Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

El paseo de Buster Keaton

Did you ever wonder why doctors think it’s a good idea for a bunch of sick people to wait together for their exams in a small, overheated, unventilated room?  Or why drugstores invariably put the cough medications in the aisle where people are waiting to pick up their prescriptions?  No?  Well, I do.  Think of these things, I mean.

But, I  digress and I’m late checking in today.   Here’s a new rule for those of you with frontpage posting ability.  If you don’t see something from me by noon Eastern, feel free to jump in there and mix and stir.  If you don’t have frontpage posting rights, let me know and I’ll sign you up.

Okay, here’s some exciting news.  Marvin Rosen is going to be airing another piece from last year’s Sequenza21 concert on his Classical Discoveries program.  On Wednesday, Marvin will be playing David Toub’s Objects in observance of WPRB’s first membership fund drive which is this entire week.  That, I guess, makes David the Andrea Bocelli of WPRB.

Marvin is scheduled to be airing Objects during the latter part of the 7:00 o’clock hour but the time may be slightly changed if the begging gets too exciting.

And if you happen to be near Indiana University on Thursday or Friday night this week don’t miss  the collegiate premiere performance in concert of the chamber opera Ainadamar or Fountain of Tears by Osvaldo Golijov.  Our amiga Carmen Helena Téllez, director of the IU Jacobs School’s Latin American Music Center (LAMC), and of the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, will conduct the production which will take place on Oct. 11 at 8 p.m. in Auer Hall, with a repeat performance on Oct. 12 at 8 p.m. The performances are free and open to the public. 

by Jerry Bowles
CDs, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Woke Up. It Was a Chelsea Morning.

The Metropolis Ensemble is getting set to record the complete collection of chamber orchestra concerti of Avner Dorman with producer David Frost but you don’t have to wait to hear it; the best little orchestra in New York will be performing the same repertoire live and in color next Thursday night, October 11, at  the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts (172 Norfolk St, between Houston and Delancey), commencing at 8 pm.  On tap are the American premieres of Dorman’s Concerto in A and Concerto Grosso, the New York premiere of Piccolo Concerto, and an encore performance of Mandolin Concerto. Soloists Mindy Kaufman of the New York Philharmonic, Avi Avital, and Eliran Avni will join the Metropolis Ensemble led by conductor Andrew Cyr.  If you haven’t heard the Metropolis in action you’ve missed something pretty special.  These cats seriously cook.  (Just showing my age for a moment.)

Meanwhile, Miller Theater opens its new Composer Portraits series tonight with a program devoted to the music of Esa-Pekka Salonen.  Performers include Darrett Adkins, cello; Tony Arnold, soprano; the wonderful Imani Winds; Blair McMillen, piano and artistic director and Jeffrey Milarsky, conductor.  Unlike dilettantes like, say Michael Tilson-Thomas, Salonen is a serious composer and I want very much to love Salonen’s music someday.  I’m not there yet which is probably my failing rather than his.

Speaking of liking something, Tina Turner’s cover of Edith and the Kingpin on Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters is nothing short of revelatory.

UPDATE:  This just in.  Frank J. Oteri writes:

Thanks to fellow Sequenza21 blogger Elodie Lauten, the 2005 Lithuanian premiere of my Fluxus-inspired performance oratorio MACHUNAS, created in collaboration with Lucio Pozzi, will be projected on a wide screen at the Hamilton Fish Branch of the New York Public Library, tomorrow – Saturday, October 6, 2007 – at 2 PM. Admission is FREE.
by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Last Night in L.A.: Gloria Cheng

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Piano Spheres concert:  November 13 with Vicki Ray.

by JerryZ
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

Out of the Rabbit Hole With David Del Tredici

Philip Glass is not the only composer who turned 70 this year.  Among other newly-minted septuagenarians is David Del Tredici, a “maverick” composer in the great American tradition, and while his attainment of elder statesman status has attracted much less fuss than Glass and Steve Reich, there have been some small, quiet celebrations, one of which was reviewed in the NYT this morning by Alan Kozinn.

I have not heard a lot of Del Tredici’s music but what I have heard I have liked.  I would be happier if it was presented with less explanation, not simply because his “subjects” sometimes make me a little squeamish (not homophobic, just squeamish, in the way that some of Robert Mapplethorpe’s pictures make me reflexively cringe), but simply because I think that money and sex are topics that people ought to keep pretty much to themselves.   Call me an old-fashioned libertarian; I don’t believe there is “women’s music” and “gay music” or even “black music.” There is music. 

I also have the feeling that while wordless music may “mean something” concrete to the composer, it is an abstraction to the listener.  That’s why I find Peter Maxwell Davis’s lavish, prissy, poetic program notes to be laugh out-loud funny. 

Well, that should be enough red meat to get us started.

by Jerry Bowles
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

The Intimate Side of Philip Glass

Turning 70 is a big deal for most people, and especially so for Philip Glass, whose birthday is being celebrated worldwide big time. He’s just been feted in New York by Music At The Anthology (MATA), and Groningen, Holland, is putting on a Glass Festival.  The composer and The Philip Glass Ensemble performed his massive compendium of minimalist moves, Music in 12 Parts (1971-74), this summer in the Hague and the San Francisco Bay Area pays its homage with the world premiere of his SF Opera commission, Appomattox, this coming Friday, October 5.  

Glass is such a big name, and  pervasive influence–I caught a chord progression in a dance mix lifted straight from him in a bar–that it’s almost hard to see the trees for the forest.  But Glass emerged clearly from that penumbral place in Philip Glass: An Evening of Chamber Music, which kicked off San Francisco Performances’ season at Herbst Theatre on Friday night.  And all the frenzied Zeitgeist schtick on Van Ness– couples out on first — will there be a second?– dates, bobbing heads on cell phones, opera patrons running to catch the curtain, and monster traffic–was happily left outside. 

Glass, mike in hand, (“is it me, or the machine?) began by announcing a program change. He’d begin with 4 sections of the 5-part  Metamorphosis (1988), for solo piano, and not play either of the 2 Etudes (1994) planned. Metamorphosis, though it uses material from the composer’s score to Errol Morris’ doc The Thin Blue Line (1988), takes its title from the Kafka short story of the same name, for which Glass wrote scores for concurrent theater productions in Brazil and the Netherlands. And though the music stands proudly on its own, its lines and harmonies suggest the haunted atmosphere of Kafka’s tale–Gregor Samsa’s alienation from the world, and his dogged journey to a kind of transcendence. 

And Glass, sitting erect at his Steinway concert grand Model D, brought its many beauties to light–the poignant hesitations in #1 struck the heart, he made the massive floating harmonies in #2 acutely affecting through discreet pedalling, his attacks gave the bell-like paralllel chords of #3 power, and his command of color gave #4 its dramatic weight. Glass has spoken of his drifting sense of meter, and this was certainly apparent throughout; pianists like Alec Karis and Michael Riesman would surely have been metronomically regular. Metamorphosis has sometimes been described as Satie-like, though the equally private worlds of Schubert’s Impromptus and Brahms’ Intermezzi, come strongly to mind. My first encounter with Metamorphosis live was when Glass played the entire set ,as Molissa Fenley danced, at The Unitarian Church, which is a little more than a stone’s throw from Herbst.  But what sticks most is how the music the composer has written in the intervening years has colored his gestures when he plays this piece now.  

Next came the West Coast premiere of Songs and Poems for Cello, which Glass wrote for NY-based new music star Wendy Sutter of Bang On A Can fame, who plays a wide range of works from uptown –actually West Village people like Elliott Carter–to downtown composers. This is a thoroughly demanding piece, which Sutter played from memory, and which, with its sense of duende–Lorca”s term for anything  springing from deep within– seemed to evoke music as various as Bach, bits of the Suites for Cello (BWV 1007-12), and Brandenburg 6 (1721), as well as Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello (1920-22), and Dohnanyi’s Cello Sonata (1899), which Martha Graham choreographed as Lamentation, without ever resembling any of  these.  Its seven sections–applause broke out in one–were mostly grave, intense, deeply sonorous, and completely lacking in easy effects.  Sutter negotiated its myriad technical–long sustained lines, double-stopping, pizzicati, and focus on different registers, usually sequentially–and expressive difficulties with almost superhuman ease.  

Four interconnecting episodes, or “Tissues”, from Godfrey Reggio’s third and final installment in the QATSI trilogy, Naqoyqatsi (2002), scored here for Glass, piano, Sutter, cello, and PGE percussionist Mick Rossi, followed. One was struck by the cello writing’s resemblance to that in Songs and Poems for Cello, the ultra soft sounds from the keyboard, and the floating sounds Rossi achieved on marimba and celeste. Naqoyqatsi never got the attention it deserved in its initial theatrical release, though Glass’ tour with his ensemble here last year–the film and score were performed by him and his PGE live at Davies–helped to right that wrong. 

Equally atmospheric were the last two offerings–The Orchard, a kind of slow sarabande from Glass’ score for JoAnne Akalitis’ 1991 theatre production of Genet’s The Screens, transcribed here for piano, cello, and percussion, from its original incarnation for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion and cello, and Closing, from Glass’ 1981 record debut on CBS, Glassworks, misunderstood as a pop/crossover piece then, and probably now as well, which Glass and his two fellow musicians played with both point and affection. “How can such a quiet person write such powerful music?” I said to my companion, who sat stock still, hands folded, throughout. Who knows?  But this concert proved beyond the slightest doubt that Glass has always been and remains a chamber musician intent on speaking to his listeners in the most intimate terms. Appomattox, which struck this listener as almost unbearably intimate, when he heard most of its first act at a Sitz-Probe 2 September, will likely fall into this exalted class

by Michael McDonagh
Contemporary Classical

The New Season in L.A.: Pt. 2, Music in Zipper

Over and above its contributions in teaching the performing arts, The Colburn School gives Los Angeles a good, small concert hall, Zipper Concert Hall, just across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall.  Zipper Hall is now performing home to three independent program series important to contemporary music in Los Angeles.  To get a little off-topic, of course Zipper is also home to the programming of Colburn School itself and is the primary Los Angeles home of the Calder Quartet, just ending a residency at Julliard and a co-founder of the Carlsbad Festival of alternative classical music, which begins down south tomorrow.

For us Angelenos, Monday Evening Concerts deserves pride of place and first mention.  MEC will provide four concerts in Zipper this season; tickets are only $25 ($10 for students).  The programs are interesting, exciting even.  The range of composers and of musical styles is stimulating.  But I am surprised that there is only a single work by a living American (Donald Crockett) plus works by Earl Kim and Ralph Shapey (and Stravinsky).  In an interesting supplement to the series, each of the concerts on Monday will be preceded on Sunday morning by coffee, pastries, and a film having some tie to the program.  The Sunday mornings will be in the media lounge of the Goethe Institute; sehr gemutlich.  Free to subscribers!  MEC’s new web site conveys that they are now an established program; the site even includes an audio preview of the series.  (In something almost unique for Los Angeles the site even gives the public transportation lines to get to the concerts or the films.)  I look forward to the time when the site includes the programming history of this important series. 

Piano Spheres is a favorite of mine.  The season opens in only ten days with Gloria Cheng performing a challenging program that includes the premiere of a new work by Dante De Silva plus Berio’s “Sequenza IV” plus Cage, Takemitsu, Xenakis, Lachenmann, Carter and Messiaen.  What a range, and with lesser art the program would be a hodgepodge rather than something exciting.  And that’s just Gloria, so look at the entire season with Vicki Ray, Susan Svrcek, Mark Robson, and Ursula Oppens as this season’s guest.  The cost is $25 a ticket, $20 on subscription.  Buy now.

Southwest Chamber Music has a Pasadena home (with a winter season in the auditorium of the Norton Simon Museum and a summer season at the Huntington), but their winter season has dual performances at Zipper Concert Hall.  Southwest has produced an excellent “Composer Portrait” series of 12 CDs, plus four CDs in their project to perform and record all of the chamber music of Carlos Chavez.  This season, Southwest’s 20th, will have two programs of performances of William Kraft’s complete “Encounters” series, including the premiere performance of “Encounter XIV, a new commission.  The performances will be recorded and released next year in commemoration of Kraft’s 85th birthday.  The internet confirms my recollection that two (at least) of the “Encounters” were written for a full orchestra, so I’m unsure of whether or not these will be included, or will be performed in alternate versions.  I like most of the programming of the Southwest performances.  Scroll down the list of programs and see whether or not you agree.  Will the two Brandenburgs work with the Cage, for instance?

In the final post in this series, I’ll mention the contemporary music offered this coming season in the Jacaranda series, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Pacific Serenades, and summarize some events in other venues.

by JerryZ
Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

Steve’s click picks #37

Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, with so much good listening online.

Time to leave our standard classical composers and performers behind for a second, to hear what the writers can do:

Liesl Ujvary – Ann Cotten – Hanno Millesi (Austria): “Ghostengine – Speech without Language” (2005)

Ujvary-Cotten-MillesiLiesl Ujvary (1939-, Pressburg/Slovakia) moved to Austria in 1945 and spent her childhood in Lower Austria and Tyrol. She studied Slavonic, old-Hebrew literature and art history in Vienna and Zurich. After some visits in Moscow she finished her dissertation on Ilja Ehrenburg’s ‘Julio Jurenito’ at the University in Zurich in 1968. She held a university teaching position for Russian language and literature at the Sophia University in Tokyo, and lives as a writer in Vienna since 1971.

Ann Cotten (1982-) was born in Iowa, but her family moved to Austria when she was five. After growing up in Vienna, she just moved to Berlin last year, having stirred up a raft of critical attention with her first book of poetry, Fremdwörterbuchsonette (“Foreign Dictionary Sonnets”). The Frankfurter Rundschau interviewed her recently, and an English version of that article can be read at Sign and Sight.

Hanno Millesi (1966-, Vienna) studied art history in Vienna and Graz. From 1986-1992 he worked with Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna; from 1992 to 1999 assisted Hermann Nitsch’s “Orgien Mysterien Theaters”; 1999-2001 hung out at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; all the while working at his own writing (as well as his guitar, in the band ALBERS).

— OK, preliminaries out of the way, why tell you about these three Austrian writers on our trusty new-music site? Because among Ujvary’s kalideoscopic interests and activities is music and sound art, which for the last ten-plus years she’s been broadcasting on radio and issuing on CD. The link on her name above will take you to her main website; from there the “musik” button will send you to a whole compendium of these, most available as free MP3 downloads as well as standard CDs. But clicking the other link above this post will take you directly to the 2005 CD Ghostengine – Sprechen ohne Sprach (“speech without language”). In this essay Ujvary, Cotten and Millesi all interact with an Etherwave theremin, trying to create a a kind of intuitive, wordless “speech”. Ujvary also processes this using a Kaoss pad — a wonderfully fun device from Korg, that lets you control all kinds of processing in realtime, with a few movements of your fingers. Interleaved between the solo “speeches” are four mixes by Ujvary, where she combines, varies and elaborates the three solos.

Mahler it most certainly is NOT; but it is a wonderful soundscape, that somehow captures a bit of each of its collaborators.

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

What Did You Do During the War, Daddy?

roybowles.jpgThe rabid right has worked itself into a state over Ken Burns’ extraordinarily fair, balanced and altogether pro-American documentary series, The War.  Partly it’s the fact that it is on PBS and it it is an article of faith among conservatives that PBS is run by a bunch of commie, pinko surrender monkeys who use taxpayer dollars to grind out streams of anti-American propaganda.  Forget the fact that most of money comes from such dubious sources as General Motors, Anheiser-Busch, Bank of America and generous foundations established by thoughtful capitalists of the past.  Keep those kids away from PBS; they might see a gay cartoon character.   

Another part of the problem is that Burns himself has said he wasn’t making a celebratory documentary and that he took care to frame his subject (in the words of one veteran) as a “necessary” war, not a “good” war.  This infuriates the true belivers to whom war, any war that America gets involved in, is a good war simply because we’re in it.  Saying anything to contrary is like, well, suggesting that Ronald Reagan was human-born and put his pants on one-leg at a time.

On the lack of celebratory zeal front, the most curious offering came from Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal who was particularly offended by the downbeat original music created for the series by Wynton Marsalis:

The dolorous jazz arrangements by Wynton Marsalis that run throughout the film were, the credits tell us, created especially for this production. Who would doubt it? Don’t ask about the background music for D-Day. Moving on, we see the archival footage of U.S. soldiers advancing through German streets — it is 1945, the troops are among the first Americans to have made it across the Rhine, and victory is, if not in sight, close at hand. By way of an accompaniment to this moment, we hear on the soundtrack some faintly mournful twitterings.

I’m not a huge fan of Marsalis as a composer and I think Burns overused him in his previous jazz films but it seems to me that in this case his restrained, thoughtful, unobtrusive musical texture is a perfect fit for the intimate, personal and very emotional stories the subjects are telling.  When Burns moves away from the personal to the sweep of history view he inevitably turns to familiar tunes by Artie Shaw or Glenn Miller or other period music that serve as a kind of shorthand for the American experience of the World War II.  And, Burns best efforts notwithstanding, that music is always sad, nostalgic, and, yes, celebratory for those of us whose lives touched the war. 

Rabinowitz has some particularly nasty words of America’s current queen of pop:  “When it comes to the dolorous, to be sure, there’s nothing quite equal to the effect of the dreadful “American Anthem” (1999, sung here by Norah Jones), whose sodden notes sound at regular intervals.”  True, the song is sappy but then so was “I’ll See You in My Dreams” and Alice Faye.  Sometimes, sappy is right.

The War is an incredible tribute to the Americans who lived through it and to those who fought and died.  By focusing on the little stories that were epic to those who lived them, the film touches the heart in ways that banal glorification can’t.  Inevitably, it celebrates the resilience of the American character, even if it’s trying not to. 

This is a case of people listening to what Burns said he was doing and not watching what he has actually done.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Critics

The Sun Also Rises

Adam Kirsch, writing in today’s New York Sun:

The critic of the serious arts — poetry, painting, music — is addressing readers who are not just indifferent to new work, but feel justified in their indifference. The critic’s first job, then, even before he evaluates individual works, is to make the reader feel uneasy about his ignorance—to convince him that the art in question is vital and serious, deserving of complex attention. A reader who has always heard that classical music is dead must first be convinced that it is alive.

 

No critic at work today does this better than Alex Ross, who writes about music for the New Yorker.

Can’t say much for the Sun’s politics, but its arts coverage is spot on.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Dispatch from Carnegie Hall: Sphinx Gala

Two contemporary African-American composers shared the spotlight with Bach, Turina, Ellington, and Piazzolla at the Sphinx Organization Gala at Carnegie Hall last night. Cellist Tahirah Whittington held a sold-out Stern captive with Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s “Perpetual Motion” from his Lamentations Suite for solo cello. A fierce, prolonged flourish perfect for a charismatic performer, its aggression contrasted nicely with the similarly Bluegrass-inspired Delights and Dances for string quartet and string orchestra by Michael Abels. Performed by the Harlem Quartet, Delights is a pleasant work which Edgar Meyer fans will find plenty congenial. The zippy, high-flying finale had the audience on their feet (though not this reviewer), and one left the hall grateful for the good work Sphinx does. Congratulations to them on their tenth anniversary.

by David Salvage