Sequenza21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 61st Ojai Music Festival opened last night.  Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams, returning after their success two years ago in their performances of Nancarrow, gave us a great survey of modern works for two pianos with works by Stravinsky, Ligeti, Sciarrino, and this season’s featured composer, Peter Eötvös.  (Us amateurs have trouble coming to a decision as to the best mispronounciation of his name.)  But let me start with the featured composer, glad I can write the name and not try to speak it.

The second half of the program opened with his Cricketmusic (1970) a tape of cricket sounds, the perfect opening for an evening performance at Ojai.  This moved directly to the two pianists playing his Kosmos (1961, 1999 rev.), for which the Soviet space flights inspired the teenaged composer.  Yes, it’s a young work, but it’s good stuff and it was given a vibrant performance in which two pianos had been positioned in the front corners of the Ojai stage so that we could hear the space as well as the notes.  The pianists moved back to center stage for a performance of Ligeti‘s masterful Three Pieces for Two Pianos (1976), making the extremely difficult seem effortless.  The second of the pieces is his Self-Portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin in the Background), his homage to the Americans whose work he had discovered.  (His eventual discovery of Nancarrow’s work seems obvious in the first piece, Monument, with its layers of different time intervals.)

In the first half of the program Bugallo and Williams performed two of Stravinsky’s versions for two pianos of his own works for ensemble.  The first work was Septet (1953), written when he was beginning to form his own interpretations of twelve-tone concepts heard in so much of the music he heard at Ojai and at the fore-runner of LA’s Monday Evening Concerts.  Bach and Schoenberg don’t co-exists that easily in the work, but it’s interesting to hear his exploration.  Salvatore Sciarrino’s Sonata for Two Pianos (1966) came next:  a work that’s a study of as many variations as possible of ornaments, a work providing a sweet between the two works of Stravinsky.  And then the Stravinsky “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto (1938) in its two-piano version, a masterpiece in that version as well as in the instrumental one.  Bugallo and Williams have recorded six of Stravinsky’s two-piano works, and I recommend the CD to any fan of Stravinsky or of duo pianos, Stravinsky in Black and White.  It’s not merely that the works are given good performances by two pianists who seem to inhabit each other’s piano shapings; the works give you a different view of Stravinsky and his creativity.  The architecture of the work seems much clearer in the piano versions, and it’s fun to think of how Stravinsky, the expert instrumentalist, would use the colors of other instruments.  (And of course their recording of Nancarrow is worth having.)

The concert closed with a performance of Ligeti’s Poeme Symphonique, the famously infamous work for 100 metronomes.  For the Ojai performance the metronomes were positioned in nine groups (I think because the ones I could see had 11 each) around the audience, with an amplifier for each cluster.  At first there was a lot of conversation, but the talkers gradually got more of the spirit of things.  By the time the work was down to about a dozen metronomes, the audience was paying attention, listening to the patterns.  The trail-off from five down to one, then to zero was fun.  It was much more enjoyable than watching the video on YouTube.