed the composer. Her approach to Les Barriades mystérieueses was sonorous, eschewing ornamentation in favor of unadorned, shapely melodies. Like the Goldberg Variations, the second piece required interlacing the hands to play everything on the piano keyboard that would have required two manuals on the harpsichord. Le Tic-Toc-Choc, ou Les Mallotins featured motoric clockwork and brisk filigrees that were an excellent foil for the Philip Glass work that immediately preceded it.

Mad Rush (1979), one of Glass’s best known piano pieces, was first composed for the organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where the composer performed it for an appearance by the Dalai Lama. Arranged for piano, the piece is forceful and filled with contrasts. Its delicate passages were played with a spacious sense of breath by Dinnerstein, while the more emphatic central section in piece’s the repeating loop was performed powerfully with fleet-fingered accuracy. Last year, Dinnerstein’s account of Glass’s Third Piano Concerto was impressive; here, she made a further case for a place in the pantheon of Glass pianists. Contrast played a large role in Dinnerstein’s rendition of Robert Schumann’s Arabesque. Once again, she emphasized the breath between phrases, allowing the audience a sense of deft transition between the various emotive sections as they unspun.

Erik Satie’s Gnossiene No. 3 received the mysterious performance its ambiguous markings and lack of bar-lines evokes. One part cafe music and another modal Impressionist excursion, the piece was rendered with an evasive, lilting quality.

The pianist, in general, avoids overt and flashy displays of hyper-virtuosity, preferring instead to pick distinct places in which she allows her playing to be unrestrained. Dinnerstein’s performance of Schumann’s Kreisleriana provided several excellent opportunities for effusive virtuosity, and they seemed all the more special for the way that the pianist set them in relief against the more contemplative portions of the work. Fleet arpeggiations flew and the fugal passage in the final movement was a brisk cannonade.

Dinnerstein’s aforementioned penchant for allowing the music to breathe, as well as the atmosphere she created for her performance, encouraged a normally bustling New York audience to truly slow down and breathe themselves: a welcome respite during the busy holiday season. When the encore she favored them with was not some barnstormer but instead a reprise of Les Barriades, allowing the program to come full circle, it seemed entirely appropriate.

December 10, 2018 by Christian Carey

Composers, Concert review, Opera, Premieres

György Kurtág’s “Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie” at La Scala

[Ed. note: Former S21 contributor, member, and friend David Salvage has in the last couple years pulled up his U.S. tent pegs and landed in Italy. He’s offered up his review of the latest György Kurtág premiere last month at La Scala.]
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After decades of prodding, false starts, intense study, delays, and, finally, seven years of composing, György Kurtág, at age ninety-two, has written his first opera. For its subject matter, he has chosen Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, a play he saw during its initial run in Paris in 1957 and has loved ever since. World premieres don’t get any more hotly anticipated than this, and it was a privilege to be in attendance for the opera’s final performance at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

Endgame takes place on one of the last days of an imperious invalid named Hamm. As he sits in his wheelchair, he gives his servant, Clov, half-pointless tasks to do, like reporting on what’s outside the windows or pushing him around the room. Stuck in the same space are Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, who live in two trashcans, having lost their legs years earlier in a biking accident. There is little food left for the four of them, and outside lies a bleak landscape of post-apocalyptic desolation.

While Kurtág’s work will inevitably be referred to simply as Fin de partie, its complete title is worth keeping in mind. The opera is actually called Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie and bears the subtitle “scenes and monologues, opera in one act.” By including Beckett’s name in the title, Kurtág connects the work with his earlier Beckett setting, Samuel Beckett: What is the Word; with the subtitle, he suggests that the present is something formally more open than a traditional opera.

The result bears out both title and subtitle. The original version of What is the Word is for singer and piano, and the piano doubles the singer note for note without contributing additional harmony or counterpoint. A similar closeness marks Kurtág’s approach to the singers and orchestra in Fin de partie: while the orchestration is vast and colorful and adds harmony to the vocal lines, emphasis to the stage action, and commentary on the text, principally, the instruments serve to double the vocal lines, making for an almost monadic work that is intensely expressive. Indeed, this is the miracle of Fin de partie: Beckett’s play is quirky, intimate, and subtle—in other words, not material readily suitable for operatic adaptation. And yet Kurtág’s music captures the text’s many mercurial shifts in tone while remaining nothing if not coherent and compelling. As much as any opera in history, Fin de partie finds that magical ground where song, speech, and tone are united. Rather than an end of anything, I found it to be a beginning, an opera rich in new possibilities for composers to come.

It is with the opera’s subtitle, however, where Kurtág seems less surefooted. In creating a libretto of an appropriate length, he has very significantly reduced the role of Clov. By doing so, Kurtág has weakened the play’s dramatic heart: the complex interdependence of a master and his servant. These cuts make some important moments in the opera’s second half come out awkwardly. When Hamm laments that a stuffed dog is not in fact real, the statement is a bit baffling because Kurtág has the cut the play’s sad and comical stuffed-dog scene (which involves Clov). When Hamm thanks Clov for all he has done for him, we might be similarly puzzled, since in the opera he does little for his master (crucial scenes mentioned above involving the windows and the wheelchair ride are also cut). Strangely, Kurtág also omits the parts where Hamm asks Clov whether it’s time for his painkiller; in the play, Clov always says that it’s not time; at the end, he finally reveals to Hamm that there is no more painkiller left. In the opera, we only get this final exchange: the result is a sudden outburst that lacks catharsis. And in the opera, Clov’s long concluding monologue (prompted by Hamm to say something “from the heart”) seems more like a set-piece than the expression of things long unspoken.

By attenuating the play’s central conflict, Kurtág’s Fin de partie becomes less unified—more “open”—than Beckett’s original. As a result, it prioritizes the expression of inwardness over the realization of drama. As the opera goes on, the monologues take over, and the drama becomes more and more suspended. Of course, monologues can heighten drama; but this depends on the characters’ being insightful about themselves, others, or their situations. Beckett’s aren’t, and he wisely never lets their stories, musings, or ramblings dominate for too long in the play.

While I loved every note of Fin de partie and found the music’s force such that I’ve had trouble composing ever since seeing it, I remain puzzled as to what was gained by the approach Kurtág took: reducing Clov cuts into the play’s very core, and giving the monologues free reign is the wrong approach for this material. (I have some speculations about this, but I’ll save them for the comments section.)

Meanwhile, what remains is a grand achievement—a new opera at an extraordinarily high level. Those who stuck their necks out to make Fin de partie happen—Alexander Pereira, sovrintendente of La Scala, perhaps foremost among them—deserve our respect and gratitude. However problematic it might be, this is a work that bestows honor on any institution who decides to mount it or any musician who participates in its performance.

December 6, 2018December 7, 2018 by David Salvage

Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Seattle

Abrahamsen’s Schnee at Seattle Symphony’s [untitled]

Thomas Dausgaard conducting members of Seattle Symphony in Abrahamsen: Schnee (photo: James Holt/Seattle Symphony)

[untitled] is the moniker given by Seattle Symphony to its thrice-annual Friday night new music events. Staged in the lobby of Benaroya Hall, it’s a semi-formal atmosphere in which the Symphony can deploy its musicians in smaller groupings better suited to the exigencies of postmodern music. The first [untitled] concert of the new season took place on October 12, and featured the regional premiere of Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee, offering listeners in the Pacific Northwest an opportunity to judge how well this work has earned the considerable attention it has received in its brief ten-year lifetime.

Scored for two piano quartets (one conventional, the other with woodwinds instead of strings) flanking a central percussionist, this hour-long piece is officially a chain of ten canons conceived in pairs. But don’t bother looking for Row, Row, Row Your Boat-style rounds. Abrahamsen’s vision of musical canons ranges from relatively straightforward imitation between two voices in stretto…

From Canon 2b (other instruments omitted)

…to rhythm-only canons, to cases where the only trace of a traditional canon is the successive entries of similar lines:

It’s probably easiest to think of the canons as a set of ten segued movements in which each instrumental group stays within a tight-knit band of musical material. An important structural characteristic of the piece is that these canons get progressively shorter, starting with 8–9 minutes allotted to the distended Canons 1a and 1b, and ending with the fleeting Canons 5a and 5b, lasting a minute apiece (audio links and the YouTube embed above are from the work’s only commercial recording, by ensemble recherche).

Accompanying this process of diminution is a corresponding process of detuning where the string instruments, then the woodwinds, shift their intonation downwards by 1/6 and 1/3 tones so that they gradually go out of tune with the pianos. Mikhail Shmidt, violinist for the [untitled] performance, likens the effect to melting. Such a reliance on “dirty” intonational clashs—most prominent in Canons 5a/5b—reflects the influence of Abrahamsen’s teacher, Ligeti. In a particularly imaginative stroke, three Interludes are inserted as composed tuning breaks to allow the musicians to effect the retuning without a break:

Ritual orchestral tuning is often satirized, and audiences will occasionally mistake tuning for an actual piece, but there is little precedent for written-out retuning occurring in the middle of a composition.

Schnee of course means snow in German (curiously favored by this Danish teutophile over his native sne), and this hour-long work is a suitably frosty and brittle affair. It begins and ends in the extreme treble register, and its overall sound world is dominated by white noise effects suggested by the title’s initial consonant. The score calls for scratchy bow noises, the application of Blu Tack to muffle piano strings, and frequent “half-breath” effects on the woodwind instruments (which in the case of the contralto flute and bass clarinet seem to have been specifically chosen for their breathy quality). The percussionist’s job mainly alternates between rubbing writing paper on a smooth surface and rubbing wax paper on a rough surface, the task broken up only by the use of sleigh bells in Canons 4a/4b and a single tamtam stroke at the end of Canon 3b. Other noise effects show the influence of Lachenmann, most notably his piece Guero, whose technique of gliding fingernails across the piano keyboards is directly borrowed in Schnee.

The very first canon fulfils the evocative trajectory of the title, beginning on a repeated violin harmonic on an A♮ that’s so high, you mainly hear bowing noise (the score says “like an icy whisper”, though North American listeners might find it inadvertently reminiscent of a certain cinematic shower scene). Pentatonic white note tinkerings in the 1st Piano’s top octave soon enter (E-A-F-D-E is a prominent pattern), and one might wonder if this will be a characteristically long and static exposition of European postminimalism. But the complexity increases as the canons proceed, reaching an apogee in the third canon pair where the harmonies are atonal, the rhythms unmetered, and the pitch range fully extended to the bass register (intensified by tuning the cello’s lowest string from C down to G). The process then reverses in the last two canon pairs, and we eventually revert to the white note pentatonicism of the opening. It’s the simultaneous revelation of both arch-like vectors (range and complexity) and straight-line vectors (length and detuning) as the work progresses that gives Schnee such dramatic impact.

The influence of Feldman is often close at hand in Abrahamsen’s music, and it’s quite obvious in Schnee’s Canon 3b. But a different parallel can be found with Feldman’s Three Voices, a unique and uncharacteristically texted and beat-driven work from 1982 that in its repetitions, quirky metricality, overall length and architecture based on concurrent unfolding of both linear and arch-shaped processes, is a tantalizing predecessor to Schnee. It even features as its sole lyric this most apropos poetic snippet by Frank O’Hara:

Who’d have thought
that snow falls

Schnee is the kind of piece that can die in a too-dry space, but [untitled]’s idiosyncratic venue is just live enough to avoid this pitfall. Being designed as an entry and reception point rather than as a performance space though, it does come at the cost of an omnipresent background rumble from the building’s HVAC system. This often overwhelmed the subtle piano resonance effects and smeared the rhythmic definition of the percussionist’s paper shuffling (both prominent in Canon 3b). But the piece would have gotten lost in either of the two conventional concert spaces at Benaroya Hall, and the capable ensemble, drawn from regular Seattle Symphony musicians with frequent adjuncts Cristina Valdés and Oksana Ezhokina handling the piano parts, managed to traverse the work’s rhythmic complexities with no trace of strain or sloppiness.

They also did something perhaps more remarkable: avoiding the temptation, especially in the excitement of live performance, to play this music too loudly, too quickly and too brashly. Abrahamsen’s bleak snowscapes, like Varèse’s deserts, are those of the mind as much as of nature. What this piece needs is not so much the brisk extroversion of Ludovic Morlot, but a healthy dose of Scandinavian reserve, which it received under the conducting of Thomas Dausgaard, who will assume Morlot’s role as Music Director next season. In this performance, the first of this piece for any of the evening’s musicians (including Dausgaard), we perhaps have a glimpse of the direction that the Symphony’s programming will take under Dausgaard’s leadership.

Abrahamsen, born in 1952, presents an unusual musical example of a late career breakthrough. He started out as a Danish representative of New Simplicity, but much of his music from that period now seems rather…simplistic. After a Schoenbergian decade of relative silence, Abrahamsen reemerged with a more synthetic style that elevated his international profile to the degree that he can now be reasonably considered the most prominent living Danish composer other than the venerable Per Nørgård (1932–).

The best survey of Abrahamsen’s career arc is the Arditti Quartet’s recording of his String Quartets 1–4, whose dates range from 1973 to 2012 (this album was one of my favorites of 2017). His recent hits include some orchestral songs for Barbara Hannigan and a concerto for piano left hand, but these works seem less distinguished to me measured against the formidable European corpus of modernist orchestral music. It’s Schnee, completed in 2008, that continues to stand as Abrahamsen’s masterpiece, comparable in scope and ambition to Haas’ In Vain, and likewise exemplifying the alloy of exploration and consolidation that characterizes the most accomplished of contemporary European art music. Its reputation as one of the classics of the young 21st century (advanced by the likes of Paul Griffiths, who chose it to conclude the current version of his book Modern Music and After), was given powerful witness by Dausgaard and the Seattle Symphony musicians.

The score to Schnee is available online here.

October 22, 2018January 30, 2020 by Michael Schell

Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Flute, Music Instruments, Performers, Resources

Glissando Headjoint for Flute

The Glissando Headjoint for flute was invented by performer, composer, improviser, and inventor Robert Dick. Essentially, it adds a carrier tube to the standard C flute headjoint. The lip plate can be moved along the carrier tube to create true glissandi. Much of Dick’s work with the headjoint is in an improvisatory style; most of my work with it has been largely through commissioning works. One of the most rewarding things about this activity as a performer is seeing the variety of sounds composers require from the headjoint in their works. The minimal repertoire for glissando flute compared to the vastness of the rest of the flute repertoire across the centuries really highlights that the lack of precedent drives some pretty rewarding creativity.   The first work that I performed with my newly-purchased headjoint in 2013 was Jay Batzner’s Dreams Grow Like Slow Ice. Written for glissando flute and electronics, it’s an evocative work that brings to mind an icy, barren landscape. I’ve had the pleasure of performing it fifteen times on three continents. I’ve worked with Jay on two other works involving the headjoint: Fire Walk, which is for solo glissando flute and is based on ideas from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks; and Used Illusions, a large work in three movements for glissando flute and concert band, based on Guns N’ Roses tunes.   Andrew Rodriguez’s Highways for solo glissando flute brings to mind the sensations of driving at night: being lulled to sleep, occasional lights when traveling through towns, the mixing of dreams and waking consciousness. It’s a highly effective work that uses the glissando effect masterfully to blur the lines between being asleep and the reality outside the vehicle.   The Dream Has Ended in Death by Aaron Jay Myers is based on a lithograph of the same name and uses a variety of sounds to create a mood representative of the visual art inspiration. It is particularly effective to project the lithograph behind the flutist during a performance. This work is also for solo glissando flute.   Chamber music involving the Glissando Headjoint can also be effective. Wes Flinn’s Urban Legends X: Mothman is written for glissando flute and trombone, and the similar glissando effects are really heightened when utilized by both players. Similarly, Alan Theisen’s Pura Besakih, inspired by the temple complex in Indonesia of the same name, uses glissando flute and traditional C flute in a duet.

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When writing for glissando flute, there are helpful resources to help composers find the sounds they want to hear. Several documents on Robert Dick’s website (http://robertdick.net/the-glissando-headjoint/) include fingering charts, which explain the extended lower range. His website also includes a selection of demonstration videos. Most importantly, work with your performer either before starting the composition process or throughout it to confirm your ideas will work within the limitations of the instrument. For example, the headjoint extends the lower range of the flute to a low A, but it can’t be played very loudly. Another limitation is just plain physics. The headjoint can only move so quickly, so some combinations of notes and headjoint placement within the carrier tube are simply impractical. Keeping the lines of communication open with your performer will reveal any of these quickly.

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Tammy Evans Yonce, an Atlanta native, is a flutist, collaborative musician, writer, and professor. She is a dedicated new music performer who is particularly interested in the commissioning and teaching of new music. Dr. Yonce has commissioned over twenty works involving flute, many with a specific focus on creating new music for the Glissando Headjoint. She is Associate Professor of Music at South Dakota State University. Her recently-released album, Dreams Grow Like Slow Ice, includes several works for glissando flute. She can be found at tammyevansyonce.com and on Twitter @TammyEvansYonce.

September 17, 2018 by Tammy Evans Yonce

Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Seattle

A year without Matt Shoemaker (1974–2017)

One year ago the Pacific Northwest’s new music community was stunned by the suicide of Matt Shoemaker: painter and musician, enthusiastic traveler, frequent performer with Gamelan Pacifica, and accomplished creator in the genre of dark ambient. Shoemaker’s “electroacoustic soundscapes” have been released in a variety of formats by Elevator Bath, Helen Scarsdale Agency and other labels, and I offer an overview of this work in the Second Inversion article Mutable Depths: Remembering Matt Shoemaker. Shoemaker was a veteran of Seattle’s formidable electronic music scene, and he often performed his music at the Chapel Performance Space, the workhorse venue for experimental music in this city. It was there that an assembly of his colleagues, friends and admirers gathered on the night of May 5 to honor his memory.

Eric Lanzillotta opened the evening by coaxing deep, dense sonorities from a Moog MG-1 analog synthesizer. These gently modulated sounds were soon joined by filtered bands of pink noise, and then by low frequency sine wave glissandos. These latter often seemed to be amplitude modulated by a noise source to create an irregular tremolo, a time-honored technique for introducing complexity into the innately regular sonorities of electronic instruments. Lanzillotta often collaborated with Shoemaker, and the two can be heard jamming together in a 2005 session that has been released on Anomalous Records. An excerpt thereof is available on SoundCloud:

Jim Haynes took the stage next. This California-based musician and Helen Scarsdale Agency proprietor began by recounting the impact of encountering Shoemaker’s music for the first time (“Fuck, this guy is doing what I’m trying to do, only way better”). Next Haynes stepped up to his instrument table and brought in a major sixth drone that anchored the first several minutes of his set. Like Lanzillotta, Haynes exclusively used abstract, synthesized sounds—most notably a series of falling glissandos that swelled to an incredibly loud and thick climax before suddenly evaporating into one of those electronic “rattles” that evoke the world of Forbidden Planet-style sci-fi movie soundtracks.

I’d been curious about the half dozen 40W halogen bulbs scattered across Haynes’ setup until finally, ten minutes in, they started to illuminate, powered by the same pink noise source that was controlling the amplitude of his rumbling oscillators. A visual and aural crescendo ensued, the blinding effect of these irregularly flickering lamps inside the otherwise dark Chapel interior suggesting a campfire emerging from beyond the grave—a vast improvement over those tacky synchronized disco lights you see at popular concerts and clubs.

As he’d done before, Haynes suddenly cut the signal to the lamps and oscillators, leaving only a faint heartbeat-like pulse. After a few forlorn palpitations, the set ended. Of the evening’s offerings, it was Haynes’ music that reminded me the most of Shoemaker’s.

Matt Shoemaker’s LP Isolated Agent/Stranding Behavior ‎(Elevator Bath eeaoa031) featuring his original artwork

Up next was Climax Golden Twins, a Seattle-based experimental music band that has been active in various guises for 25 years, and whose configuration for the night comprised founders Robert Millis and Jeffrey Taylor along with Dave Knott and Jesse Paul Miller. The instrumentarium featured analog and digital synths, guitars, a hi-hat and an array of toys and other homemade contraptions. The music was free improv with the continuous transitions and generally slow tempos that are characteristic of that genre nowadays. The 20 minute set included the first concrete sounds of the evening: radio signals transduced through guitar pickups, sampled instruments and, most poignantly, excerpts from Shoemaker himself playing a Millis piano piece. These latter sounds, repetitive tinkerings on a C♯ minor triad of a kind I’d associate with Brian Eno or West Coast postminimalism, served to anchor the final five minutes of the set, which saw Knott walking through the space plucking this same chord on a ukulele as the piano excerpts played on, both forward and backward.

Knott remained onstage for a solo set that featured a half-sized bottleneck guitar with custom re-entrant tuning designed so that when the fingerboard is barred at the 9th fret, the strings can be played on either side. Its timbre reminded me of the spicy, transient-rich sounds of a Japanese biwa or samisen. The improvisation began in free rhythm, eventually taking on a steady pulse the way that a raga performance might progress from alap to jor. As the music grew more animated, Knott’s use of a sliding glass rod imparted a bit of Hawaiian inflection, and for the last few minutes Knott performed overtone singing over his now-steady strumming.

Miller returned to close out the event with a video featuring footage he shot in Indonesia, where Shoemaker had once spent several formative months. The multilayered imagery was conveyed in extremely fast cutting, sometimes combined with time lapse layers, and the montage was accompanied by synth drones mixed with field recordings (also from Indonesia). It was a suitable conclusion, and a reminder of the visual side of Shoemaker’s art (which was simultaneously on display in a memorial exhibit at Jack Straw New Media Gallery). All told, it was a substantive and beautiful evening of timbrally rich music befitting its dedicatee.

August 13, 2018December 14, 2019 by Michael Schell

Composers, Contemporary Classical, Deaths, File Under?

RIP Oliver Knussen (1952-2018)

Knussen Honorary Doctorate RAM July 2018 — Oliver Knussen received an honorary doctorate from the RAM on 5 July 2018.

Saddened to learn of the passing of composer and conductor Oliver Knussen. One of the truly great musicians of our time, Knussen had received an honorary doctorate from the Royal Academy of Music, where he was Richard Rodney Bennett Professor of Music, just a few days ago.

A renowned pedagogue as well as a superlative conductor of contemporary music, Knussen held positions with such organizations as London Sinfonietta, Aldeburgh Festival, Tanglewood, BBC Symphony, and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

While not as prolific as some of his contemporaries, his catalog included a number of high quality works. Knussen will be remembered for compositions such as his two Maurice Sendak operas – Where the Wild Things Are and Higglety Pigglety Pop – orchestra pieces such as the Horn and Violin Concertos and Fanfare with Fireworks, and his settings of Walt Whitman and, in a Requiem for his late wife Sue, Emily Dickinson and W.H. Auden. Knussen’s final work, O Hototogismu!, consisted of adaptations of 17th-19th century Haiku poems for soprano and ensemble. It was premiered at Aldeburgh in June 2017.

July 12, 2018July 26, 2018 by Christian Carey

Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York

Da Capo Players at Merkin Hall (Concert Review)

Da Capo Chamber Players Perform a Potpourri of American Works

Da Capo Chamber Players

Merkin Concert Hall

June 4, 2018

NEW YORK – Themed programs and portrait concerts are all the rage these days. As such, it is refreshing when an ensemble goes eclectic, presenting a diverse array of music. Such was the case on Monday, June 4th, when Da Capo Chamber Players performed eight pieces by living American composers who write in a plethora of styles. Consisting of violinist Curtis Macomber, cellist Chris Gross, flutist Patricia Spencer, pianist Steven Beck and joined by guest artists soprano Lucy Shelton, clarinetists Marianne Glythfeldt and Carlos Cordeiro, and percussionist Michael Lipsey, the musicians are a formidable cadre of some of New York’s best new music performers. This was handily demonstrated in all of the works on offer at Merkin — how often can you depend on that level of consistency?

Few groups perform the rhythmic patternings of minimalism more assuredly than the Da Capo Players. Here they clearly delineated the differences between various types of ostinatos. Sweet air (1999) by David Lang juxtaposed its repetitions with distressed dissonances, In the sole premiere on the program, Dylan Mattingly’s Ecstasy #3 (2018) presented passages filled with an alt-folk-inflected melody. An arrangement by Robert Moran of Philip Glass’s Modern Love Waltz (1980) may have explored repetition in the most straightforward way of the pieces here, but its fluid playfulness made it a fetching addition to the proceedings.

The modernist wing of composition was represented too. Elliott Carter’s Canon for Four (1984) received an incisive rendition, with the contrapuntal details of the work vividly underscored. Tanoa León’s One Mo’ Time (2016) mixed a varied palette of chromaticism with inflections of gospel and jazz. She is one of the best at allowing these two traditions to coexist in her music in organic fashion. Christopher Cerrone supplied one of the evening’s most imaginative works. Hoyt=Schermerhorn for keyboard mixed a gradual build-up of soft textures that was somewhat indebted to the works of Feldman but through quicker changes of harmony. Over time, effects such as reverb and treble register loops brought the piece from its eighties origins into the twenty-first century. Amalgam (2015) by Taylor Brook, was the concert’s most experimental piece, with the players (and soprano Lucy Shelton) moving from disparate roles to unison playing, then heterophonic treatment of the piece’s melody. Amalgam is a fascinating composition that certainly proved to be a successful experiment for Da Capo.

The concert’s standout was Romancero (1983), for soprano and ensemble, settings of four medieval poems thought to be from the Sephardic Jewish tradition by Mario Davidovsky. Shelton was as expressive as ever and well-matched for the angular challenges posed by Romancero’s post-tonal pitch vocabulary. Her voice ranged from delicately floating pianissimo passages to forceful forte declamations. The instrumental parts are quite demanding as well, reminiscent of the complexly articulate language of Davidovsky’s electroacoustic Synchronisms. Shelton is a frequent collaborator with Da Capo (see a recent video of their rendition of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire below), and their association showed in the intricate interplay between voice and instruments: a gem of a performance.

As if to remind us of the celebratory catholicity of taste that bound together the disparate strands of this program, its finale was the brief, yet brilliantly multi-faceted, Encore (1991) by Bruce Adolphe. Composed to celebrate the Da Capo Players’ twentieth anniversary, it has remained a staple of their repertoire. It is hard to believe that the group has now been going for 48 years. Based on the vigor with which they performed at Merkin Hall, the sky’s the limit for their upcoming golden anniversary season.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw-OItKIZMc&w=560&h=315]

June 16, 2018 by Christian Carey

Chamber Music, Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Performers

ArchiTAK at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music

NEW YORK – On February 10th, 2018, Architek Percussion and TAK ensemble presented five US premieres in the DiMenna Center for Classical Music’s Benzaquen Hall. The program, charmingly titled ArchiTAK, was composed entirely of new music by New York and Montreal composers. Walking into the hall expecting some sort of configuration to accommodate five percussionists, a flautist, clarinetist, violinist, and vocalist, I was instead greeted by nine chairs in a tight, even row behind nine microphones. I heard members of TAK ensemble behind me discussing the location of “the knives.” I was ready to expect the unexpected as the program began with Myriam Bleau’s Separation Space. The piece began with these nine performers manipulating electronically processed microphones with tapping, scratching, sandpaper, and yes, a chef’s knife. Adding to the rich amalgam building in the speakers, performers began to play pre-recorded media from cellphones, and two began to sing in a close, gently pulsing dissonance. The work was an excellent opening to the program. I found myself having a thought that I would return to many times throughout this program. New music can be strange, intimate, challenging, and moving, and in capable hands, can be all four at once. Taylor Brook’s Incantation left the stage to Architek Percussion, with each member of the quartet equipped with a hi-hat prepared with a small towel, two metals bars (each tuned to form a microtonal octachord spanning the width of about 2 semitones), a brake drum, and a violin bow. Early questions I raised to myself about the authenticity of their performance considering the handicap of headphones (presumably playing a click) were quickly replaced with a respect for these performers as they flawlessly moved through the aggressively fast and equally demanding piece with incredibly tight ensemble. The first half of the program concluded with A Song About Saint Edward the Confessor by Isaiah Ceccarelli, which again utilized the full complement of players. Opening as a vocalise before later unfolding into a proper song, the piece capitalized on vocalist Charlotte Mundy’s unaffected voice and pure tone, while still leaving her room to realize a richly expressive performance. While her diction was very clear and the hall was intimite, I felt that omitting the text from the program was a missed opportunity.

Moments into New York composer David Bird’s Descartes and the Clockwork Girl, I understood why this was programmed after a short break. I again found myself considering the strange, intimate, challenging, and moving as the piece worked through timbre pairings that were as conceptually attractive and musically effective. I am still particularly taken with Carlos Cordeiro’s performance, balancing passages that demand incredible dexterity with clean, sustained bass clarinet multiphonics. The program concluded with Taylor Brook’s Pulses. For the fifth time that night, I found myself almost entirely outside of time, so engrossed in the performance that I honestly could not give an accurate break-down of the roughly 90 minute program.

After the final piece concluded and members of Architek Percussion and TAK received a strong round of much deserved applause, a gesture towards the audience revealed that both David Bird and Taylor Brook were in attendance for this performance. For all these musicians did to curate and present moving and compelling works of new music, there were several missed opportunities in the presentation of the program itself that could have gone a long way to making the music more accessible. Given that each piece contained such evocative, programmatic titles, I have a feeling including program notes would have provided audience members with a better vocabulary to appreciate the work of both the composers and performers. With a composer present for three of the five pieces on the program, I feel it was a real missed opportunity not to hear about their work from them, especially considering the intimate nature of the venue.

ARCHITAK

Myriam Bleau —Separation Space

Taylor Brook — Incantation

Isaiah Ceccarelli — A Song About Saint Edward the Confessor

David Bird — Descartes and the Clockwork Girl

Taylor Brook — Pulses

Architek Percussion: Ben Duinker, Mark Morton, Ben Reimer, Alessandro Valiante

TAK ensemble: Charlotte Mundy, voice; Laura Cocks, flute; Carlos Cordeiro, clarinet; Marina Kifferstein, violin; Ellery Trafford, percussion

May 21, 2018May 22, 2018 by Cortlandt Matthews

CDs, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Deaths, File Under?, New York, Obits

RIP Matt Marks (1980-2018)

All of us at Sequenza 21 are saddened to learn of the passing of Matt Marks. A musical polymath, he was a composer, new music advocate, provocative Twitter presence, co-founder and key organizer of New Music Gathering, and a versatile performer, both a vocalist-actor in various projects and a founding member of the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, in which he played French horn and for which he did imaginative arrangements.

I met Marks on several occasions, but will allow his close friends and family to share reminiscences of a more personal nature. Among all those who knew and encountered him, either as a social media presence or “IRL,” his intelligence, sense of humor, persistent advocacy for gender equality in concert music and other worthy causes, and formidable talent will be sorely missed. Condolences to the many people whose lives he touched.

Read and Listen Further: Matt Marks

Matt Marks on Twitter.

The Matt Marks Music Page (personal website).

Matt Marks at New Music USA.

A 2017 review in the New York Times of Marks’s opera Mata Hari.

And a scene from the opera:

Mata Hari from PROTOTYPE Festival on Vimeo.

Steve Smith, writing in 2010 in the NY Times, profiled A Little Death, Vol. 1, a performance piece and recording with soprano Mellissa Hughes for New Amsterdam. It served as an introduction to Marks’s music for many.

Arrangement of “Revolution Number 9” for Alarm Will Sound:

May 12, 2018May 22, 2018 by Christian Carey

CD Review, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?, New York, Orchestras, Philadelphia Orchestra, Twentieth Century Composer

Philadelphia Gives New York Premiere of Van der Aa’s Violin Concerto

New York Premiere of Van Der Aa Violin Concerto

The Philadelphia Orchestra

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Music Director and Conductor

Janine Jansen, Violin

March 13, 2018

Carnegie Hall

Published on Sequenza21.com

By Christian Carey

NEW YORK – Dutch composer Michel Van der Aa (b. 1970) is best known for his imaginative and formidably-constructed multimedia works that incorporate both film and electronics. Notable among these are the operas Blank Out (2016) and Sunken Garden (2012), as well as a music theater work based on Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (2008). Even pieces for acoustic ensembles, such as the clarinet chamber concerto Hysteresis (2013), have frequently incorporated electronics as part of their makeup. Thus, when Van der Aa composed his Violin Concerto (2014) for soloist Janine Jansen and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the absence of electronics was significant. (Interestingly, after the success of the concerto, his follow up piece for orchestra, Reversal (2016), also abstains from the electronic domain). However, even in the analog realm, Van der Aa incorporates a sound world that acknowledges his interest in decidedly non-classical elements.

The score indicates that the solo violin part should be played with the vibrato, portamento, and usual techniques common to the instrument in contemporary concertos. The accompanying strings however, are asked to refrain from using vibrato in sustained passages, creating a kind of sine tone effect. Various styles are incorporated in the solo part, from bluegrass fiddling to more angular contemporary passages. Other aspects of the orchestration hearken to pop music terrain: near the end of the first movement, for instance, a climax approaches house music in its boisterous brass and percussion.

On March 13th, joined by Jansen, the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, delivered an energetic and assured performance of the concerto at Carnegie Hall. The violinist played with the supreme confidence of a soloist who has endeavored to make a work entirely her own. With its variety of solo demeanors, both shaded and nuanced and explosive and mercurial, Van Der Aa’s Violin Concerto seems the ideal vehicle for Jansen’s multi-faceted artistry. The Philadelphians matched her playing with equal confidence, with strings sensitively taking up the “sine tone” accompaniment of the sostenuto passages and winds, brass, and percussion gamely taking on roles in the electronica mimicry of wide swaths of the piece. Interpretively speaking, Jansen and Nézet-Séguin were on the same page throughout. In a dramatic conclusion to the piece, the violinist played her last gesture nose to nose with the conductor, eliciting surprised exhalation and then sustained applause from the audience.

Sergei Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony is one of my favorite of the composer’s works and I have seen a number of performances of it in concert. While I might quibble here or there with Nézet-Séguin’s tempo choices, the conductor’s tendency to press ahead during the potentially “schmaltzy” moments of the piece rendered it free of several layers of sentimental “varnish:” still emotive yet utterly fresh-sounding. The Philadelphia Orchestra’s strings are justly renowned and were exemplary here, but the winds, brass, and percussion each contributed in both spotlight and ensemble moments as well. Thus, it was a touching exchange onstage when the conductor insisted on walking out to each of them in turn, bestowing embraces and well-earned praise.

Jansen and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, have recorded Van Der Aa’s Violin Concerto for Disquiet Media. It is paired with the aforementioned Hysteresis, performed by Amsterdam Sinfonietta, directed by Candida Thompson, with Kari Krikku as soloist. The performances are detailed and evocative, giving an excellent sense of the composer’s approach to ensemble works. One hopes that both the recent high-profile performances of the Violin Concerto and this persuasive recording prove inviting to other soloists and ensembles: Van der Aa’s work is worthy of wider currency.

April 12, 2018 by Christian Carey