This Saturday night at Greenwich House, composer Ted Hearne pays loving tribute to the glorious achievements of state and federal officials in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. An hour long song cycle, Katrina Ballads enshrines the immortal words of Barbara Bush, Dennis Hastert, Anderson Cooper and others in all the dignity they deserve.

Or (ahem) roasts the above named folks to a crisp.

Either way, tickets are $15 and $8 depending on your social status – so it’s cheap. Workers around the world unite.

I’m a bit late in reviewing this, but two Saturdays ago, February 23, the Lost Dog New Music ensemble performed at Judson Memorial Church at Washington Square in Manhattan. Lost Dog isn’t yet a very well-known group, but if this concert was any indication they may be on their way to indispensable. The group is the contemporary chamber music wing of the Astoria Music Society, which was founded in 2003 and which also includes a composers collective called Random Access Music, a jazz series called Astoria Jazz Nights, and the Astoria Symphony. (I saw the Symphony in an excellent performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah last year.) Lost Dog has been around since 1995, but was rolled into AMS when the society was founded. Astoria, for those who don’t know, is a neighborhood in Queens, New York, just over the Triborough Bridge from Manhattan, and on the N R and W subway lines. As artists got priced out of places like Downtown Manhattan, and DUMBO and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, many moved to Astoria, and in recent years has become one of the several rapidly gentrifying artsy communities in the Five Boroughs.

Saturday’s concert was, as I mentioned, not in Astoria but in Manhattan, and it was quite well attended for a contemporary music concert. The opening work was a piece by Lost Dog’s Artistic Director Garth Edwin Sunderland called Dark Heaven Angel. Composed for scordatura cello, tuned according to the harmonic series, the piece constructed a wide variety of sonorities out of different parts of the harmonic series. As in something like The Well Tuned Piano, much of the music seemed to exist in a contradictory world where the harmonies were simultaneously dissonant and harmonious, jarring and resonant. Part way through, car horns could be heard a few blocks away, and in almost any other circumstance they would have been an unwelcome intrusion, but somehow the timbre of the horns fit with the cello sounds, and actually enhanced my experience of the piece. Cellist Eric Jacobsen, it should be noted, is not a regular Lost Dog member, but he was spectacular in both this piece and as a featured performer in the next as well.

The featured work was Peter Maxwell Davies’s Vesalii Icones, a 14 movement work for chamber ensemble (flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, viola, and cello) and dancer. Davies drew his inspiration from a series of 16^th century anatomical drawings by Andreas Wessels, or Vesalius in Latin. Vesalius used to perform human dissection during his lectures, and he was so celebrated that the government would time executions to coincide with them. The drawings themselves are, to modern sensibilities, quite bizarre—-rather than being clinical and impersonal, the dissected figures strike balletic poses, and are depicted with country landscapes in the background. Davies chose images and paired them with the Stations of the Cross, which the dancer interprets. It was an ambitious piece to write, and ambitious to perform. Unfortunately, I’m not much of a Peter Maxwell Davies fan, and I was not particularly impressed with the choreography, but, my own tastes notwithstanding, the piece is actually very good, and had some moments that even I found quite wonderful—-some of them funny and some beautiful. And I should say that other people seemed to like the choreography, so maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about. What I do know, however, is that the performances—-both the dancing and the music-—were outstanding. Silas Huff, who also conducts the Astoria Symphony, lead the ensemble ably, and at one point cavorted with the cellist and with dancer Dora Arreola, reenacting the famous Abu Ghraib photos during the “The Mocking of Christ.”

In short, most people probably haven’t ever heard of Lost Dog before, but this talented group of musicians clearly has a lot to offer, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they do next.

A long, long time ago, boys and girls, there was a very funny TV series called Get Smart, starring a Borscht Belt comic named Don Adams as a brain-addled superspy named Maxwell Smart and a cute-as-a-button gamine named Barbara Feldon as his trusty sidekick, Agent 99. This was before most of you were born.

Adams left the building for the big Grossinger’s in the Sky a long time ago but Barbara Feldon, Agent 99, is alive and well and appearing this Wednesday night at 8 pm with the early music ensemble Parthenia, a Consort of Viols, in Hot Off the Press, a concert of new music and poetry at Picture Ray Studio, 245 West 18th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues) in Manhattan. Other guests will be Paul Hecht, and soprano Kristin Norderval.

Scheduled works include Max Lifchitz’ Night Voices No. 15 (2008), for 4 viols, David Thompson’s 2:4 (2008), a fantasy for 4 viols, David Glaser’s Fantazy (2008), a duet for tenor and bass viols, Frances White’s Like the Lily (1999) for two bass viols and electronic sound
(arr. for Parthenia 2008), Paul Richards’ A Twelvemonth and a Day (2007) and Kristin Norderval’s selections from Nothing Proved for four viols, soprano and interactive audio processing (2008). Check out the program notes. $10 “rush” tickets at the door subject to availability. For tickets and more information, contact Parthenia at 212-358-5942 or visit them online.

I’m guessing that Agent 99 will be reading poetry rather than fiddling. She has a marvelous speaking voice and is nobody’s dummy. I’m sure I’m one of the last people alive to remember that she won $64,000 on The 64,000 Question in the category of Shakespeare.

It’s now just a smidge over seven years since Iannis Xenakis died. And almost exactly 13 years ago, Xenakis sat down for this amicable interview in English:

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This is the first ten minutes; its poster, Edward Lawes, promises a second part in the near future. (And if anyone recognises who Xenakis is talking with in the video, fill me in.)

I get a lot of review CDs.  Most of them I listen to once, or not at all, and pass them along to the four or five people who have proven to be reliable reviewers.  It is rare that a recording makes me stop everything and listen.  Jenny Lin’s new recording of two major piano works by Ernest Bloch with the SWR Rundfunkorcheter Kaiserslautern, under Jiri Starek, is one of those rare moments.  I must confess that I didn’t know the Concerto Symphonique but I’m inclined to take the word of David Hurwitz at Classics Today who has pronounced it “one of the 20th century’s great masterpieces for piano and orchestra,” and this CD “easily…its finest recording to date.”

Jenny’s performance is extraordinary. Intense, sensitive, nuanced, and perfectly executed.  You wonder how a 97-pound human being could possibly create a sound this big and enveloping.  Her account of Bloch’s much more familiar Concerto Grosso No. 1 is just as spectacular, in a quieter way.  You come away from the CD with the realization that Bloch was even better than you thought he was and that Jenny Lin, who has until now been best known for her willingness to take on new and gnarly works, is an A list pianist in the late romantic repertory as well.  

I.

Early in our conversation yesterday, Hilary Hahn, loquacious and genial throughout, was chatting openly about music and athleticism; about how half her practice time was geared towards staying in shape; how solo recitals were more physically draining than chamber and concerto performances; how different halls, players, even A’s demanded great flexibility; and how flexibility and one’s ear were integral to the athleticism she strove to maintain. I commented on how some pieces were meant just to be big flashy fluffs, and that this was fine; have fun, play fast, show ’em you can hit those notes – not everything’s supposed to be late Brahms. But this, she replied, was not how she saw things. All the music she plays, she believes in entirely; were she to suspect a piece of superficiality, she would not play it; practice time is precious and is for profound music alone.

II.

This April, Hilary Hahn (via Deutsche Grammophon) brings us that feste Burg of twelve-tone serialism, the Schoenberg violin concerto. Hahn’s been wanting to record the piece for years. First she needed to book some performances to force herself to learn the (very difficult) piece. Though no orchestras she contacted had actually played it, she was able to muscle enough of them into agreeing to the project that she could let her interpretation grow on the concert stage for a few years before entering the recording studio. She decided to pair the Schoenberg with the Sibelius violin concerto, and Esa-Pekka Salonen (naturally) conducts. The two concertos show off one another very, very well. The Schoenberg’s tense chromatic saturation finds release in the expansive diatonic washes of the Sibelius. Hahn sees the project as an attempt to release each concerto from narrow pre-conceptions: the Schoenberg is really more Romantic than academic, and the Sibelius is more international than Finnish.

III.

Hahn was born in Virginia, but home, as one suspects and as she frankly admits, is on the road. She enjoys the non-stop traveling and hotel stays. Her life, she claims, is simpler when touring than when staying put. While on tour, she keeps an online journal, in which recently she’s been pretty active. (She once considered doing a creative writing MFA.) Her journal is intended for anyone who might come across it, she says, but young people considering a musical career are her primary audience. Having been blessed with good connections in the local music community as a kid, she wants those who aren’t so lucky to feel connected to what actually happens when concerts are made. She wants kids to realize international music stars go through many of the same aches and pains as everyone else. Currently concertizing in Switzerland, before the end of the spring Hahn will be back in the States playing, among other programs, some concerts with Josh Ritter. She is taking the summer off to row.

New York Philharmonic.  North Korea.  Discuss.

p.s. Steve Smith is on the scene. WGBH will air one of the concerts live online on Sunday, March 2, from 3-5 pm.

Tuesday Update:  Great picture of Steve at the airport in North Korea.

The Yale at Carnegie concert series will honor distinguished faculty member Ezra Laderman at Weill Recital Hall at 8pm on March 3 with a program that features a career-spanning range of Laderman’s chamber works, from his 1954 Bassoon Concerto to the New York premiere of Interior Landscapes II for two pianos, written in 2007.

Laderman (b. 1924) continues the line of distinguished composer-pedagogues at Yale, which has included Paul Hindemith, Krzystof Penderecki, and Jacob Druckman. His ties to the Yale School of Music run deep; after joining the YSM community as a composer-in-residence in 1988, he served as the Dean of the school from 1989 to 1995, and currently holds the position of Professor of Music in the Composition department.

There’s a podcast of a live performance of Laderman’s Concerto for Clarinet and Strings with David Shifrin, clarinet and Ransom Wilson, conducting members of the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale, on Yale’s fabulous netcast page. If you haven’t discovered the Yale School of Music Netcasts page, get on over there. It has more than 100 downloadable podcasts of music and interviews with music luminaries, dating back to Aaron Copland.

And those of you who know Professor Laderman, leave your mosaltovs here.