Two quick notes:

First, the American Symphony Orchestra League is reporting that the full House Appropriations Committee has approved the major arts funding increases which the Interior Subcommittee had recommended on May 23rd.  InsideHigherEd.com confirms the story, saying that

“The House Appropriations Committee approved legislation Thursday that would increase spending on the National Endowment for the Humanities to $160 million in the 2008 fiscal year, up sharply from the $141.4 million that the agency is receiving this year. The bill, which finances the Interior Department and numerous other agencies such as non gamstop casinos, would also provide $160 million to the National Endowment for the Arts, which would represent a $35 million increase over its 2007 allocation.”

Next stop is the House Floor.  As I said before, there remain many opportunities for this funding proposal to die, but so far it remains unscathed.

Second, our friends Drew McManus of Adaptastration and Frank Oteri of NewMusicBox are going to be on Sound Check on WNYC this afternoon, discussing whether blogs can fill the void left by declining arts coverage in the mainstream media.  The show airs at 2 PM, and you can catch the web stream at wnyc.org if you’re outside of the New York region.  Sound Check also posts its episodes on the website within a few hours of the air time, so you can hear the rerun there.  You tell ’em, Drew and Frank!

The Sunday evening concert explored the range of voices of a piano with four works for piano and orchestra, almost four concertos.  Pierre-Laurent Aimard was pianist in three and merely a conductor in the fourth, Dialogues for Piano and Large Ensemble (2003) by Elliott Carter.  One result of the differences in attitude (or fashion?) regarding contemporary music between northeast and southwest is that we hear much less of Carter’s music than do you in the more variable climates, so that hearing the work seemed both old and new.  Tamara Stefanovich was given the chance to shine as soloist, and she did shine, at turns lyrical, provoking, forceful, quizzical as the kaleidescopic music flowed through her and her fingers into sound.  This was a delightful return from intermission.  Stefanovich has been impressive in this debut at Ojai, and she deserves some bookings at other venues.

The concert began with Aimard playing the Mozart 8th Concerto, conducting the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra from the keyboard.  Douglas Boyd then came on stage to conduct the Ligeti Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1986), and Aimard was brilliant.  I’ve spoken with many Ojai residents (who buy a majority of the tickets, after all), and the programming at the Ojai Festival is as adventurous as they get; for the rest of the year they won’t hear Ligeti (or Carter, for that matter).  Yet they come to these concerts with minds willing to listen.  The applause for the pianist and for the ensemble was deep and sincerely felt; even some near us who couldn’t quite decide whether or not they liked the work still could recognize that it was pretty impressive.  The concert ended in comfort for these uncertains, with Boyd conducting and Aimard playing the Ravel Concerto in G.  The slow middle movement seemed to be a lovely match for the Ojai ambience.

The Sunday morning concert was the “feel good” concert of this season, with the Nexus Percussion Ensemble giving us a world exposure.  Nexus captured us at the beginning with Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood (1973), and over two hours later we still wanted more after a medley for xylophone and marimbas of “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Bye Bye Blues”.  (Thank you, Bob Becker.)  Someone missed a good special-interest report by not covering the logistics problems associated with getting all of those Nexus instruments from point to point.  The three-dozen-or-so devices for bird calls would have been easy to pack, but all of those other instruments would be challenging.

This was a good series of concerts.  I wasn’t ready to leave.  Next year’s Ojai Festival will have David Robertson as music director and will feature a return of Dawn Upshaw.  Put June 5 – 8 on your calendars.  The next three months look pretty empty of contemporary music.  Why is it that groups and programmers think that summer is a time to stop new music?

An evening joining the dots between music genres and digital art forms, and exploring the worlds of electronic music, contemporary classical practice and interactive visual arts, all taking place on a Cold War air base – that’s Faster Than Sound at the Aldeburgh Festival. It took place on Saturday, see more pictures of the event here, and read the background story here.    

Last night’s concert introduced us to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Douglas Boyd.  The major work was Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, transcribed for a chamber orchestra by Schoenberg in 1921 for a chamber orchestra of 14, and completed by Rainer Riehn in 1983.  I didn’t like this.  At over an hour in length, it wasn’t a condensation.  “Listen to all of Mahler’s pretty melodies without all those messy instruments getting too emotional.”  (Yes, I recognize that Schoenberg’s motivation was to try to bring a contemporary work to a local audience, even if he had to strip things down to fit the resources available.  Something similar is given as a reason for condensing books.)  The singers were good, but I thought the piece made a marvelous case for our copyright laws.

The concert opened with “Chinese Opera” by Peter Eötvös, which is neither Chinese nor opera,  Instead it’s a strikingly colorful work for 26 instruments (mostly wind).  To me it’s a work about off-stage music, about how much drama and suspense and emotion and feeling can be created to support actions on stage.  You can hear clips of the work at Amazon.  Missing from these clips is the stereophonic space created.  Eötvös separated the pairs (or triplets) of instruments, placing them across the stage and gave them parts that were off-set in timing or that gave song-response lines so that we had a wall of sound before us.

Saturday afternoon’s concert was a triumph for Pierre-Laurent Aimard.  This was a program constructed by someone who had thought about music and the meanings and feelings behind the sounds.  The first half of the program took a series of works by widely different composers, and Aimard performed the pieces without pause, creating an arc of connections and feelings across generations and works that seem to have no connection.  Schumann: 5 Morning Songs (1853); Bach: 2 fugues from Art of the Fugue (1749); Carter:  Intermittances (2005) and Catenaires (2006); what linked these works?  Yet Aimard created a flow.

After intermission Aimard gave an astounding performance of the Charles Ives “Concord” Sonata (1909-1915).  A narrator was included (in addition to the viola and flute), reading appropriate sections from Ives’ Essays before a Sonata in which he described the subject of each movement and discussed his intent for the music he was creating.  Given that the Concord is such an episodic work, this use of narration wasn’t an interruption but an amplification.  Now for a lot of pianists this incorporation of the narration would be risky because the pianist would then have to pay attention to Ives’ words as well as to his written notes.  Aimard, however, seemed to welcome the challenge of fully realizing the intentions of the composer.  At the conclusion of the final, “Thoreau”, movement the pianist held his position, motionless.  A few seconds went by.  A minute.  More.  In the quiet you heard the birds in the trees, the occasional sounds from the playground in the park and the movements in the street.  (John Cage would have approved.)  Finally the spell ended and the applause began. 

Pierre-Laurent Aimard is music director for this year’s Ojai Music Festival, and his program for last night explored music in which the piano is used as a percussion instrument, while also continuing the use of multiple pianos begun last night.  With Saturday morning set for his solo program, his work yesterday evening was as a colleague.  The percussion group Nexus played in all three works of the program, as did his colleague Tamara Stefanovich on piano.  For the past several months Stefanovich has been Aimard’s fellow-player of choice, having filled in for another pianist who suffered what sounds like tendon problems and had to withdraw on short notice from a program with Aimard.  Once the partnership began, they obviously found that they could enjoy similar interpretations and motivations concerning important work.

The concert began with Bartok’s too-seldom-heard masterwork, Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), a work written at the height of his musical and physical strengths.  It’s a shame that without an orchestra or even a violin or two the work fits so poorly with most programming decisions.  There are some pretty good recordings of this work still in print, but last night seemed an exceptionally good performance.

After a rearrangement of the stage, Peter Eötvös then came on stage to conduct his new Sonata per Sei (2006) for two pianos, sampler (played by Helena Bugallo from Bugallo-Williams) and three percussionists.  In its first version the music was Concerto for Acoustic Piano, Keyboard and Orchestra, written for the 125th anniversary of Bartok’s birth.  This revision, giving its U.S. premiere, makes the homage to Bartok (and to Bartok’s sonata) even more obvious.  This is a chamber work that would probably benefit from a conductor, not merely to compensate for inadequate practice by the ensemble.  The piano parts seem extremely difficult, and the work is full of rhythmic interactions.  In fact it was fun to watch the faces of two of the percussionists who probably wouldn’t be good poker players: they beamed with pleasure at some of the piano and percussion riffs, even when they were just listening to the others in the group.  The music is full of instrumental color, and it is easy on the ears but much harder to understand on first listening.

After intermission the Los Angeles Master Chorale, four vocal soloists and an additional piano came on stage for the most vibrant performance of Stravinsky’s les Noces (1913-1923) I have heard.  Eötvös conducted, and the result emphasized the folksong origins of so much of the work.  Everyone around me seemed as swept away by this performance as I was.  It was one of those Ojai evenings in which everything seemed to click.  Can you get four better pianists for the Stravinsky?  Can another chorus to better than the Master Chorale?  Is there a better percussion group than Nexus for something like this?  And where did Tom Morris, the managing director of Ojai (formerely with Cleveland) find so appropriate soloists?

I should mention that it’s nice to find someone in an office job who still has some chops.  The performance of the Stravinsky needed one more percussionist, on cymbals.  Tom Morris made his Ojai debut as percussionist.  Of course, as his bio shows, he had kept his hand in all along.  It just shows that a Wharton MBA doesn’t overcome every other tendency.  Word around the Festival is that Morris is extending his contract with Ojai for at least four more seasons.  Based on how this festival is shaping up, that’s very good news for us.