Chamber Music, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, New York, North/South

Viva Max!

For the past 27 years, the Mexican-born pianist and composer Max Lifchitz has been a tireless and resourceful promoter of new music (including his own) through live performances and recordings with the North/South Consonance Ensemble, the chamber group of the non-profit North/South Consonance organization. Many young composers, particularly those of the Neoclassic or New Romantic temperment (Larry Bell comes immediately to mind), have gotten a career boost from Lifchitz’s annual programs and recordings, which now number nearly 50. 

I mention all this because North/South Consonance’s  final concert of the current season is coming up on Sunday afternoon June 17 at 3 PM and will take place at Christ & St. Stephen’s Church (120 West 69th St, NYC) on Manhattan’s West Side. Admission is free (no tickets necessary).

The program will feature two compositions involving narration: Igor Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat and Lifchitz’s The Blood Orange.  I personally detest works that involve people talking while I’m trying to listen to music, but apparently some people like it and many famous composers have written works for ensemble and spoken word. 

Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale was written at the end of World War I and is one of those Faustian/Devil Goes Down to Georgia things about trading in your soul for a fiddle.  Lifchitz says the work is being performed to mark the 125th anniversary of the birth of the composer and, in fact, it is being performed on June 17, the exact day Stravinsky was born in 1882 in a town near St Petersburg.

Lifchitz’s The Blood Orange is a setting of a text by New York City writer Kathleen Masterson, written especially for the actress Norma Fire, who will perform it.  The narrative with music relates the story of Fire’s parents who emigrated to this country before the Holocaust, and of their relatives who did not. Fire will be supported by violinist Claudia Schaer and Lifchitz on piano. 

Today’s musical question is:  Name the best pieces ever written for music and narration (and let’s get Copland and Honegger out of the way quickly).

by Jerry Bowles
Cello, Contemporary Classical, Lost and Found

Lost and Found

Music by Nicolas Flagello
National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine
John McLaughlin Williams, conductor
Elmar Oliviera, violin 
Susan Gonzalez, soprano
Artek 0036-2

Nicolas Flagello (1928-1994) was born in New York City, earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music and, upon graduation, taught there until 1977.

Flagello’s music is romantic and firmly built on 19th century models with lush orchestrations and long melodic phrases. The Symphonic Aria from 1951 is moving, but sometimes too rich. Mirra (1955) concludes with an exciting “Dance” that allows the orchestra to show a lot of meat.

Many of the works were orchestrated post facto by Anthony Sbordoni, including a Violin Concerto, and several songs for soprano, featuring Susan Gonzalez. Flagello is a good writer for the voice, and sensitive to the text in his prosody and harmonic textures. The CD concludes with two songs, Polo and Polo II, and the liner notes indicate that the “polo is a genre of flamenco song of Arabian origin.” Both draw heavily on folk elements.

 

 

The Return

Andrey Dergatchev

ECM 1923

There are few film scores that stand alone as “concert” works. I’ve often felt that the best film music should either go unnoticed to the average viewer or play a prominent role in the film (The Red Violin). Music in film should enhance the overall experience, which combines with visual artistry and dialogue/monologue.

That said, the music by Andrey Dergatchev needs the film to be fully appreciated. I suppose if any composer were to peddle their notes before a film, we all might have a different opinion of the music. In this case, I’ve never seen the film, so I was absorbing this ECM release as an electro-acoustic composition (sans movie).

Several tracks use spoken word from the picture, and it’s in Russian, so I didn’t understand anything. If you’ve seen The Return, this CD will make a nice souvenir.

Nostalghia – Song for Tarkovsky

François Couturier, with

Anja Lechner

Jean-Marc Marché

Jean-Louis Matinier

ECM 1979

Moving from music for film, to music inspired by film, we have François Couturier’s tribute album to Russian film-maverick Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986).

According to the composer, Tarkovsky felt that film does not require music (I usually agree), and so Nostalghia has very little music. This CD is inspired by all of Tarkovsky’s films, with each movement representing “a specific emotion linked to the universe of this director.” (As a side note, Tarkovsky produced a successful Boris Godunov in 1984 for Covent Garden.)

The performing ensemble consists of the composer, François Couturier at the piano, Anja Lechner, cello; Jean-Marc Larché, soprano saxophone; and Jean-Louis Matinier, accordion. The scores are bare and thin, slow and melancholic, and the instrumental textures can be exciting, on occasion. Couturier makes reference to two of Tarkovsky’s favorite composers: Bach and Pergolesi, and also throws in Schnittke for good measure.

 

by Daniel Gilliam
Contemporary Classical

Last Night in L.A.: “Partch” plays Partch

John Schneider and his group “Partch” gave their annual REDCAT concert of Partch’s music last night.  The program included Partch’s film of U.S. Highball:  A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip (1958, film completed in 1968).  The program began with the eight hitchhiker inscriptions of Barstow (1941/1943/1968); this interesting site provide clips of different performances of the first inscription.  The second half of the program included rousing performances of Ring Around the Moon (1950) and Castor & Pollux (1952), both involving the seven instrumentalists in the group.  The audience jumped up and called their approval at the end.

There were ten Partch instruments (in addition to the voice):  the Adapted Viola (1930), the two Adapted Guitars (1935 and 1945), the Kithara (1938), the Chromelodeon (1941), Harmonic Canon (1945), Diamond Marimba (1946), HypoBass (1950), Cloud Chamber Bowls (1950) and Bass Marimba (1950).

Two of the instrumentalists, Vicki Ray and David Johnson, were key in Tuesday night’s concert by Xtet at the County Museum.  For me a high point was The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine for orator, piano, violin and cello by Aaron Jay Kernis.  (Amazon’s sound clip doesn’t include the oration, so it lacks the flavor of the piece.)  The program began with three songs to Shakespeare by Stravinsky, and included three songs by John Cage and Morton Feldman’s lovely The Viola in My Life 2.  Phil O’Connor, Xtet’s frequent clarinetist/saxophone, presented the premiere of his new work War Again(st) ? (T)error!, a work of several episodes which didn’t seem linked to the title but which kept active.

by JerryZ
Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Steve’s click picks #29

Our regular (well, semi-regular, at least until our dust has settled in Houston) 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, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:

Amos Elkana (b. 1967 — US / Israel)

Amos Elkana Born in Boston and a product of Berklee, the New England Conservatory and Bard, Amos now makes his home in Tel Aviv. He was one of the brave few “serious” composers that took the online plunge early; I first bumped into him and his music way back in 1999 or 2000 on the old MP3.com. His work has a touch of the modern Romantic, chromatic and sharp, though the lyrical is never too far away.

The website linked above gives a great introduction to Amos and his music. You can read about some of his composing techniques, snag a CD or two, and the works page contains numerous full-length MP3s of all kinds of pieces (some with PDFs of the scores), including his award-winning Arabic Lessons for three sopranos and chamber ensemble (though you shouldn’t forget to catch the piano piece Eight Flowers as well).

by Steve Layton
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Covent Garden

If I Swallow Anything Evil, Put Your Finger Down My Throat

Not quite sure what to make of this, but the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London has bought Opus Arte,  a leading for-profit maker and producer of performance DVDs.  The economics of high music culture have changed and more and more music groups of all sizes are moving toward control of production and distribution of their artistic “products,” as traditional avenues like record labels go belly up.  Where is our friend Pliable on this one?  

Here’s an update on David Salvage’s piece at the Harvard Club on June 11.  Starting time is 7pm, not 7:30 as we reported here yesterday.  The requirement to dress “spiffy” remains in effect. 

Update:  EMI has joined the other three major record labels in distributing music videos on YouTube.  In addition to making available clips, EMI and YouTube plan to develop a system that provides for consumer-created content that uses EMI music and video. Additionally, thanks to some new Apple software, the clips won’t just be available online but also on Apple TV — the device that lets people watch Internet video on TV screens

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

David Does Harvard

dsheadsht.pngAttention Boston (and NY) shoppers!  The world-premiere run of David Salvage’s String Quartet No. 2 is at hand.  The Arcturus Chamber Ensemble will do the honors, starting this Friday, June 1, at 8pm, at Adams House JCR, Harvard University.  They’ll do it again on Saturday night at 7:30 at the First Religious Society, Carlisle and, just to be on the safe side, one more time on Monday, June 11 at 7:30pm, at the Harvard Club, here in the Center of the Universe. 

There will be other works on all the programs, probably by dead white guys.  The concerts are free and open to the public although the Harvard Club requires you to “look spiffy,” according to Master Salvage.  I used to go there years ago with my old buddy Whit Stillman (whatever happened to him anyway) and it was pretty tight-assed then.  Probably hasn’t changed much.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

The Hybrid: The Two Worlds of Asha Srinivasan

“But he, Siddhartha, where did he belong? Whose life would he share? Whose language would he speak?” These words of Hermann Hesse depict Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) at a pivotal point in his quest to find purpose in the world. He will soon find it, seeing one where he once saw many, finding that the seemingly unrelated are related.

Later in the same book, Siddhartha, is a chapter called “By the River,” which inspired the title of Indian-American composer Asha Srinivasan’s newest work, By the River of Savathi, that will be premiered on June 2nd and 3rd, in New York City, as part of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s “Notable Women Festival: A Celebration of Women Composers”—result of winning first prize, among seventy-four applicants between the ages of twenty and thirty, in the BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) Foundation’s Women’s Music Commission. (more…)

by Patrick Durek
Contemporary Classical

The iGasm ‘Listener’ – A Potential Avant Garde Music Audience?

With news that Apple is suing the manufacturers of the iGasm it occurred to me last night that this perhaps was a possible new venue for contemporary music. I brought up the subject with a few friends over beers and the debate began, ‘What piece of avant garde music would be the ideal iGasm driver?’

Steve Reich? Philip Glass? Xenakis? Ferneyhough? The winner at the table seemed to be the genre of noize punk. Driving 200 BMP noise. But who knows? Maybe your music could be a hit at this latest of new music venues extended! What piece of music would drive the adventurous iGasm user into sensory overload?

by Jeff Harrington
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Born in the U.S.A.

Composers, painters, writers, the whole motley lot–have always depended upon the kindness of strangers. Timely financial interventions of the Lorenzo de’ Medici here, the Nadezda von Meck there, the Paul Sacher over there have greased the skids for the makers of many of the world’s great masterpieces.  Alas, those sort of patrons aren’t that plentiful nowadays and so a new “community” model of patronage has sprung up in which arts organizations pool their resources to commission new works.  I call it the “Biegel” method after S21 blogger and pianist Jeffrey Biegel.  I suspect he wasn’t the first to do it but he has turned joint financing of commissions into an art and a bustling career.

Joan Tower’s Made in America, which will be released by Naxos next Tuesday, is the latest example of the art of the deal, new music-style, and it adds an intriquing new wrinkle–a corporate sponsor. The project began as an attempt by 65 small orchestras from around the United States to pool their resources to commission a new work by a major American composer. With the help of the American Symphony Orchestra League, Meet The Composer, and Ford Motor Company Fund, (the latter patronage leading to the fortuitous branding, Ford Made in America), the project has brought Tower’s piece to towns nationwide.

Made in America, premiered in Glens Falls, New York in October 2005, and has received over 80 performances—making it perhaps the most-performed piece of new music in recent history—and is still making the rounds on the concert circuit.        

The new Naxos recording marks the first appearance of new Music Advisor Leonard Slatkin on record with the Nashville Symphony.

As for the music itself:  it’s not Ligeti but you knew that.  Made in America is more like a Copland chocolate plucked from a Whitman Americana Sampler.  Gooey and slightly pre-chewed, but you kind of like it.  

by Jerry Bowles