Contemporary Classical

Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

CageConcert: An Interview with Philip Thomas

Interview: Philip Thomas Launches Cageconcert

By Christian Carey

Pianist Philip Thomas is a prolific artist. A member of Apartment House, he recently participated in their recording of Ryoko Akama’s compositions for Another Timbre. Also on Another Timbre is Thomas’s gargantuan CD set of piano music by Morton Feldman, which includes several previously unreleased pieces.

Two of the pianist’s other recent projects focus on other members of the New York School. His deep dive into Cage’s Concert for Piano (again with Apartment House) has resulted in a book, recording, and an interactive online project, Cageconcert (cageconcert.org) that also includes apps to work with segments of the piece and make one’s own versions. He has also released a recording of Christian Wolff’s piano music. Finally, Thomas has recorded a CD of composer-pianist Chris Burn’s work, including transcriptions of improvisations by the late guitarist (and author of one of the key books on improvisation) Derek Bailey. As the interview below demonstrates, Thomas’s performance and recording schedule shows no signs of let-up. (Note: Philip and I talked before the pandemic, so some of his future projects are now TBA).

How did you and Martin Iddon come to collaborate on a book about Cage’s Concert for Piano (1957-’58)? Were the book and recording in process before the website and apps were conceived or was the idea of multiple presentations part of the initial concept?

This goes back a long way! I had it in my thoughts that, having performed the piece a number of times, with Apartment House but also with others, including the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for the dance ‘Antic Meet’, it was a far richer piece than had perhaps history had credited it. It’s such a well-known piece, not least from its visual appearance, and its historic performance value has influenced what we think of as a Cage-ian performance practice. Plus the premiere performance and recording is notorious from its depiction on the Twenty-Fifth Retrospective Concert album. But I felt strongly that there was much that is not more widely known when digging a little deeper, both about the way it can be performed, about the graphic notations of the ‘Solo for Piano’, and about the instrumental and conductor parts. And I was aware that performance as both historical and contemporary practice has a lot to say about the music, not least because of the unusually long time one has to spend with the piano part in order to arrive at something which is playable. So I set to thinking about this as a major research project and immediately thought of Martin as being an ideal collaborator, particularly due to his brilliant book about Cage and Tudor, as well as his Darmstadt book. So over lunch in London one day we dreamt up the project, which over the following year developed and formed to include the book, the website and apps, as well as the involvement of Apartment House. Then there was the inevitable long wait until we found out our grant application was successful. The grant was for a 3-year project but inevitably aspects of that spill over into the months since – and I’ve just now finished the index for the book! The apps grew from a simple idea that we thought might be nice to a far more complex concept than any of us could have imagined, forming a vital part of the project. The team expanded to include two research assistants, Emily Payne and Chris Melen – Chris being the developer of the Solo for Piano app – with additional help from others, including Stuart Mellor who designed the Concert Player app.

As a pianist who specializes in experimental music, Concert for Piano seems like a natural work to explore from multiple vantage points. When did you first become acquainted with the piece, and what does it mean to you as an interpreter?

I’ve mostly played it with Apartment House. I think possibly the earliest occasion was in 2008 when I organised a 50th anniversary concert of the 25-year retrospective concert. My experience then was as it continues to be, that this is an exceptionally rich and lively piece, full of surprises, and one which is a total joy to perform – each moment is alive and fresh, and my experience as a performer is of being part of music being made, rather than something which is ‘re-played’. We don’t rehearse, everyone works on their own materials, and then it’s put together, so for everyone playing the experience is as new as it is for the audience. This is true of many pieces by Cage of course, but this piece seems to heighten those senses and the material is so exaggerated in its range here – noises, pitches, highs and lows, louds and softs, etc.

The website and apps provided detailed and varied material from Concert. Will you share with us some of the features you consider to be highlights?

There’s so much there, a few of my favourite things include:

Interviews with Apartment House – I love to hear the musicians of Apartment House talk about what they do. These interviews are brimming with insight. I especially like the films which combine their different insights, such as the ‘Performing the Concert’ film and the last 10 minutes of the conductor film.

Watching the films of our performances of the ‘Concert’ and also Christian Wolff’s ‘Resistance’ is a particular thrill, because, as I suggested above, there’s so much unknown in the performance itself that it’s great to get a stronger sense of the kinds of things the other musicians are doing.

This one is not yet on the website but will be appearing very soon – I have made a studio recording of the complete ‘Solo for Piano’, which has never been done. It’s completely different from the version I play with Apartment House – for this I recorded each notation individually, according to a space time measurement of 3 minutes per page, and then Alex Bonney has mapped them together like a patchwork quilt, to get a complete 3 hours and 9 minutes performance of the Solo. You can hear it now actually on the Concert Player app as it’s this recording which we use for the app.

For the uninitiated person finding this on the web, what do you think they apps will demonstrate to them?

I hope firstly that it’ll just be a great entry into the music – that this is music people play and love to play, and is really great to play, instead of perhaps either that it is too ‘far-out’ or obfuscatory, or, the flip-side, that it is entirely open and ‘free’! For users trying out the Solo for Piano app, I hope it’ll both be a great way of playing with the notations and their conditions for performance, to see what might be possible and conversely what is not possible with each, and to play with the multiple possibilities the notation offers; and that it will also be an aid to performance. Of course each pianist will want to try it out in their own way, but at the least I hope that for some notations this will be a time-saver, offering possibilities to randomly generate multiple outcomes and to print them off in usable formats. An obvious criticism of the app is that it removes the fun of working these things out yourself – I think it manages to keep the fun of playing with each notation, whilst cutting down on the work needed to write these things out. And we’ve been careful to always show where and how we’ve made interpretative decision when others might make other choices, so it’s clear that this is both a facility AND an interpretation.

And then the Concert player app is simply a delight to hear – there are 16,383 possible instrumental combinations of this piece, and we have a handful of recordings available. Clearly, a recording of a work such as this can only hint at the slightest possibility of how this piece may sound. But the app allows users to randomly generate or select combinations, plus select pages, their durations, their sequence, and then hear how that might sound. We’ve taken great care to ensure the space-time properties of the music are upheld (measuring by the pixel!) and so really this is a pretty accurate – no matter how inappropriate that word is to this piece!! – realisation. I still listen to it regularly and am surprised all the time by the combinations. It’s a thrill, so I hope people will just dive in.

You have been performing Morton Feldman’s music for over a quarter century. Still, the recording you did for Another Timbre last year was a mammoth undertaking. How long did it take to record? How do you keep so much detailed, long repertoire, with irregular repetitions, in your brain and fingers? 

Somehow it didn’t feel like a mammoth task, more like a real pleasure to play these pieces again. Perhaps surprisingly, I didn’t feel any kind of pressure to give a ‘definitive’ statement on the music – my performances on disc just happen to be a representation of how I play this music today, after many years of thinking about and playing it. If I were to record it all again in 10 years it may be quite different, who knows? It was though a particular pleasure to discover a few pieces that I hadn’t played before, namely the unpublished works I explored at the Sacher Foundation in Basel, and the transcription I made of the Lipton film music.

I recorded the music over a period of about 2 years, in different sessions. It’s funny how the music at times just sticks in terms of fingering, rhythmic detail, whilst at other times what should be very familiar to me still seems strange. Certainly, whereas I thought this project might draw a line in the sand for me – no more Feldman! – I feel it’s done the opposite, opened up more possibilities, more ways of thinking about the music. In particular, Triadic Memories, which I’ve probably played more often than any other single piece of music, changed a great deal for me in preparation for the recording and what I thought I knew now feels more experimental, more curious, than ever. There’s a part of me that sometimes tries to avoid Feldman’s music – it’s almost too gorgeous at times, and I need to find something else, something of rougher hue, but those chords keep pulling me back! Thankfully, there’s so much more to the music than just beautiful sonorities, and in particular the music’s form and narrative feels to me to be so strikingly original.

Are there surprises among the previously unrecorded pieces?

Certainly, the addition of struck drum and glass to the Feldman sound is pretty surprising, bringing to mind much more the 1940s music by Cage, and here included as part of a set of three pieces composed for the dance. In fact there’s a surprising number of pieces composed for dance collaborations, not just for Cunningham, but also for Merle Mersicano, as Ryan Dohoney has written about in considerable detail recently. One of these is Figure of Memory which sounds nothing like Feldman and more like some kind of sketch of a Satie piece, consisting simply of repetitions of three short phrases.

Another recent release is of music by Chris Burn, including a transcription of an improvisation by Derek Bailey. How does that translate to the piano?

Well Chris is a wonderful wonderful composer, and a brilliant pianist and improviser. And so he is fully aware of the slightly perverse nature of what he was doing in writing these pieces, not least as someone who used to play with Bailey. But these pieces are not just really lovely pieces of music, but they also reveal something about Chris and how he hears and thinks of music, as well as being revealing of Bailey’s own work, and in particular of his love of Webern and his close attention to pitch. So when the guitar-ness of the pieces is removed a different side to Bailey’s music is revealed which is simply different but to my ears no less remarkable.

As if 2019 weren’t busy enough for you, a compendium of Christian Wolff’s piano music was released on Sub Rosa. In the notes you say that “In all my performances of Wolff’s music, I aim for interpretations that both interest and surprise me, allowing the notations to lead me to new ways of playing and thinking about music, whilst at

the same time trying to lead the notations toward the unexpected.” When discussing the piano music with Wolff, what were some insights he offered? What piece will most likely surprise listeners? 

The recent double disc follows on from an earlier three-disc set, and hopefully precedes another three-disc set to follow. Christian’s music is, when it comes down to it, the music I feel closest to. I love the potential for change, for surprise, for play. On the whole I tend not to ‘collaborate’ with composers (I trust them to do what they do well and then it’s over to me) and so I love the moment when I begin a new piece, I put it up on the piano and I start to think ‘ok so what am I going to do with this’. This is where I am at my most creative, and Christian’s music works especially well to that effect. I’ve never asked him for his approval of what I do and most often he doesn’t hear my interpretations until after I’ve performed or recorded it. Though the very first time we met, in 2002, I played ‘Bread and Roses’ to him, waited for his response, and learnt fairly quickly that his typical response was ‘Sure!’. He tends not to validate not to denigrate peoples’ performances of his music and I appreciate that. He doesn’t want to say ‘yes, this is how it should be played’ preferring instead for the individuality of the player to find new solutions, new ways of playing. And so I do hope with each performance I give of his music that I might offer something that would surprise him, that might suggest possibilities in his music which he’d not considered.

In this recent set I’ve included a few pieces which are not published, so that surprised him too! So three variations on Satie, pieces he composed for John Tilbury, which he never quite convinced himself as worth publishing but hopefully he’s convinced now they’re out on disc – they’re wonderfully eccentric pieces. Also his Incidental Music, which he has played and recorded (wonderfully, on Mode) but which he’d not heard anyone else perform. He was delighted, so that’s great. And for anyone familiar with Wolff’s music I hope that my playing brings both recognition and surprise too.

What will be your next recording/recital? What will Apartment House be up to in 2020?

Next concert, in Cambridge in April, features a brand-new piece that Toronto-based composer Allison Cameron is writing for me, which I’m delighted about. And Simon Reynell’s always dreaming up new ideas and introducing me to younger composers and I’m always happy to play a small part in that project. And as a result of the Feldman release we’ve been able to commission one of my very favourite composers, Martin Arnold, to write a large-scale new piece for me. But that won’t be for a while. Lots of ideas, lots of pieces I want to play, but actually I’m hoping for a bit of a quieter year this year!

(For more, consult Philip Thomas’s website.)

Christian Carey is a composer, performer, musicologist, and writer. His work has been published in Perspectives of New Music, Intégral, Open Space, Tempo, Musical America, Time Out New York, Signal to Noise, Early Music America, Sequenza 21, Pop Matters, All About Jazz, and NewMusicBox. Carey’s research on narrativity in late music by Elliott Carter, presented at IRCAM in Paris on the composer’s 100th birthday, appears in Hommage à Elliott Carter (Editions Delatour). He is Associate Professor of Composition, History, and Theory at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey.

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

RIP Charles Wuorinen (1938-2020)

American composer, conductor, and pianist Charles Wuorinen has passed away. Wuorinen was the first person to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for an electronic music work, Time’s Encomium. He was also a MacArthur Fellow and received numerous other commissions and awards. His book, Simple Composition, is one of the clearest explications of composing using 12-tone techniques.

He was my teacher at Rutgers University for four years, where I was studying for the Ph.D. in Music. One of the best sight-readers I have met, his musicianship was impeccable and intellect formidable.

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Jonathan Powell plays Sorabji (CD review)

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji

Sequentia Cyclica – Super Dies Irae ex Missa Pro Defunctis

Jonathan Powell, piano

Piano Classics PCL10206 (7 CD boxed set; digital)

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988) was the composer of some of Western classical music’s most intricate, extended, and ambitiously virtuosic works to date. His output encompassed seven decades, from 1914-1984. The serial composer Milton Babbitt, often himself described as the creator of tremendously difficult pieces, ranked Sorabji, alongside Brian Ferneyhough, as the most complex composers of the Twentieth century (Talking Music, William Duckworth). This is not just due to the massive scope of the pieces – several last a number of hours in duration – nor to their formidable technical demands, although both of these aspects of Sorabji’s music are ubiquitous. The notation of the music poses challenges as well. It is a welter of corruscating counterpoint and its rhythmic shapes are seldom delineated with bar-lines; nor do their gestures readily suggest metricity. Dynamics and tempo indications are infrequent and the music is often laid out on several staves. Thus, a lot is left open to interpretation.

Despite these challenges, Sorabji’s music is being documented by stalwart performers. Happily, a performance practice for the music is taking root that is helping to clarify some of the aforementioned difficulties. Noteworthy among these interpreters is the English pianist Jonathan Powell, who has championed the composer for over two decades. He has taken a number of Sorabji’s works in manuscript and transcribed them into performing editions, toured them widely, and begun the challenging task of creating recorded documentation of the piano oeuvre. His most recent project has been Sequentia Cyclica, a piece lasting nearly eight hours that he has presented in marathon single-day concerts in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. Piano Classics has released a seven-CD boxed set of Powell’s rendition of the piece. It is an extraordinary recording of a totemic work. 

Sequentia Cyclica (subtitled Super Dies Irae ex Missa Pro Defunctis) is a set of twenty-seven variations on the Dies Irae sequence from the Catholic liturgy of the Mass for the Dead. Composed sometime in the thirteenth century, the Dies Irae has taken on extra-liturgical significance through its use in a number of concert works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most famously in  the Symphony Fantastique by Hector Berlioz, but also in a plethora of other piece including ones by Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saens, and Dallapiccola. Sorabji’s employment of the theme serves multiple ends. It gives a nod to its presence in works by predecessors, particularly in Rachmaninoff’s piano music, it serves as a contrapuntal motive that is treated with a near-encyclopedic array of variants, and, judged by the voluble praise-filled postscript appended to the work, as an object of Christian devotion. Sorabji made an initial (201-page long!) pass at a set of Dies Irae variations in the 1920s. They were to be dedicated to the recently departed composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni, but the piece was withdrawn in favor of the 1949 version recorded here, dedicated to Busoni’s pupil the pianist Egon Petri (1881-1962). 

True, eight hours is a long time to fill with a very familiar melody, but Sorabji creates a startling array of presentations, sometimes only employing the head motive and at other times the entire sequence. Elsewhere, it is submerged in other material, only to triumphantly rise up when called to the surface. Character pieces such as Hispanica, Marcia Funebre, and Quasi Debussy demonstrate imaginative deployments of the sequence in myriad styles. Trying to play “spot the influences” will provide the listener with glimpses at a panoply of creators, including Busoni, Liszt, Alkan, Debussy, Beethoven, Bach, Messiaen, and Rachmaninoff, to supply just a partial listing. None of these reference points is overarching; it is remarkable how adroitly Sorabji distills their essence into his own distinctive language. An enormous passacaglia with 100 variations takes up a disc-and-a-half worth of the recording and the piece concludes with an eighty-minute long fugue that successively builds from two-voice counterpoint to six, followed by a stretto on steroids that rousingly concludes this magnum opus. 

Jonathan Powell’s traversal of Sequentia Cyclica is authoritative. The program notes are some of the finest I have read in a long while. His performance is deftly nuanced, technically assured, and powerfully rendered. It is a benchmark that will provide a tough act for future interpreters to follow, but hopefully his performance editions will encourage them to do so regardless. Powell’s dedicated work on behalf of Sorabji makes the composer’s legacy seem assured. 

(Those looking for a more theoretical explication of Sequentia Cyclica are directed to Andrew Mead’s excellent article Gradus ad Sorabji in the Winter 2016 issue of Perspectives of New Music).

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?

Two Recordings by David Felder (CD Review)

David Felder

Jeu de Tarot

Irvine Arditti, violin; Ensemble Signal, Brad Lubman, conductor; Arditti Quartet

Coviello CD COV91913

David Felder

Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux

Laura Aikin, soprano; Ethan Hesrchenfeld, bass;

Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, conductor

BMOPsound CD 1069

David Felder has taught for a number of years at SUNY Buffalo, running the June in Buffalo Festival and mentoring countless contemporary composers in the school’s illustrious graduate program. His own works are multi-faceted, incorporating muscular gestures, modernist harmonies, innovative timbres, and, oftentimes, electronics. Felder’s recent music is given sterling performances on two CDs, one of his chamber music on Coviello and another of his orchestra piece Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux on BMOPsound.

The Coviello disc consists of three works that feature violinist Irvine Arditti. Its centerpiece, Jeu de Tarot, a chamber violin concerto based on seven of the twenty-two main tarot cards, reveals a mystical side to Felder’s music. Each movement is an interpretation of the character on its card – The Juggler, the Fool, the High Priestess, et cetera. Thus, the musical surface is multifaceted, unspooling a variety of characteristic textures. Arditti performs the solo part with laser beam incisiveness and Signal supplies comparable clarity, performing the piece’s interlocking rhythms with impressive coordination. Some sections of the piece, such as its finale “Moonlight,” explore a mysterious ambiance akin to Expressionism. Here, Arditti’s tone takes on a supple quality. He dovetails with the winds to provide intricate counterpoint.

The Arditti Quartet contributes Netivot, a work for strings and electronics, to the disc. On Felder’s website, you can see the optional video component, which adds another layer to the piece. By itself in two channels, there is considerable antiphony and with this setting one can only imagine how immersive the piece must be live. The recording also has an SACD layer which allows for surround listening, an engaging adventure that gets the listener closer to being there.

At times, string harmonics and pizzicatos meld with synthesized parts. Elsewhere, the strings and electronics trade registers. The overall effect is one of extensive integration of the elements into a “super-instrument” that swirls colorfully. Irvine Arditti concludes the disc with a solo piece, Another Face. Motoric ostinatos, mercurial leaps, and microtonal inflections contribute to an overarchingly variegated impression. Arditti plays with virtuoso technique and a questing manner.   

Joined by soprano Laura Aiken and bass Ethan Herschenfeld, Boston Modern Orchestra Project performs one of Felder’s most prominent pieces, Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux. This is the second recording of the piece; the other is by Ensemble Signal with members of SUNY Buffalo’s Slee Sinfonietta. Each is an assured rendition, with BMOP stressing the dramatic sweep of the piece while Signal focuses with granularity of detail. The texts Felder employs in Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux are by Réne Daumal, Robert Creely, Pablo Neruda, and Dana Gioia. Most are Daumal’s, whose work Felder discovered via Buffalo-based writer Kathleen Frederick Rosenblatt’s biography of the polymath author. Felder does interesting things to treat the texts. He intermingles electronics with the vowels of the Daumal to create an ethereal quality. One of the two movements featuring Creeley’s poems emphasizes its sibilants, the other maps the consonant attacks onto the percussion, creating an intriguing sound world. Gioia’s poem is treated to the piece’s most stentorian and angular writing, clearly distinguishing it from the other texts.

Felder was a chorister with the Cleveland Orchestra in his teens but has only recently begun to set text. His vocal writing is ambitious, operatic in scope and compass. The piece opens with a series of spectral chords, over which Aiken’s voice soars, effortlessly managing pianissimo dynamics and altissimo high notes. She is worthily matched by Herschenfeld’s resonant low notes and seamless legato phrasing. The first section culminates in a rapturous duet in which the vocalists both navigate their upper registers fluently. In the section “Fragments (from Neruda),” an impressively thunderous tutti orchestral passage is matched by clarion singing from Aiken. A rousing duet rendition of Daumal’s “Stanza 3b” matches the Neruda’s intensity, and “Stanza 4a” is treated to a sepulchral solo by Herschenfeld in which he is accompanied by intertwining brass. He goes still lower on “Stanza 4b,” shadowed by sustained chords that move from strings to brass. Then, the vocal line is mimicked in counterpoint by the lower brass. Timpani thrumming is juxtaposed against choral-like passages as the piece moves into an instrumental postlude in which a clamorous buildup of drums heralds the final entrance of Aiken, her arcing solo haloed by trumpet glissandos, ascending to her top register and then plummeting down to conclude the piece.

Throughout, BMOP plays impressively. Rose shapes the piece beautifully and provides a detailed account of its myriad details. Hopefully, Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux will be followed by more vocal music from Felder. It is a formidable entry into his catalogue of works. Recommended.  

Christian Carey is editor at Sequenza 21 and an Associate Professor of Music Composition, History, and Theory at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey (www.christianbcarey.com).

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Barbara Hannigan “La Passione” (CD Review)

La Passione

La Passione

Barbara Hannigan, soprano and conductor; Ludwig Orchestra

Alpha Classics

La Passione is soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan’s second CD with Ludwig Orchestra. Their first collaboration, Girl Crazy, won a 2018 Grammy Award. Like Girl Crazy, the selections on La Passione are disparate, but they cohere into a convincing program. Whether she is performing a solo vocal piece by Luigi Nono, conducting a Haydn symphony, or conducting and singing a spectral work by Grisey, Hannigan is a compelling performer. This is also true of Ludwig Orchestra, who thrive in this setting. 

Luigi Nono’s solo vocal work Cjamila Boupacha eulogizes a dissident who, during the lead up to the French-Algerian war, was raped and murdered. Her story galvanized anti-colonial resistance in the country. The piece is a vocalize that often accesses the extreme upper register of the soprano’s range. Hannigan navigates its wide range and visceral expressive qualities with eloquence and impeccable technique.

It might seem strange to pair a Haydn symphony with a Nono piece, but Symphony No. 49, “La Passione,” explores grief with depth of feeling and dramatic flair. Composed in 1768, it is one of Haydn’s “Sturm und Drang” pieces. Its formal design is that of a church sonata, with an extensive slow movement preceding the sonata allegro second movement. In terms of both form and demeanor, it may have been played at Esterhazy during Holy Week. The first movement extends a mournful demeanor over a quarter-hour, and it is followed by a combative allegro. Hannigan provides a supple reading of the minuet and trio, with the latter finally allowing the listener let-up from f-minor’s pathos, which has thus far dominated the proceedings, with a glimpse, albeit brief, of F-major. The emotional finale truly embodies the “Sturm und Drang” aesthetic, ending the piece in powerful, albeit tragic, fashion.

French composer Gérard Grisey passed away in 1998 at age 52 from an aneurysm, leaving behind a compact but compelling body of work that helped to define the spectral approach to composition. His last completed piece was Quatre Chants pour Franchir les Soueil (“Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold”), premiered posthumously in 1999. In recent years Hannigan has championed Quatre Chants, notably performing it with Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Susanna Mälkki and Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. On La Passione, she undertakes the daunting task of both singing and conducting the piece. Of the recorded performance with Ludwig Orchestra, Hannigan has remarked, “It took us to our limits.”

A variety of texts are used: Guez-Ricord’s The Hours of Night, Egyptian Sarcophagi of the Middle Empire, a fragment from sixth century Greek poetess Erinna, and an extract from the Babyloninan Epic of Gilgamesh (courtesy Tim Rutherford-Johnson).  Overtone chords and micro-tunings abound. The instrumentation is distinctive, particularly the percussion cohort that includes fifteen tuned gongs that are played in quick arpeggiations at a low dynamic level, an impressive feat and singular sound. The bass drum has an evocative role as well, serving to toll a memento mori that divides the piece’s several sections. In the first song, “Death of the Angel”, is one of the piece’s signatures, bracing unison lines between soprano and trumpet that shatter an otherwise merely ominous atmosphere. A variety of wind instruments are employed throughout, including saxophones. Hannigan’s singing seamlessly intermingles with the various instruments, moving from sinuous angular lines to altissimo shrieks with myriad gestures in between. After the four songs is a postlude, “Berceuse,” haunting in its comparative reserve with a number of duets between Hannigan and various instruments in floating vocal lines.

An ambitious program with a “can’t miss” piece (the Grisey) and all of it exquisitely executed: recommended.

-Composer Christian Carey is Associate Professor at Westminster Choir College, Editor at Sequenza 21, and regularly contributes to Tempo, Musical America, and other publications. He has created eighty some compositions for orchestra, choir, solo voices, and chamber musicians. His electronic score for Gilgamesh Variations was produced at Bushwick Starr Theatre in Brooklyn, NY.

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Adés Conducts Adés (CD Review)

Adés Conducts Adés

Kirill Gerstein, piano; Christianne Stotijn, mezzo-soprano; Mark Stone, baritone; 

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Thomas Adés, conductor

Deutsche Grammophon CD/DL 4837998

Thomas Adés is in his third year as Artistic Partner of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It has been an extraordinarily fruitful pairing. Adés has performed with the ensemble as a conductor and pianist, contributed new pieces to its repertory, and curated events such as the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood. In the midst of this plethora of activities, the March 2019 premiere of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was a highlight. Both the performance of the BSO under Adés’s direction and the brilliant playing of the work’s soloist, Kirill Gerstein, were widely acclaimed. The DG recording of its premiere confirms the buzz — the concerto is indeed a formidable work and the performance is radiant.

Cast in the traditional three movement structure (fast-slow-fast), the concerto demonstrates Adés’s encyclopedic familiarity with composers of the past, including hat-tips to Prokofiev, Ravel, Liszt, and Stravinsky. Despite revelling in touchstones of eras past, Adés ultimately distills them into a glinting, sharply contoured language with a distinctive character all its own. The first movement contrasts extensive glissandos with clock-like ostinatos. Sustained chorales create an aura of poignancy in the middle movement. The finale juxtaposes upward and downward scalar passages that provide a tilt-a-whirl of intensifying momentum that ends the piece aloft – and on a brilliantly orchestrated major triad to boot. 

In these times of pandemic and social distancing, Adés Totentanz (2013) is a particularly sobering piece. It is based upon the text of a fifteenth century frieze, which depicts all walks of life, from the Pope to an infant, being invited to dance with the Grim Reaper. Baritone Mark Stone embodies Death with a muscular and menacing delivery. Mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn sings the parts of the various people attempting to elude his grasp as heartfelt laments. Adés creates a searing score that allows space for declamation while interpolating ominous interludes, often supplying aggressively syncopated ostinatos that suggest the inexorable dance. Bracing listening, but engaging throughout. Recommended.

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Live concert resources for a music-thirsty world

Image courtesy of Carnegie Hall

It’s a brave new world. Large gatherings are prohibited in many cities to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, and so nearly all concerts have been postponed or cancelled. Still, performers and presenters prevail, providing live-streamed concerts, even without a physical audience in attendance.

Several resources have popped up to help music-starved ears find concerts online. Here is a list of classical concerts offered live on the internet, worldwide. The list is updated regularly. Performers, presenters and others may submit events via a Google form. (Full disclosure: I created this database).

Live Music Project, a concert resource based in Seattle is also gathering information on digital streams. And radio host and producer Jamie Paisley at WKAR in East Lansing, MI is overseeing a list as well.

Simon Rattle

Digital Concert Hall is offering free access to their site, which contains a large number of performances by top-name artists. Yesterday, I sampled an archived Berlin Philharmonic concert, and I was astonished at the technical quality of the production. Crystal clear close-ups, smooth video transitions and superb performance quality knocked me out as Paavo Jarvi conducted a new concerto for horn by Hans Abrahamsen and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. I had a similar experience today, watching the live performance of Berlin Philharmonic led by Simon Rattle. The program was enticing – Berio’s Sinfonia and Bartok Concerto for Orchestra – and the musicians delivered an excellent performance. Rattle spoke about each work beforehand, and his live program notes were compelling. One astonishing tidbit that Rattle shared: the ailing Bartok was the first civilian in the US to get the then-brand-new medicine, penicillin. That saved his life, making it possible for him to complete the concerto.

So, while we may be deprived of physical contact with other concert-goers, we’ve got these streams to tide us over. One thing’s for sure: I’ll need to upgrade my computer’s speakers.

by Gail Wein
Chamber Music, Concert review, Contemporary Classical

Kopatchinskaya and Hong perform Kurtág in Seattle

Few composers have embraced the Webernian aesthetic of brevity more closely than the Hungarian György Kurtág (b.1926). Starting with his earliest canonical work, the Op. 1 String Quartet (1959), he steadily built an international career entirely from bagatelles, usually written for small ensembles and gathered into collections linked by instrumentation and concept, and always unsurpassed in concentrated intensity. Kurtág’s commitment to epigrammatic potency reached an apogee with Kafka Fragments (1985–87), 40 brief German texts from the novelist’s diaries and posthumous writings adapted into an hour of music of such resolute focus that the composer limited its instrumentation to one soprano and one violinist.

Despite the challenges that it poses in sustaining such constricted severity—not to mention the demands it places on the musicians’ technique and stamina—Kafka Fragments is among Kurtág’s most frequently recorded compositions. So it was of great interest when, in the midst of a US tour that brought her to the Pacific Northwest to play Shostakovich with the Seattle Symphony, the acclaimed and iconoclastic Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaya (PatKop as she is known among associates) devoted the evening of January 29, 2020 to this one composition, presented in the Symphony’s recently inaugurated and pocket-sized Octave 9 space with Ah Young Hong, a soprano currently based at the Peabody Institute whose advocacy of new music is closely associated with composer Michael Hersch. Not surprisingly, the duo delivered a novel and thought-provoking take on the piece, fulfilling the wish expressed in Kopatchinskaya’s pre-performance remarks of “an enriching and uncomfortable evening”—one whose resonances turned out to be unexpectedly timely.

The interpretive affinity between the two women was evident from the get-go. Like many soloists of her generation, Kopatchinskaya eschews the habitual wide vibrato of the Kreisler/Heifetz school in favor of a more nuanced approach. Hong too is capable of deploying a “cooler” technique, allowing for the gradations needed to convey the mood swings in a song like Einmal brach ich mir das Bein (Once I broke my leg) or for backgrounding the voice in a song like Der wahre Weg (The True Path) where the violin is usually in the lead.

Particularly impressive were the vocal leaps in Wiederum, wiederum (Again, Again) that accompany the line “mountains, desert, wide country to wander through”. Most sopranos try to smooth over these jumps, but Hong attacked them in a dazzling fashion, reminiscent of the wordless exhortation that begins ¿De dónde vienes, amor, mi niño? from Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children (1970) one of the Fragments’ more palpable stylistic precedents.

Together, the performers delivered sufficient volume to overpower the persistent white noise emitted by the LED cooling fans in Octave 9’s low ceilings, the space’s most distracting acoustic issue. In this regard they were aided by its vaunted Constellation sound projection system, whose computer-backed array of ceiling microphones and loudspeakers is capable of simulating a variety of acoustic environments while accommodating ambulatory musicians (this being essential for a work like the Fragments, where the performer’s stage positions are often specified).

Commenting on the choice of presets, Kopatchinskaya said “I thought about the sound of the burning Notre Dame cathedral (it seems it is not yet programmed in the system), but we now have perhaps something similar to a synagogue in Prague from the last century, at least in our imagination”.

The most striking aspect of the evening’s performance, though, was its emphasis on contrast. With the Fragments’ instrumentation confined to a pair of treble instruments whose range and expressive characteristics largely overlap, the resulting sound world can easily seem unrooted. Accordingly, most of the work’s interpreters have sought to achieve maximum unity of timbre, rhythm and articulation. But the Hong/PatKop traversal frequently exploited differences between the two parts, as evinced in the very first song, Die Guten gehn im glichen Schritt (The good march in the same step), where on the word gleichen (same) the voice begins to straggle behind the violin’s steady pace:

score excerpt

Singers usually take this passage in strict tempo, producing exact syncopation at the divergence. But Hong allowed herself the slightest hint of rubato, suggesting a more neurotic relationship with Kopatchinskaya’s indifferente beat.

And though it was not explicitly coordinated, the musicians’ costuming likewise presented a thematic contrast. Hong wore a long, black, V-neck dress with a long-sleeved black coat and a long silvery necklace that emphasized the resulting oval framing. Combined with her expressive face and “Bohemian” hair, the visage suggested a voice emanating from darkness, in touch with invisible forces but not in particular control of them. At times, the prophesizing of Shakespearean witches came to mind. At others, as during the reprise of Verstecke (Hiding-Places) when Hong clutched her cheeks in a pantomime yell, it was the anxiety of Munch’s Scream that seemed to be channeled.

At this latter juncture, Kopatchinskaya crept behind Hong while playing sul ponticello tremolos like a buzzing mosquito. Her role, suggested by her trademark suit resembling an undersized tuxedo with tails and shoulder cutouts, was more akin to a tramp. A hatless and shoeless Chaplin (for PatKop always plays barefoot) who carries a violin bow instead of a cane. Perhaps a bit of a stretch, but for this American observer at least, even Kopatchinskaya’s expressions and occasional one-footed gestures of musical energy conjured up something of Chaplin’s mischievous physiognomy and comic kicks. Heightened by dim, magenta-hued “darkroom” lighting, with translations projected behind the performers, the presentation affirmed Kopatchinskaya’s vision of the Fragments as “full of musical literary moments that you could ponder for the rest of your life”.

Ah Young HongThe Kafka Fragments were an inflection point in Kurtág’s career, wherein the potentialities of chamber bagatelles and their sequencing into longer and longer assembled forms, are stretched to the verge of collapse. Kurtág’s organization of the 40 songs into four parts, divisions that the performers marked by sitting silently for a minute of rest, helps to mitigate two issues that have always bedeviled the song cycle form: the constant starts and stops, and the challenge of consuming a lengthy totality made up of numerous short units that don’t naturally combine into intermediate structures. One can still sense the composer’s struggle with the oppositional demands of brevity and heft though, and soon after completing the Fragments Kurtág finally began to write longer continuous pieces, often greatly expanding his ensembles in the process. The Double Concerto (1989–90) and the orchestral Stele (1993–94) were among the first manifestations of the newer, more “monumental” Kurtág which has perhaps reached its consummation with his aptly-titled full-length opera Fin de Partie (2018), after Beckett’s Endgame.

In a way it’s fitting that a transitional piece like Kafka Fragments would come to Octave 9 now, amplified by what’s arguably the biggest star power yet to appear at that venue. Fashioned from a generic storefront space at the corner of Seattle Symphony’s Benaroya Hall complex, its uses are divided between educational/community outreach events and contemporary music recitals featuring the Symphony’s musicians and guest artists. One of its goals has been to foster new works “without the risk of presenting them in front of 2500 people” (as Ludovic Morlot put it to me shortly before his departure as Music Director). Today, though, one year after its March 2019 unveiling, a mass exodus of executive-level talent from the Symphony has left Octave 9 shorn of all four of its principal architects: CEO Simon Woods, two key VPs (Elena Dubinets and Laura Reynolds, whose replacements have not yet arrived) and Morlot himself. Like Kurtág at the time of his Fragments, Octave 9 appears to be facing a crossroads.

Despite hosting a succession of noteworthy events, including a remarkable inaugural 24-hour contemporary music marathon, the space has yet to make a noticeable impact on the chronic fragmentation of Seattle’s new music community, whose denizens seem to be deterred by its ticket prices and downtown location (those that I saw in attendance at the PatKop/Hong event were mostly Symphony personnel). Instead the clientele for the venue’s new music events comes mainly from Symphony patrons, many of them downtown-dwelling professionals for whom the featured performers are celebrities. Speaking afterwards with some of these concertgoers, none of which had previously heard of Kurtág, I encountered several variations on “this music is a lot more interesting when you’re close to the musicians and can see their enthusiasm”, a sentiment that shows that the Octave 9 experiment is at least working for this cohort. Success at audience cultivation can portend broader successes down the road, and the potential on display at Octave 9 pleads for a replenished leadership team that will support it with the same vigor and creativity as its founding cadre.

Photos by James Holt/Seattle Symphony. Score excerpts via Stretta Music.

by Michael Schell
Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles

Separation Songs at Monk Space

On Tuesday, February 18, 2020, Brightwork newmusic presented the Los Angeles premiere of Separation Songs, by Matt Sargent.  A 70-minute work for two string quartets, Separation Songs comprised the entire program. The Eclipse Quartet was joined by the Aperture Duo, Grace Oh and Julie Jung to complete the eight-piece ensemble. Seating in the Monk Space venue was reconfigured to accommodate the larger musical forces and to take full advantage of the close acoustics. Everyone in the audience was within twenty feet of the players, allowing the listeners to be immersed in the warm sonority of the strings.

Separation Songs is fashioned from ten New England hymn tunes written by William Billings in the early 18th century. This is plain, yet stately, church music that carries comfort and warmth in every note. The original harmonies have been delicately processed and woven together to create a continuous flow.  Composer Matt Sargent writes “Throughout the piece, hymn tunes come and go, passing from one quartet to the other: As tunes reappear, they filter through a ‘separation process,’ whereby selected notes migrate from one quartet to the other. The process leaves breaks in the music that remain silent or are filled by stretching the durations of nearby notes, generating new rhythms and harmonies.”

The two quartets were arrayed as mirror images: the  cellos were in the center and the higher strings seated in a semicircle on either side. The brick walls surrounding the performance space brought out every timbral nuance. Separation Songs opened with one quartet playing a Billings hymn in full harmony. The second quartet picked up the tune while the first played long sustaining tones in support. As the piece proceeded, the hymn tunes and sustained notes were passed back and forth between the two quartets in a regular exchange. Nothing was rushed and only slight variations in dynamics, tempo or texture could be detected. Everything was carried forward in the kaleidoscopic unfolding of the harmonies so that a warm wash of sound enveloped the audience in a profound serenity. The playing was very expressive and care was taken by the musicians to coordinate the two quartets in a piece with few landmarks.

Separation Songs rolls along for 70 minutes with almost no change in its character, but the harmonic variations keep the listener continuously engaged. The sturdy hymn tunes bring a sense of strength and wistfulness to this music; a shorter version would make a perfect prelude at a memorial service. Separation Songs is a powerful re-imagining of the early American congregational hymn, and succeeds brilliantly in bringing a sharpened sense of the transcendental into the 21st century. As the last notes faded away, a full 15 seconds of respectful silence followed before the start of a roaring ovation from the audience.

Separations Songs is available on CD from Cold Blue Music.

The Eclipse Quartet is:
Sarah Thornblade, violin
Sara Parkins, violin
Alma Lisa Fernandez, viola
Maggie Parkins, cello

The Aperture Duo is:
Adrianne Pope, violin
Linnea Powell, viola

With:
Grace Oh, violin
Julie Jung, cello

The next Cold Blue Music presentation will be at the Soundwaves concert series at the Santa Monica Public Library on March 18, 2020, and will feature music from several new CD releases.

by Paul Muller
Contemporary Classical

Terry and Gyan Riley at The Shannon Center

On Saturday, February 1, 2020 the Shannon Center for the Performing Arts at Whittier College staged a concert titled Terry Riley with Gyan Riley – Live at 85. Featuring one of the founding fathers of classic minimalism – now in his 85th year – along with his talented son Gyan, this concert was a chance to catch up on the current output of the innovative composer of In C. The Shannon Center was the perfect venue for the two musicians who filled the stage with keyboards, synthesizers, guitars plus assorted amplifiers and speakers.

There was no printed concert order and the music simply began. What must have been several pieces were played sequentially, without a break. The opening phrases were a series of intriguing piano arpeggios thoughtfully played by the senior Riley, and the guitar soon entered underneath with a soft, relaxed feel. From this amiable beginning, the playing varied over a remarkably wide musical palate. There were suggestions of jazz, boogie and the blues along with splashes of the mystical, Asian and other exotic influences. A continuous stream of animated phrases kept things lively and engaging. This was all played from memory – or perhaps by improvisation – and the finesse of the elder Riley on the piano was extraordinary. Terry seemed to know exactly where he wanted to go and there were times when Gyan had to be on the alert to keep up. The interplay between the two was often intricate and complex, but always coherent and connected. A booming crescendo marked the end of this first section of the concert and this was received with a round of strong applause.

The second set was something completely different. Terry Riley switched from keyboard to an electronic synthesizer operated from an iPad. Gyan continued with guitar, but with a heavily processed sound. The beginning sounds were mysterious and liquid, consisting mostly of sustained tones. The synthesizer notes had a bell-like quality that evoked a feeling of calmness and serenity. The guitar produced notes with a gathering velocity until there was a distinctly frenetic feel to the texture. The synthesizer contributed a series of increasingly alien sounds that added to the frenzy. The elder Riley proved to be especially adept in generating the kinds of sounds he wanted from the iPad. Typically, the electronic sounds dominated while at other times strongly melodic passages were heard from the guitar. The general disarray of the sounds gained strength, concluding in a great crescendo complete with the realistic wail of a siren. This piece would have easily fit right in with any from the more experimental electronic groups here in town. Clearly the Rileys were not creating music for the past.

The third set of the concert had Terry Riley seated at a keyboard synthesizer with Gyan’s electric guitar, now producing a more conventional sound in the introductory riffs. Warm chords from the synthesizer entered and the result was a soothing contrast from the previous piece. Perhaps more remarkable was the voice of the elder Riley, credibly singing a slow ballad over the instruments. As the piece proceeded, there was a fine keyboard-guitar duo. Terry now switched back to the piano and more of a jazzy feel predominated along with a solid beat. A short vocal section completed this piece. The final piece on the program opened with a repeating cell in the piano and a solid groove developed as the guitar joined in. The echo of a vintage minimalism was unmistakable, and many in the audience could be seen bobbing their heads and tapping their feet to the beat. The texture turned more complex at the finish, but for those who attended the concert hoping to hear some classic minimalism, the Rileys obliged.

A long and loud round of applause brought the Rileys back on stage for an encore, and this featured some powerful chords from the synthesizer along with some nice counterpoint from the guitar. Once again a satisfying groove was heard, and the big sound filled the space at the finish. A standing ovation followed.

Terry Riley is one of the more influential composers of the mid twentieth century, but like any artist he has evolved over the last 55 or so years since In C. This concert provided something for everyone: a variety of accessible and wide-ranging music, something new and cutting edge, and a nod to his roots in classical minimalism. Watching the Rileys, you could sense that they very much enjoyed the opportunity to perform together. Terry Riley seemed to have a permanent smile on his face and was generous with his time for his fans in the lobby after the concert. Gyan was also very personable – despite having traveled all day across three time zones. And why not? Seeing father and son performing together made for an evening of great music, with Terry vital, creative and alive at 85.

by Paul Muller