Sequenza21

On the Verge
Chamber Music by Sebastian Currier
Music From Copland House
Koch International

With last year’s magnificent New World release Quartetset and this equally outstanding recording of four fairly recent chamber pieces (including the Grawemeyer-awarding winning Static), Sebastian Currier has elbowed himself into the honorary “little music” seat at the big table where the Glasses, Adamses, and Reichs go to chew the fat.  So he’s a minaturist, but would Vermeer have been Vermeer on a Frank Stella-sized canvas? 

Currier is something of a music jokester, with performance directions like “almost too fast,” “almost too much,” “almost too little” and “bipolar” but it is his uncanny ability to re-imagine music you think you’ve heard before that most frequently draws a smile and a sense of good companionship.  Nobody since Stravinsky has done it better.  

Debut
Lowell Libermann
Trio Fedele
Artek

There is more than hint of powered wigs and petticoats in Lowell Libermann’s gracious, stately chamber music for ladies and gentlemen of quality.  No 20th century angst here. Dvořák sounds like a wild man by comparison. The flute, cello and piano pieces are pleasant enough and expertly played by the Trio Fedele but I couldn’t help imagining a live performance where Borat would wander in with a plastic bag filled with poop and ask the cello player what to do with it.

Chamber Musics III, IV, V
Aulis Sallinen
Virtuosi de Khlmo
CPO

Another music jokester but more in the William Bolcom tradition, relentlessly tonal and melodic, drawing mirth and drama out of genre references to tango and jazz.  Easy listening?  Sure.  Nobody writing “classical” music today writes better hooks.   That’s not necessarily a criticism in my book.

Everybody likes to grouse about the weather, and East Coasters, who’ve moved to California, may expect sun 24/7. And though that’s never the case here in San Francisco, the climate, and especially the cultural climate on both coasts, does have one very definite thing in common — the dearth of welcome homes for new music, plus a congenial band to spread the word.

New York has the long-running American Composers Orchestra, the S.E.M. Ensemble, and Bang On A Can, and the Bay Area, the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, which has been in operation for three years. Its March 10th concert at San Francisco’s Old First Church showed it going from strength to strength. A Springtime Romance fairly blossomed under music director and co-founder Mark Alburger’s careful, and for him, very relaxed guidance.

Katie Wreede’s 4 poem suite, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Childrens’ Garden, began its life as a viola / soprano duo for the composer, and Lisa Scola Prosek, and joining them here was pianist Alexis Alrich as the third member of their Serafina Trio. Wreede’s settings suggested a kind of childrens’ candor, which Scola Prosek made irresistibly charming with her superlative diction and strong projection; Wreede and Alrich added their simple, flowing parts to the whole. Scola Prosek was represented with another section, Wedding Scene, from her to be performed at San Francisco’s Thick House opera, Belfagor, based on Machiavelli’s comic novella of the same name. SFCCO presented its overture, which features a big bass clarinet solo for Rachel Condry, last December; Condry beguiled with her tone as well as her mastery of her part’s manifold challenges.

The challenge for any theatre or film composer is to make whatever world they enter come alive convincingly as sound, and Scola Prosek’s instincts seem right on the money, whether that world is Periclean Athens, Imperial Rome, or Renaissance Italy, which she conjured “simply” yet effectively with rich sustained harmonies for her vocal quintet — sopranos Maria Mikheyenko and Eliza O’Malley; alto Gar Wai Lee; tenor Aurelio Viscarra; and bass bartone Micah Epps — and her orchestra, which launched the scene with a bright snappy fanfare. Loren Jones’ Dancing On The Brink of the World, San Francisco — 1600 to The Present–was effective–he obviously knows how deliver standard styles — but much less imaginative, while the middle, slow movement, of Alexis Alrich’s Marimba Concerto, which soloist Matthew Cannon played with polish and point, though not baldly eclectic, lacked an overriding sense of personal style.

Chris Carrasco’s The Mind Suite fortunately had one, though its Glassian homages, especially in the inner part writing for strings, were easy to spot and not that interesting, though he may develop — he’s very young — in surprising ways. The big surprise in fact was Erling Wold’s way tongue in cheek Baron Ochs, which despite a veritable melange of styles, still seemed to hang together, unlike his opera Sub Pontio Pilato, which stylewise seemed like a mad dash out the door in mismatched socks. He also seems to have gotten the knack of how to orchestrate effectively for every choir. The two seats I sat in — “stage left” aisle 6 — and the first row of the Old First’s balcony — seemed to offer the same sonic picture: warm music/ audience friendly balances when the scoring was chamber refined, and harsh congealed climaxes when it wasn’t.

Consider this: Christopher Rouse does not compose every day; he starts every piece in full score, on measure one; he doesn’t use a piano much, because he can hardly play; he finds the entire process of composition miserable from start to finish and perennially aspires to artistic levels he believes he cannot attain; he only hears the bad things when his pieces get performed, and he is waiting for the day when people wake up and realize he’s no good.

Rouse is, as in his music, unafraid to air his honest thoughts. He can appear neurotic and contradictory one moment, pragmatic and confident the next. He was so thoroughly interesting, I couldn’t resist trying to switch him before interview’s end to my own favorite topics: music and education. But we still had music to discuss.

Rouse has two upcoming world premieres: a Requiem (commissioned by Soli Deo Gloria, Inc.) and Wolf Rounds (commissioned by the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music). The former takes place March 25^th at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the latter at Carnegie Hall on March 29^th.

Rouse has been thinking about a Requiem for a while and all along the idea of interspersing the Latin liturgical text with secular poetry has inspired him. In his new work, he uses the secular texts to tell the story of a man’s encounters with death: a Seamus Heaney poem describes death from the perspective of the man as a ten year-old boy; a poem by Michelangelo mourns the death of the man’s father; a Siegfried Sassoon poem relates the suicide of a comrade in the trenches of World War I. These poems – and others – are sung by a solo baritone; the Latin is reserved for the chorus. Musically, Rouse organizes the work into an instrumental palindrome, building up from the opening unaccompanied baritone solo to the tutti “Tuba mirum,” and closing again with the solo baritone.

In Wolf Rounds Rouse gets the chance to rock out. The 17-minute work for symphonic band attempts to capture the rhythmic vitality and virtuosic energy of Rouse’s favorite rock music – most notably Led Zeppelin. Over a driving beat, instruments take up variations of the same melodic line; the close, quasi-canonic counterpoint calls to mind the circling of wolves around their prey. There are even some flutter-tongue trombone growls: mimesis, but also a nod to John Corigliano’s Symphony No.3 – another work for symphonic band.

Near the end of the interview, Rouse told me he was worried about his stage bow at Disney Hall. It takes 90 seconds to reach the stage from the balcony, and it was possible the applause might not last that long. The performers have assured him they will stretch the applause in the unlikely event such measures are necessary.

P.S. He’s also on MySpace.

Last night’s Monday Evening Concert was programmed by Kent Nagano:  “Bach and the Music of Today”.  This is hardly a fresh theme, and last night’s program didn’t reveal any fresh ideas of resonance across the centuries.  But it did let us hear works of four composers of today, and that was welcome.

I first heard the music of Kurt Rohde when Nagano programmed his Double Trouble (2002) for the 2004 Ojai Festival.  Last night Rohde and his friend Ellen Ruth Rose performed the virtuosic parts for two violas, supported by a small ensemble of violin, cello, flute, clarinet, piano; I enjoyed last night’s performance much more than my vague recollection of the Ojai performance.  Rohde’s web site has clips from the first and the last of three movements, and listening is worth your time.  Rohde and Rose also played the delightful Viola, Viola (1997) of George Benjamin.  This work was written at the behest of Takemitsu for the opening of a Tokyo concert hall, and Benjamin gets a seldom-heard range of color and expressiveness from his viola duet.  Here’s the single clip from a recording of the work, but you won’t get a feeling for how good a work it is.  Fortunately, it receives reasonably broad appearance on programs.

The largest work of the first half of the concert was by Unsuk Chin, whose “Alice in Wonderland” opera is scheduled for performance in Munice this June, led by Nagano.  Chin’s work was Fantaisie Mecanique (1994/1997), a work for trumpet, trombone, piano, and percussion (two players).  The work has been recorded, and a single clip is available from the German Amazon site here.  Chin achieves a great amount of sonority from her five performers, and the piece was very well played last night.

Ichiro Nodaira was the most active person in last night’s concert.  He performed the four Bach works on Steinway.  (One of these was Busoni’s inflated “transcription” for piano of Bach’s “Chaconne” from the Partita in D Minor; this provided a rather bizarre conclusion to the program and its theme.)  Nodaira conducted three of the works.  One of these was his own composition, Texture du Delire I (1982) for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, piano and two electronic keyboards.  The work has been recorded with Nagano conducting the Intercontemporain, but I couldn’t find a clip.  Nodaira’s transcriptions of Bach keyboard works for orchestra has been performed by the Chicago Symphony and the NY Philharmonic.

Just read this on CrooksandLiars.com, one of the best political blogs out there if you’re a leftist radical like me. In any case, the Copyright Royalty Board is essentially moving forward with a plan to increase the royalty fees for playing music over the Web. All you folks out there who are for strict intellectual property protections and copyright, get ready to potentially lose your favorite Web radio programs. They’ll all be gone unless they are willing to pay through the nose in order to provide more money to the record companies (and remember, for all the pro-IP arguments out there, the reality is that the majority of the fees tend to go to the record companies, not the composers or performers).

What can be done? Probably not much, but signing a petition takes little time and effort so please go here and sign on. As C&L correctly point out, it will perhaps take a politician or two to take this on and reverse the momentum. But the more people who sign, the better—it can’t hurt.