In a Grove at Prototype Festival 2025 (credit Maria Baranova)
PROTOTYPE – OPERA | THEATRE | NOW defines itself as a “festival of visionary opera-theatre and music-theatre works”. Its presentation of In a Grove (January 16 – 19, 2025) was as close as Prototype comes to conventional opera in the context of eschewing tradition. It was also one of the most compelling productions I’ve seen in a long time. The intimate setting at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater augmented the visceral impact.
The story unfolded in four sections, each expressing a different character’s point of view of a murder in the woods. If that description sounds like the Kurosawa film Rashomon, it’s because that film was based on the same book: In a Grove, a century-old short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.
The four singers: John Brancy, Chuanyuan Liu, Paul Appleby, and Mikaela Bennett, all excellent vocalists and actors, played multiple roles. Surtitles were projected above the stage, but for the most part they were not necessary to decipher Stephanie Fleishman’s effective libretto.
Christopher Cerrone’s melodic material was memorable without being trite. As I left the theatre after the performance, the haunting lament of the last scene continued to ring in my ears. Director Mary Birnbaum’s concept was exceptionally powerful in its simplicity, with no props and no set, save for a large pane of glass that glided in to bisect the stage at certain points. The glass panel also served as a mirror in some scenes.
Cerrone’s vocal score was accompanied by ten instrumentalists of the Metropolis Ensemble, led by Luke Poeppel (standing in for music director Raquel Acevedo Klein on the day I attended). The orchestration included some appropriately eerie effects, such as drawing a violin bow across the edge of a xylophone.
I was very much captivated by this powerful drama and its excellent performance.
The Pakistani-American singer and composer Arooj Aftab’s performance couldn’t be classified as an opera at all, though one can think of her concept album Night Reigns as a dramatic song cycle in the guise of pop culture. She appeared with her band for a one-hour set at HERE’s Dorothy B. Williams Theatre January 15 – 17.
Aftab’s style bridges world music and jazz with an ethereal aesthetic. Her presentation was casual and unusual – she distributed shots of whiskey to the audience in mid-show. It was also transporting; an atmosphere and music that took me out of the real world, and her clear lilting voice had an emotional impact. Never mind that most of the words were in Urdu. The meaning came across easily.
In this intimate space, seeing Arooj and her band – harpist Maeve Gilchrist, bass player Zwelakhe-Duma Bell Le Pere and Engin Kaan Gunaydin on percussion – was a visceral, and, enhanced by whisps of smoke created by dry ice, often ethereal experience.
On Thursday evening in New York, Momenta Quartet’s October festival – now nine years running – closed with an assorted program, enthusiastically curated by violist/composer Stephanie Griffin. Griffin is the last founding member still actively performing with the group. Noting that this festival has ever featured the opportunity for each member to have curatorial carte blanche on one night only, Griffin nodded to the overall 2024 theme – Charles Ives at 150 – while admitting that “this is not a thematic program, but rather a joyous collection of pieces that I saw fit to celebrate the genius of Charles Ives and my own twenty years as the violist of Momenta.” As such, her own instalment was themed Momenta at 20. Griffin’s rather fine and comprehensive program notes are recommended ancillary reading, and can be found HERE.
The first musical offering was from Mexican composer Julián Carrillo: his String Quartet No. 3 “Dos Bosquejos.” Opening with muted strings and an effective microtonal chorale, this music veiled itself in mystery, dark and lush, a perfect selection with which to begin the evening. The piece continued to unfold like a set of exercises – or experiments – in string writing, with novel techniques (ca. 1927!) and textural effects. The first movement, “Meditación,” eventually burst a romantic vein, with solos and extended techniques eliciting vaguely integrated call-and-answers.
The second movement, “En Secreto,” felt eerily expressionist. (Griffin likens Carrillos’ music “to the work of surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte.”) While related in mood and material to the first, the “secrets” revealed in this second and final movement were whispered between instruments in a matter-of-fact, straightforward mode, a little too efficiently.
Momenta seemed to relish these coloristic experiments in extended space. Carrillo’s numerous homophonic passages prove especially demanding in their intonation and yet most octave unisons were handled judiciously by this group. Suddenly, just as this essaying music began to fatigue under its own weight, it was over: a mere eleven minutes in duration.
After this, Stephanie Griffin spoke to the audience about the quartet’s close relationship with the music of Carrillo. They “fell in love” with the string writing of this composer and have established an important connection with his unduly neglected catalogue. Griffin has proclaimed* the forthcoming recording of Carrillo’s complete string quartets on the Naxos label to be Momenta’s “most significant legacy.”
The remainder of the first half highlighted early music from Charles Ives. Brief and inconsequential, The Innate (1908) for string quintet and piano, is based on hymnal material. It stood out as a somewhat unquantifiable preamble to the composer’s early quartet – the Quartet No. 1 (1896-1902) – which has been a favorite of Momenta’s, as Griffin explained in her spoken introduction. It was a part of their first season in 2004-2005, twenty years ago.
This first quartet from the turn of the century is a high-energy, Ivesian romp in three movements, containing a great deal of musical irony: an irony sometimes missed by Momenta on Thursday night. Striking the right side of Ives’ mercurial nature can challenging, particularly in his earlier works. There exists a quirky dimensionality here, even in seemingly upfront and “folksy” material. During Thursday’s performance, a command of tempi and rhythm in the first movement could have been better established.
The rhetorical components of the first and second movements urge a singular vision of interpretation. This brave new music, (as it was in its own time), remains theatrical today. For Momenta, the blending and balance amongst the four instruments went astray at times, requiring more central grounding in the hopes of evoking a sense of play. Where was the element of surprise?
Conversely, the third movement read as well integrated and convincing. The individualistic approach from each player here yielded dynamic displays of line and texture. One was reminded of Dvorak’s string quartets: folk-inspired and generous. Through contrapuntal awareness and a dash of extra courage, Momenta brought the recital’s first half to a delightful close, gleeful and quicksilver; Ives himself, not to mention Dvorak, would have approved.
After an intermission during which the audience was advised to stay in their seats, this lengthy program continued with a world premiere by Stephanie Griffin, herself in the solo role. The Overgrown Cathedral (2019-24) for viola and lower string ensemble was inspired by a disused, ruined cathedral in Brazil, the Igreja do Senhor da Vera Cruz.
Griffin’s idiomatic writing for solo viola flattered the piece’s narrative musical structure. Her new work unfolded as a dirge-like processional, improvisatory in its droning, rolling lyricism and unusually self-contained. The pulse altered little throughout the single-movement and skillful writing for all players alike brought to mind successful spectralist composers as well as the more contemporary Scotsman (and friend to string players), James MacMillan.
Solos in other instruments – especially the cello – peppered Griffin’s soundscape. About midway through the proceedings, “mosquito” effects emerged antiphonally, forming an integral role in the narrative and echoed by accompanying violas. As the scoring was devoid of violins (!) this resulted in an attractive sonority. The constant lulling never ceased and, relievedly, never got in the way of prominent soloistic activity. Dipping in and out of familiar string effects like sul ponticello and glissandi, The OvergrownCathedral meandered its way to a final utterance, at the brink of being circuitous.
Photo credit: Nana Shi
As finale, and in diptych with Griffin’s Cathedral, Claude Vivier’s Zipangu was an impressive stroke. Interspersed between these two larger works for string orchestra was another short, innocuous piece from Charlies Ives: his Hymn of 1904. One craved more context for this curatorial placement, especially for its juxtaposition with Zipangu.
But Vivier’s vivid, brazen work for strings from 1980 remained an apt and powerful choice. Brimming with a depth of sound we had not yet heard on the program, Zipangu boasted its novel textures as a means of expression, easily engrossing even the most casual listener. Vivier himself claimed, “within the frame of a single melody I explore in this work different aspects of color. I tried to ‘blur’ my harmonic structure through different bowing techniques.”
Glimmers of microtonal Ligeti shone through the spectral haze of this work (*think* 2001: A Space Odyssey). After Griffin’s favoring of low registers, the arrival of Vivier’s upper strings scoring proved a dramatic and welcomed shift.
This branch of string writing is not always easy to interpret nor to refine, especially for a quasi pick-up orchestra. Nevertheless, the sheer impact and boldness of the material seemed to inspire the string players on Thursday, many of whom Griffin described as “Momenta alumni,” having played with the group over the past 20 years.
Photo credit: Nana Sh
For some time, conductor and artistic director, Sebastian Zubieta, had urged Momenta to program this music by Vivier. On Thursday night, it seemed to augment the quartet’s profile and manifest a compelling wrap-up to the 2024 Festival.
What’s more, the works of Claude Vivier are worthy of wider recognition, 41 years on from his death. Thanks to Momenta and their colleagues this relevant, near-cosmic, Canadian voice reached our sympathetic ears on Thursday night, straight on through the hurly-burly “blur” of a 21st century that Charles Ives would have almost certainly recognized.
Cellist Seth Parker Woods with New York Philharmonic, Thomas Wilkins conducting. Music by Nathalie Joachim on October 17, 2024 (credit: Chris Lee)
Black American composers dominated the programming at two of New York City’s major institutions last week — a 180° turn from the typical fare of Dead White Men at most orchestral concerts.
On Wednesday, October 16, Carnegie Hall presented Sphinx Virtuosi — the flagship ensemble of the Sphinx Organization, an organization whose mission it is to encourage careers of Black and Latino classical musicians and arts administrators. Thursday at Lincoln Center’s Geffen Hall was New York Philharmonic’s program “Exploring Afromodernism” — a program which was repeated on Friday. Both concerts featured outstanding and committed performances of mainly 21st century classical works.
Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie Hall on October 16, 2024 (credit Brian Hatton)
Sphinx Virtuosi is a conductorless chamber orchestra of 18 Black and Latino string players. It can be hard to pull off cohesive performances without a conductor, but it was immediately apparent that this ensemble was up to the task. The concert began with a reworking of Scott Joplin’s overture to his opera Treemonisha, arranged by Jannina Norpoth. The work infused classical gestures with blues, gospel and a bit of ragtime. The most effective and exciting selection was the world premiere of Double Down, Invention No. 1 for Two Violins by Curtis Stewart, performed by Njioma Chinyere Grievous and Tai Murray. It was a brilliant display of virtuosity from both violinists, playing off one another in a keen game of counterpoint which included a fiery display of fiddling as well as percussive foot-stomping. The audience roared its approval with a lengthy standing ovation. Stewart’s other work on the program was the New York premiere of Drill (co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Sphinx Virtuosi and New World Symphony). Percussionist Josh Jones, a member of the ensemble, was the soloist. It was a wild piece with frenetic drumming countered by subtle moments of gentle trills on wood blocks. All in all, it was a roiling cluster of excitement.
Music by Derrick Skye, Levi Taylor and the 19th century Venezuelan-American Teresa Careña, rounded out the brief program, which included a five-minute promotional film and comments by Sphinx Organization president Afa Dworkin.
The New York Philharmonic’s program was a wonderful display of a range of talents and generations conducted by Thomas Wilkins. It began with Carlos Simon’s Four Black American Dances, which impressed right away with the composer’s great orchestration. The rich first movement showcased the brilliant playing of every section of the Philharmonic, including a rollicking solo by concertmaster Sheryl Staples, who showed off her great artistry later in the work as well. After a somewhat schmaltzy second movement (“Waltz”) and predictably percussive third (“Tap!”), the final section (“Holy Dance”) began with a mystical aura which devolved into a loud and jaunty display.
The New York premiere of Nathalie Joachim’s concerto Had To Be, written for the cellist Seth Parker Woods began with an off-stage band replicating a New Orleans-style “second line.” After a smooth transition into a slow and lush passage by the orchestra on stage, the solo cellist had a lyrical soulful melody. The second movement, “Flare” launched with boisterous brass and percussion, which tended to drown out the strings. “With Grace,” the final movement, was beautifully emotional. Though the soloist wasn’t given an especially virtuosic part, Woods’ stage presence dominated throughout the work. Wilkins graceful conducting infused an appropriate amount of emotion into the performance.
David Baker’s Kosbro was intense from its very beginning, with driving rhythms, insistent timpani whacks, double-tongued brass and winds and angular melodies. Written in the 1970s, the work was an effective combination of jazz and classical styles.
William Grant Still’s gift for melody, harmony and orchestration made me wonder why this particular work – Symphony No. 4, Autochthonous, (the subtitle refers to indigenous people) isn’t programmed more often. Still’s superb orchestra writing balanced winds and strings in a dialogue which Wilkins navigated beautifully, each exchange infused with profound meaning.
Beyond the demographics of the composers, a similarity on both of these programs was that each of the works by the living composers was an olio of styles. In each case, the creators sought to include a variety of folk, pop, jazz and other cultural idioms in a single composition. It may be unfair to generalize, because the selections were undoubtedly programmatic decisions. I promise not to make a broad generalization until I hear more music from each of these composers, which I am eager to do.
With regard to the focus of these two concerts, I am going to say something very unpopular: Nobody is proclaiming that there aren’t enough White rappers or that Anglos aren’t well enough represented in, say, Latin jazz or conjunto music. And yet in recent years there has been great emphasis on striving for diversity in classical music. I’m not saying we shouldn’t work very hard to be inclusive of all Americans — or of all peoples in general for that matter — to be a part of this art form, this culture. I’m wondering aloud why it seems especially crucial in classical music.
Let’s discuss.
Be that as it may, the Sphinx Organization has been a leader in encouraging careers and celebrating people of color in classical music for over 25 years. They have done an admirable — nay amazing — job, welcoming hundreds of young musicians into the art form, creating role models for future generations, and creating an environment in which it is not only comfortable, but encouraging for young musicians to get involved and excel in the field.
Sequenza 21 readers know Carey very well through his insightful reviews of concerts and recordings in this publication. He is also a superb composer with a lengthy catalogue of varied works.
Christian B. Carey
Quintet 2 is scored for oboe, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, and Carey wrote it for the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, who commissioned it and premiered it in 2016. In his program note, Carey writes that much of his music – including this work – is based on the idea of labyrinthine structuring. “Quintet 2 deals with a spectrum of harmonic shadings, from triads to microtonal verticals with a great deal expressed in between. Likewise, the short melody at the beginning is offset by long passages of linear counterpoint. A number of rhythmic layers corruscate to create overlapping and frequently syncopated gestures.”
Also on the program, music by Augusta Read Thomas, Oliver Knusson, Jeremy Beck, Jonathan Newman and the world premiere of “I Like Chocolate Ice Cream” by David Macdonald (me too, says the writer).
Performers include: Calvin Wiersma and Conrad Harris, violins; Daniel Panner, viola; Chris Gross and Peter Seidenberg, cellos; Huan-Fong Chen, oboe; Benjamin Fingland, clarinet; Jonathan Faiman, piano; Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, mezzo-soprano
This year’s Long Play schedule is particularly dizzying. The annual festival presented by Bang on a Can in Brooklyn, now in its third year, seems to have crammed more events than ever into its three day festival, running May 3, 4 and 5. For instance, on Saturday, May 4 at 2 pm, you’ll have to choose between a new opera by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Alex Weiser with libretto by Ben Kaplan, called The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language (at American Opera Projects) AND Ensemble Klang imported from the Netherlands playing works by the Dutch composer Peter Adriaansz (who has set texts from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”) at BRIC Ballroom AND vocal sextet Ekmeles performing music by George Lewis, Hannah Kendall, and Georg Friedrich Haas (actually at 2:30, but I imagine you’d have to get to The Space at Irondale early for a seat). A choice as difficult as any I’ve had to make at Jazzfest in New Orleans (which incidently is also happening this weekend, albeit 1000+ miles from Brooklyn).
Fans of Balinese gamelan music are in luck. A rare confluence of events provides the opportunity to hear two different ensembles, both free, both in Brooklyn, on Saturday. At 3:30 at the BRIC Stoop, you can enjoy the Queens College Gamelan Yowana Sari, performing with the percussion ensemble Talujon, along with the composer / performer Dewa Ketut Alit. Alit has come halfway around the world from Indonesia to Brooklyn for the premiere of his new work commissioned by Long Play. And at 5 pm the ensemble Dharma Swara performs at the Brooklyn Museum. Note: The Dharma Swara performance is not part of Long Play – it is a Carnegie Hall Citywide presentation.
Once your head has gone to Indonesia, you may want to continue on an around-the-world trip at Long Play. On Sunday at 2 at the Bam Café, hear DoYeon Kim playing gayageum (a traditional Korean plucked zither with 12 strings) along with her quartet featuring some New York jazz and classical luminaries.
Stick around at Bam Café after Kim’s set for another musician with sounds of a far-flung continent: At 3 pm the master kora player Yacouba Sissoko from Mali is joined by percussionist Moussa Diabaté. Diabaté is an internationally acclaimed dancer, choreographer, drummer and balafon player and together the two bring the sounds and culture of West Africa to us.
Come to think of it, when was the last time you heard music by Philip Glass played on accordion? Might as well settle in at Bam Café for the 4 pm show on Sunday, then, to hear a rare performance of the Polish virtuoso Iwo Jedynecki. Jedynecki has created some inventive arrangements of Glass’ piano etudes for button accordion.
The pinnacle of Long Play comes Sunday evening at 8 at the BAM Opera House, when the Bang on a Can All-Stars along with a bunch of special guests perform a seminal work by Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians.
On Saturday at 8 PM, Kafka-Fragmente by György Kurtág will be performed at Tenri Cultural Institute (43A West 13th Street,New York NY), by soprano Susan Narucki and violinist Curtis Macomber (tickets). Earlier this week, they performed it at another venue also abundantly supportive of contemporary classical music, Buffalo University.
Kafka-Fragmente is based on aphoristic texts by Franz Kafka from his diaries and correspondence. As is his practice, Kurtág brought the composition together gradually, collecting fragments over time and completing the piece in 1985. At seventy minutes in duration, until his opera Fin de Partie (2018), it was the composer’s longest piece. Not only are the forty movements based on brief texts, they are also miniature in design. The text-setting is exquisitely detailed, and the musical language is frequently dissonant and angular, drawing both from postwar modernism and Eastern European folk traditions of declamation and string performance.
Narucki and Macomber are both new music specialists. I have remembered a number of their performances with great pleasure, especially Narucki’s creation of the role of Mama in Elliott Carter’s opera What Next? and Macomber’s authoritative rendition of Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronism No. 9 for violin and tape.
To get acquainted with this distinctive music, listen below to excerpts from the soprano’s Avie CD The Edge of Silence, consisting entirely of vocal chamber works by Kurtág. It received a Grammy nomination in 2019, and demonstrates her command of the composer’s individual and demanding work.
Takacs Quartet at 92nd Street Y on March 13, 2024 (credit Joseph Sinnott)
How does a composer write music? Whether she pulls interesting sounds out of the air, or creates an elaborate scheme of hieroglyphics – can an uninformed listener tell the difference? Sometimes not, as was the case Wednesday night at the 92nd Street Y where the incomparable Takács Quartet gave the New York premiere of Flow by Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama.
Flow was backed up by an elaborate set of program notes that described inspiration ranging from the sound of the Big Bang to the breathing discipline “Pranayama”. Even with that knowledge in hand, for the most part I couldn’t detect the connection between concept and sound. Within the four-movement piece, I heard a heartbeat depicted by the viola’s pizzicato, observed sultry pitch slides in the second violin and enjoyed a wacky waltz where every measure seemed purposely just a little bit out of kilter. But the “outburst of energy and matter at the birth of our universe”? Not apparent at all. On the other hand, Flow ingeniously and successfully meshed extended technique with conventional sounds, and overall is a beguiling piece.
I’ve been a fan of the Takács Quartet for at least half of the group’s 49 years of ensemble-hood. This evening was the first time I heard them in their current lineup, with violinist Harumi Rhodes (joined in 2018) and violist Richard O’Neill (came on board in 2019), merging with first violinist Edward Dusinberre who has been with Takács since 1993, and the sole original member, cellist András Fejér.
This long-lived ensemble retained its aesthetic and its tight sound over the years and throughout its personnel changes. The Beethoven String Quartet in E Minor, Op. 59, No. 2 “Razumovsky” which made up the second half of the concert was so captivating that, in that moment, I felt like I would never want to hear any other quartet, ever. The group’s lightness and joie de vivre, dramatic attention to dynamics, and intonation and rhythmic accuracy so good, it might as well be a single instrument, all contributed to the quartet’s breathtaking performance. Their reading of the String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 76, No. 4 “Sunrise” by Franz Josef Haydn which opened the program was equally outstanding.
Flow by Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama was commissioned for the Takács Quartet by Cal Performances and a consortium including 92NY. They’ll perform the work several more times in March and April 2024, in Philadelphia, Schenectady, Scottsdale, Buffalo, Ann Arbor, and Rochester, NY.
A few months ago, I wrote an article that distilled the New York Philharmonic Fall 2023 season into enticing programs for contemporary music lovers.
“When you see New York Philharmonic’s glossy brochures and online ads, you might be hard pressed to spot the new music offerings that are in nearly every program. For instance, “Trifonov Plays Schumann” hides the fact that there is a work for strings by the Lithuanian composer Raminta Šerkšnytė, a composition which Gidon Kremer referred to as ‘the calling card of Baltic music.'”
Here is my annotation of Philharmonic concerts in Spring 2024 for the tiny niche of new music fans.
February 20, 2024 – Lunar New Year Hidden beneath Bruch and Saint-Saëns are two composers who are very much alive. The young Hong Kong-born composer Elliot Leung is making his mark in the Hollywood film scoring world, and the world premiere of his Lunar Overture leads the program. Grammy-nominated Chinese-American composer Zhou Tian is showcased with excerpts from Transcend, which was commissioned by over a dozen orchestras to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad’s completion.
February 22-24 – Emanuel Ax, Hillborg, and Rachmaninoff This one’s right there in the tease: Hillborg. It would be natural to assume that Mr. Ax would be playing Rachmaninoff, and we’d get a five-minute piece by the Swedish composer Anders Hillborg. Nope. Hillborg wrote a 22 minute concerto: Piano Concerto No.2 – the MAX Concerto for Emanuel Ax, and we get to hear the New York premiere of the piece. San Francisco Chronicle’s Joshua Kosman said it was “vivacious, funny, heroic, eloquent, plain-spoken, thoughtful and wholly irresistible”. Now, don’t you want to go hear it?
February 29 – March 1 – Émigré The concert program title “Émigré” could mean just about anything. Here, it is the name of a “semi-staged musical drama” that weaves the true tale of German Jewish brothers who fled Nazi Germany and wound up in Shanghai. It was performed in Shangai in the fall, and the New York Philharmonic and conductor Long Yu give us the first American performances. Music by Aaron Zigman and lyrics by Mark Campbell.
Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate
March 7-9 – Sol Gabetta, Elim Chan, and Scheherazade Sure, cellist Sol Gabetta is great, and I’ll look forward to seeing the conductor Elim Chan who is making waves in Europe. The part of the program I am especially excited about is the world premiere by the Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Pisachi, Tate’s tribute to Hopi and Pueblo Indian music, was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. I’ve been a fan of Tate since a National Symphony premiere performance knocked my socks off 20 years ago.
March 21-24 – Mendelssohn, Tan Dun, and Joel Thompson A rare instance in which the new music is all in the program title. Joe Alessi plays the New York premiere of Tan Dun’s Trombone Concerto: Three Muses in Video Game. The thought of hearing it makes my heart go aflutter. Music by the Atlanta composer Joel Thompson seems to be everywhere lately, and the world premiere of To See the Sky (a NY Phil co-commission) is on this program.
April 4-6 – Alice Sara Ott Performs Ravel He’s dead, but you’d probably want to know that Anton Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6 is on this program. With any luck, the orchestra will play these shorties twice. Also dead: Scriabin. But as I recall, his Poem of Ecstasy is pretty trippy.
April 12-14 – Beatrice Rana Plays Rachmaninoff In addition to heavy hitters Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, we get to hear the New York premiere of a new work by Katherine Balch, co-commissioned by the Philharmonic.
NY Philharmonic Project 19 composers
April 18-20 – Olga Neuwirth and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony Okay, Olga Neuwirth’s name is front and center. The US Premiere of Keyframes for a Hippogriff — Musical Calligrams is settings of texts by Ariosto, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, graffiti artists, and Neuwirth. Brooklyn Youth Chorus sings. This is one of the NY Phil’s Project 19 commissions.
April 20 – Young People’s Concert: Composing Inclusion Yes, it’s a concert for kids, and the hall will be full of families. Show up to hear world premieres by Andrés Soto and Nicolás Lell Benavides, co-commissioned by the Philharmonic.
May 10 – Sound On This one is probably on your radar already. Another Project 19 commission, the world premiere of an as yet unnamed work by Mary Kouyoumdjian. Kwamé Ryan conducts.
May 23-28 – The Mozart Requiem and Sofia Gubaidulina’s Viola Concerto Finally. The title says it all.
The Chevalier: The Life & Music of Joseph Bologne brings together two concepts that are hot today: music theater (or, theater with music), and recognition of figures in classical music other than white European males (Bologne is two out of three, if you count his place of birth).
The subject is Joseph Bologne, also known by his title Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a Black bon vivant who was born in 1745 on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. Formally educated in France, his talents for violin playing and composition shone (along with fencing and dancing) and he was also a military colonel and an abolitionist. As a composer, the guy was no hack: he wrote at least one hundred works from string quartets to operas.
What was his life as a Black man in courtly 18th century Europe like? We may never know for sure. Bill Barclay’s play dramatizes episodes of his life, with live performances of his music woven into the story. Barclay, by the way, is also the artistic director of Music Before 1800, the New York early music institution. MB1800 co-presents the performance, along with Concert Theatre Works (of which Barclay is also artistic director, and which supplied the actors for this production), and the Harlem Chamber Players (whose instrumental talents will be in full display on stage, along with solo violinist Brendon Elliott).
United Palace
If you are even the slightest bit piqued by this description, the venue should put you over the top. The United Palace (4140 Broadway in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan) is a must-see all by itself. The brilliantly gorgeous and excessively ornate decor of this 1920’s one-time movie theater will take your breath away. It’s one of New York City’s largest theaters, with 3400 seats.
The performance is on January 21, 2024, at 4 pm (get there early so you can gawk at the “eclectic Orientalia with Moorish-Rococo influence” of the hall). Tickets at unitedpalace.org. The performance will be captured on video, and will be available for on-demand streaming in February (tickets via mb1800.org).
Prototype: “Angel Island” photo credit: Maria Baranova
The special sauce that has made Prototype, the annual opera/theater festival, a success for over a decade is a straightforward formula: socially relevant, edgy vocal works that are high on drama. Angel Island, a theatrical work with music by Huang Ruo, fits that description.
The speck of land in the middle of San Francisco Bay known as Angel Island served as an immigration port in the first half of the 20th century
. Hundreds of thousands of hopeful migrants from Asia were interrogated and detained, some of them for years, in the decades from 1910 to 1940. It’s not a great leap of imagination to relate today to this story of migration, discrimination, prejudice and downright hatred of certain citizens from abroad.
These immigrants came here of their own volition, but did they have any idea of the strife that awaited them as they stepped off the boat? Like so many Americans whose families came from abroad over the past four centuries, they were only looking for a better life. The promise of streets paved with gold (especially after word of the 1849 Gold Rush spread) was tantalizing.
The Chinese-American violist Charlton Lee, a member of the Del Sol Quartet suggested the story to the Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo. In a New York Times article, Lee said that many people “don’t know about the plight of these immigrants who were trying to come here, start a new life and were just stuck.”
The work is in eight movements, alternating between narration and singing. The text for the sung portions were taken from some of the 200 poems that were found in the barracks on Angel Island, etched into the walls by the detainees. Each narrated section consisted of text taken directly from news accounts and other historical texts, depicting the Chinese Massacre of 1871, The Page Act of 1875 (legislation denying Chinese women entry to the United States), and the story of the lone Chinese survivor of the Titanic.
The Del Sol Quartet performed the score on stage, along with members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street whose acting talents were employed throughout the performance. The instrumental parts were often intensely rhythmic and emphatic chords, which were dramatic but sometimes monotonous. There wasn’t much in the way of melody for the instrumentalists or the singers, but the harmonies were lushly gorgeous and beautifully sung, belying the darkness and trauma of the texts. Bill Morrison’s film, often with images of the ocean, was mesmerizing, especially when the choir huddled together and swayed as if on an undulating boat at sea.
Prototype: “Angel Island” photo credit: Maria Baranova
In general, each element of the production on its own wasn’t exciting — but when combined, the hypnotic film, the adagio movements of the singers clustered on stage as directed by Matthew Ozawa, and the rather minimalist music — all worked together to be incredibly effective. This is a work much greater than the sum of its parts. Dramatic peaks, such as sequences with two solo dancers, and the insistent sounding of a gong throughout the final movement were that much more compelling in contrast.
Angel Island brings attention to a story of United States immigration that is much less familiar than the Statue of Liberty-adjacent Ellis Island.
The New York premiere of Angel Island was performed at the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong on January 11-13, 2024 (I attended on January 12). It was produced by Beth Morrison Projects in association with Brooklyn Academy of Music.
