The L.A. Philharmonic’s New Music Group opened its season last night with a concert of three works by Kaija Saariaho, all written in the early 90s.  This concert was to have provided a follow-up program to a major new Saariaho work, la Passion de Simone, on the philosophy and death of Simone Weil, which was premiered this summer in Vienna.  But (as reported by Mark Swed) Peter Sellars, who staged the premiere, convinced the Phil not to do a mere concert version as planned, but to produce the semi-staged version of Vienna, with dance and lighting; so the Passion was postponed until next season when all of the right people (dancer and lighting designer) are available.

The major work of the evening, and a major one it is, was Saariaho’s violin concerto, named Graal theatre (1994/1997), in its second version for violin with chamber orchestra.  Both versions are available on recordings.   The version for violin and full orchestra was written for Gidon Kremer and premiered in the Proms of 1995 with Kremer and the BBC Symphony conducted by Salonen; the recording also includes Saariaho works performed by Dawn Upshaw and by the cellist Ansi Karttunen, so it has its own great program.  John Storgards premiered the version for violin and chamber orchestra with the Avanti Chamber Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu; its recording includes two other Saariaho chamber works performed by Avanti.

The title of the work comes from a series of medieval poetry, updated by Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud, who also provided the source idea for what became the libretto for l’amour de loin.  The idea used by Saariaho for this concerto was the co-existance of two systems of belief and actions:  the spiritual chivalry represented by the Grail; and the profane and physical approach.  The concerto has two movements, Delicato and Impetuoso, representing the dichotomy.  In last night’s performance, Jennifer Koh was soloist, and she was very impressive overall.  To me, Koh’s strengths suited the first movement’s feeling better than the second, and I didn’t hear enough change of feeling between the two to be fully satisfied, but this work is quite demanding and difficult and when Koh has the work so in hand that she is free from the score, she may be better able to put more fire into the second movement.

With Salonen in the audience, the 18 Phil musicians (5 strings, 2 percussion, piano, harp, and 9 winds) were conducted by our new Assistant Conductor, the 21-year-old Lionel Bringuier.  He also conducted the work that served as a prelude to the concerto, Piccola musica notturna (1954) by Luigi Dallapiccola.  This perfect introduction to the Saariaho is a charming work for eight musicians (3 woods, 3 strings, harp, celesta) evoking the sounds of an enchanted night. 

The first half of the program comprised two works for solo instrument plus electronics, each supplemented by video art reflecting the feelings of that work.  The video artist was Jean-Baptiste Barriere.  I first saw his work in his conception and creation of representations of Saariaho’s music in his CD set Prisma which contains two of the works performed last night.  First was the evocative work Six Japanese Gardens (1993-1995) for percussion with electronics.  The visuals are not necessary to “see” the tone pictures Saariaho paints in simple, unbombastic percussion, made deeper by the electronic additions.  Steven Schick was the percussionist.  This was followed by NoaNoa (1992) for flute supplemented by electronics.  This work was named for a series of ten woodcuts of Tahiti by Paul Gauguin, made during his brief return to France; the drawings had been intended as examples of the illustrations he thought of for a wished-for book on his experiences in Tahiti.  Catherine Ransom Karoly was soloist and pulled off all of the technical challenges of the work, including vocalizations.  That Barriere’s video supplements seem so attuned to Saariaho’s music may be partially explained by the fact that they are married.

If you like Olivier Messiaen, you missed out on a phenomenal performance of his epic organ work Livre de Saint Sacrement on Tuesday night in New York.  The performance was by Paul Jacobs, and took place in The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, just off Times Square.  It was an impressive performance of a Messiaen’s very personal late-life (1984) magnum opus, and the cathedral was an ideal space for it.

Of course if, like me, you don’t like Messaien, you can be glad you stayed home and organized your sock drawer or whatever you did, because that piece is frickin’ interminable.  It’s about an hour and a half of pointless, pedantic noodling intercut with loud for the sake of loud, with no meaningful or satisfying dramatic structure.  There’s about a minute worth of actual good material spread through the piece, but of course it’s immediately abandoned in favor of more noodling.  And then there are the sections which sound like nothing so much as Mario collecting those gold coins.  By the time it finally ended I was ready to confess to where I hid the WMD.

So who’s going to help break the back of the mega-music corporations by buying – at any price – at your price – for nothing – a download of the new Radiohead album In Rainbows? I did it this morning and I feel good about it. I’m now promised an email with a download URL for the entire album tomorrow.

For those who haven’t been paying attention to the world’s greatest art rock band, their new album is downloadable tomorrow – without the cooperation of any record company. You pay what you want. You can pay $.01. You can pay $10.00 – that’s what I did. They deserve it and I’d like to see this business model work. And get this, they don’t even have a record company any more. They’re supposedly taking bids on who will get their hard copies into the record stores. Have any S21 readers bought the album? How much did you pay?

FWIW, I currently give away for free, all of my albums and scores and as far as I know was the first musician in the world to do that, starting in 1991. I even caused the L.A. Times to write an article about the other Harrington, David, from Kronos, about how he was freaking out the music world by giving away music back in 1995. I had to call them and ask them to issue a retraction.

But the model I’m thinking of switching to for my albums and scores is this – pay what you want. I think it’ll work and at the same time, it’ll keep poor people, poor students, from being discouraged from learning and listening to my music. It’ll mean setting up some type of PayPal system and hiding from the tech-savvy haxxors but I don’t think it’ll be that much trouble. When I get it done, I’ll post an article here about how to do it. We can all use a little money, and this model nicely allows for a hit album to benefit the artist directly and financially. For kids without a credit card I’ll probably implement a questionnaire/honor system, forcing them to describe their deepest fears about music.

However, from where I’m sitting, unlike the rock world, the new music world isn’t burdened by the record companies. It’s burdened by referral networks, academic networks, and critics who refuse to pay attention to the online world. For the new music world to become truly independent, democratic and egalitarian it’ll take this type of new thinking that Radiohead has begun. By selling, even at any price, I believe it’ll create less of the appearance at my website, which is totally natural, that I can’t give this sh*t away. Haha…

Excuse the LOLCAT reference in the title of this article if you don’t get it. 🙂

P.S., the Coen Brothers movie shoot on our street in Brooklyn Heights I mentioned in comments a few weeks ago is finally over. Here’s some pics for anybody that is curious. It was exciting and exhausting. And our garden may never be the same.

Close to 300 of us traveled to Zipper Auditorium last night to hear Gloria Cheng open the new Piano Spheres season.  It was a great concert.  With the exception of the premiere of a new work, she selected pieces by some of the most unrelenting modernists; as she said from the stage, the names of the composers would make most potential audience members head for the hills, anywhere but to sit and listen.  She gave us pleasure and enjoyment.  No one in the audience gave up and left.  In fact, after the encore of a long, challenging program, I think most of the audience felt as I did: grateful to have heard this.

Gloria Cheng is a great communicator in her playing, an artist painting a picture in sound for us to hear.  She introduced most of the works from the stage, talking about what the piece communicated to her.  Berio’s “Sequenza IV” (1966), for example, seemed to be about a shy, somewhat insecure, uptight person who finally goes out into the world, has experiences and frustrations, and comes home, true to itself, but more colorful from the experiences.  Cheng’s performance of the work gave us a structure and an arc; the work was not merely about momentary sounds, but it evolved and grew.  Here’s a performance of Sequenza IV on YouTube; the technique is good.  Even allowing for the lack of resonance in the sound reproduction, which significantly limits the realization of the work, this performance seems quite removed from what we heard last night.  Cheng’s performance had breadth and depth.

Similarly to Cheng Elliot Carter’s “Intermittances” (2005, at the age of 97) was like meeting very interesting people at a cocktail party: an arguing couple, someone tipsy, etc.  She said that for her, performing Carter was “a gas”.  She made the work fun to hear.

Her performance of Messiaen’s “Canteyodjaya” (1949) viewed the work as a series of stained glass windows within the structure provided by the jagged Hindu rhythmic theme.  Yvonne Loriot apparently said that playing the work was “great fun”, and Cheng found this ability to enjoy the colors and communicate the enjoyment.  As if the Messiaen weren’t difficult enough to play, the concert ended with a performance of “Evryali” (1973) by Iannis Xenakis.  Cheng admitted that Xenakis was difficult to like, but she grew into the work after she was asked to perform it for a ballet group building a dance to the work (which is hard to imagine).  This was fierce music and must have been difficult to play.

The first half of the program opened with Helmut Lachenmann’s “Guero” (1969/1988) in which the pianist uses plastic credit cards along the surfaces of the keys themselves or of the tuning pegs.  (The original version was for fingernails.)  About the only notes with pitch are those from the resonance in the piano as the pedal is used.  She gave us a variety of sounds and of colors, making the work interesting.  The second half included one of Cage’s theatre works, “October 2, 2007 [Water Music]” (1952) and early Takemitsu, “Litany, in Memory of Michael Vyner” (1950, revised 1989) as respites for the fingers so exercised in the Messiaen and Xenakis works.

She gave the world premiere of a Piano Spheres commission, “Piano Sonata No. 1, ‘Arcata’ ” by Dante De Silva.  The three movements had strong rhythmic content (De Silva is a percussionist and guitarist as well as a pianist) and individual episodes of spark and color.  It was an enjoyable work by a composer making his first attempt at a major piano work.

Next Piano Spheres concert:  November 13 with Vicki Ray.