The Original New Music Community
It’s now just a smidge over seven years since Iannis Xenakis died. And almost exactly 13 years ago, Xenakis sat down for this amicable interview in English:
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This is the first ten minutes; its poster, Edward Lawes, promises a second part in the near future. (And if anyone recognises who Xenakis is talking with in the video, fill me in.)
I get a lot of review CDs. Most of them I listen to once, or not at all, and pass them along to the four or five people who have proven to be reliable reviewers. It is rare that a recording makes me stop everything and listen. Jenny Lin’s new recording of two major piano works by Ernest Bloch with the SWR Rundfunkorcheter Kaiserslautern, under Jiri Starek, is one of those rare moments. I must confess that I didn’t know the Concerto Symphonique but I’m inclined to take the word of David Hurwitz at Classics Today who has pronounced it “one of the 20th century’s great masterpieces for piano and orchestra,” and this CD “easily…its finest recording to date.”
Jenny’s performance is extraordinary. Intense, sensitive, nuanced, and perfectly executed. You wonder how a 97-pound human being could possibly create a sound this big and enveloping. Her account of Bloch’s much more familiar Concerto Grosso No. 1 is just as spectacular, in a quieter way. You come away from the CD with the realization that Bloch was even better than you thought he was and that Jenny Lin, who has until now been best known for her willingness to take on new and gnarly works, is an A list pianist in the late romantic repertory as well.
I.
Early in our conversation yesterday, Hilary Hahn, loquacious and genial throughout, was chatting openly about music and athleticism; about how half her practice time was geared towards staying in shape; how solo recitals were more physically draining than chamber and concerto performances; how different halls, players, even A’s demanded great flexibility; and how flexibility and one’s ear were integral to the athleticism she strove to maintain. I commented on how some pieces were meant just to be big flashy fluffs, and that this was fine; have fun, play fast, show ’em you can hit those notes – not everything’s supposed to be late Brahms. But this, she replied, was not how she saw things. All the music she plays, she believes in entirely; were she to suspect a piece of superficiality, she would not play it; practice time is precious and is for profound music alone.
II.
This April, Hilary Hahn (via Deutsche Grammophon) brings us that feste Burg of twelve-tone serialism, the Schoenberg violin concerto. Hahn’s been wanting to record the piece for years. First she needed to book some performances to force herself to learn the (very difficult) piece. Though no orchestras she contacted had actually played it, she was able to muscle enough of them into agreeing to the project that she could let her interpretation grow on the concert stage for a few years before entering the recording studio. She decided to pair the Schoenberg with the Sibelius violin concerto, and Esa-Pekka Salonen (naturally) conducts. The two concertos show off one another very, very well. The Schoenberg’s tense chromatic saturation finds release in the expansive diatonic washes of the Sibelius. Hahn sees the project as an attempt to release each concerto from narrow pre-conceptions: the Schoenberg is really more Romantic than academic, and the Sibelius is more international than Finnish.
III.
Hahn was born in Virginia, but home, as one suspects and as she frankly admits, is on the road. She enjoys the non-stop traveling and hotel stays. Her life, she claims, is simpler when touring than when staying put. While on tour, she keeps an online journal, in which recently she’s been pretty active. (She once considered doing a creative writing MFA.) Her journal is intended for anyone who might come across it, she says, but young people considering a musical career are her primary audience. Having been blessed with good connections in the local music community as a kid, she wants those who aren’t so lucky to feel connected to what actually happens when concerts are made. She wants kids to realize international music stars go through many of the same aches and pains as everyone else. Currently concertizing in Switzerland, before the end of the spring Hahn will be back in the States playing, among other programs, some concerts with Josh Ritter. She is taking the summer off to row.
New York Philharmonic. North Korea. Discuss.
p.s. Steve Smith is on the scene. WGBH will air one of the concerts live online on Sunday, March 2, from 3-5 pm.
Tuesday Update: Great picture of Steve at the airport in North Korea.
And you thought all those novel techniques came from post-1950s Euro-modernists?:
Nathan, Jasper and Weldon Drake; Weslaco, Texas, 1942 (Thanks to the amazing historical high-res archives at Shorpy.com)
New Yawkers could do worse at 8 p.m. on March 1st, than drop by Roulette, plunk down a $10 and slurp-munch free refreshments, all while checking out this great little posse of 80’s-born composers’ music:
Timothy Andres will present two recent works: Play it By Ear (2007), for a mixed chamber group of nine players, and Strider (2006), “ambient music” for vibraphone and piano. Both pieces will feature the best young musicians from the Yale School of Music, with the composer on piano.
Lainie Fefferman has a new electric guitar quartet called Tounge of Thorns (2007), which she describes as a “7-minute giant pulsing sound inspired by the Velvet Underground’s ‘Venus In Furs’”. Tounge of Thorns will be played by Dither. Lainie and Alex will also perform a brand-new piece with Lainie singing and Alex playing melodica and piano.
Jennifer Stock will perform on laptop in her piece The High Line (2006), based on sounds recorded around the abandoned High Line railway structure in Manhattan. The piece also features soprano Ali Ewoldt, who recently made her Broadway debut in Les Misérables, and star cellist Ezra Seltzer. We’ll also see and hear Grainery (2006), a video project with processed piano soundscape.
Alex Temple will contribute The Last Resort Party Band (2006), “cabaret music from an alternate universe,” featuring composer Emilia Tamburri on alto saxophone and Yale musicians. Next comes a new piece for clarinet and electric guitar, Slightly Less Awkward People (2007), featuring James Moore (of Dither) and Sara Phillips Budde (of NOW Ensemble). Alex will also perform his David Lynch-inspired Inland (2007), for melodica and piano. (Why the preponderance of melodica? “Despite being a silly-looking instrument,” says Alex, “the melodica can be used to make serious music.” I hear you, Alex. I had one next to me all through my own college years…)
This is all a production from IGIGI (pronounced “ee-ghee-ghee”), a close-knit group of composers formed at Yale College. They work with the best New York and New Haven-area musicians to premiere new works, give repeat performances, and put on concerts featuring all genres of “cutting-edge” music. IGIGI produces the annual New Music Marathon, an all-night concert at Yale featuring student works, contemporary favorites, improvisation, and performance art. IGIGI’s history stretches back at least thirty years; its predecessor was called A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, which gave rise to the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
The Yale at Carnegie concert series will honor distinguished faculty member Ezra Laderman at Weill Recital Hall at 8pm on March 3 with a program that features a career-spanning range of Laderman’s chamber works, from his 1954 Bassoon Concerto to the New York premiere of Interior Landscapes II for two pianos, written in 2007.
Laderman (b. 1924) continues the line of distinguished composer-pedagogues at Yale, which has included Paul Hindemith, Krzystof Penderecki, and Jacob Druckman. His ties to the Yale School of Music run deep; after joining the YSM community as a composer-in-residence in 1988, he served as the Dean of the school from 1989 to 1995, and currently holds the position of Professor of Music in the Composition department.
There’s a podcast of a live performance of Laderman’s Concerto for Clarinet and Strings with David Shifrin, clarinet and Ransom Wilson, conducting members of the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale, on Yale’s fabulous netcast page. If you haven’t discovered the Yale School of Music Netcasts page, get on over there. It has more than 100 downloadable podcasts of music and interviews with music luminaries, dating back to Aaron Copland.
And those of you who know Professor Laderman, leave your mosaltovs here.
Alex Ross has a splendid piece titled Inextinguishable about Carl Nielsen in the New Yorker (yes, the New Yorker) this week. I must confess that I had not paid a lot of attention to Nielsen until Alex tagged him as “most underrated” in the comments section here a couple of years. Since then, a series of wonderful new recordings–including the opera Maskarade and Thomas Dausgaard and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra/DR’s recording of Nielsen’s orchestral works–have been released by the Danish national recording label Dacapo I have found myself playing them every few days for months now and I always hear something fresh and new. I owe you one, Alex.
On the subject of record labels, Pliable points to a review in the Guardian by Andrew Clements which begins with the provocative sentence: “Considering how much third-rate music has been included in Naxos’s American Classics series, Elliott Carter has so far been poorly served by the budget-price label…”
Granted some of the stuff that Naxos has packaged in that series has been less than distinguished but operating in a cultural establishment where critics treat every cow patty ever dropped by the likes of Alwyn and Bax and Finzi and Michael Tippitt as if it were fois gras, Clements is hardly in a position to fling merde.
Just when you thought we’ve been musically laying low… There’s a brand-new online-only CD release by fellow S21 regular and composer David Toub, realized by yours truly (Steve Layton, for those of you who don’t read the bottom post tag). It just became available on iTunes (US, also now or very soon in UK/Europe, Australia and Japan) on my little NiwoSound label; expect its appearance on eMusic as well very soon. The CD is in the “electronic” genre at both places, but purely as a matter of expediting the release; if it’s not classical I don’t know what is!
David’s darfur pogrommen, composed only a few months ago, is another expansive minimalist essay; its single continuous movement clocks in at 47 minutes. There’s no real attempt at programmatic writing; rather — like many of David’s other pieces — the title is a marker of a moment, that can call up whatever associations the listener might have in relation to it.
The piece is for open instrumentation. David’s own first recorded version used synthy string sounds, but I decided to give it a kind of “old school” treatment: a Reich-Glass hybrid with a vibraphone and electric organ taking the two primary parts, and electric piano and two more organs adding secondary voices. It trades a little lushness, but finds a bright, hard and uncompromising edge.
The biggest influence is still “classic” 60s-70s Glass, but David has his own way with how figures intuitively expand and contract, the harmonies involved, and his preference for alternating and pulsing notes. But later in the piece there’s a spot that to my ears definitely pays tribute to Morton Feldman as well. Surprising and beautiful!
Though there are many clearly defined sections in the piece, like so much of David’s work there’s just no way to get the whole flow with separate tracks. So if you want it, it’s all or nothing. (You can preview 30 seconds of the beginning on iTunes, but it’s a laughably hopeless indicator of what unfolds…)
Anyone wishing to burn the download to disc can also download and print this PDF file, which gives you the entire cover art and inner notes. More musically, you can freely download the PDF of the entire score from David himself.
Oh yeah: play it LOUD.
Growing up in a podunk, nil-culture, border-ish town in Washington State, half of my classical education came by way of drifty, static-filled, late-night AM listening to the CBC. Not only work by Stravinsky, Boulez, and Xenakis, but a whole raft of amazingly strong Canadian composers: R. Murray Schafer, John Rea, Claude Vivier and the like. Many of these recordings were CBC productions, and were something that gave me an early admiration of our northern neighbor’s commitment to the arts.
But now comes word that the CBC may be essentially shuttering its recording production; what little may remain will likely be committed to the more “relevant” world of pop. Happening just in the wake of the Grammy win of violinist James Ehnes and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra under Bramwell Tovey, of their disc of concertos by Walton, Korngold and Barber, it all seems especially ironic and bitter.