Tag: concert review

Chamber Music, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Percussion, Women composers

2025 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood

2025 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood – July 24 – July 28, 2025

Tanglewood Music Center in the cool green Berkshires of Massachusetts (credit Aram Boghosian)

Every summer since 1964, the Tanglewood Music Center presents its Festival of Contemporary Music. According to Tanglewood’s materials:

The Festival of Contemporary Music (FCM) is one of the world’s premier showcases for works from the current musical landscape and landmark pieces from the new music vanguard of the 20th century. FCM affords Tanglewood Music Center Fellows the opportunity to explore unfamiliar repertoire and experience the value of direct collaboration with living composers.

Over the four FCM concerts (of the total of six) I heard carefully honed performances by the Tanglewood Fellows, Fromme players and the Mexican percussion quartet Tambuco.

Gabriela Ortiz is the director of FCM this year, the latest in the many high notes that the Mexican composer is enjoying. In the past season, she was composer in residence at Carnegie Hall, Curtis Institute, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León; her commissioned works were premiered at New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, and she won three Grammy awards.

Ortiz’s FCM programming traced the lineage of Mexican composers from Chavez to Lavista to Ortiz herself and to her student Diana Syrse, showed off the versatile talents of the Mexico-based percussion ensemble Tambuco and the incredible capacity of the Tanglewood Fellows to learn and perfect carefully honed performances of a mountain of new music.

Two beefs: Each program ran at least 25% longer than its stated duration. Each was densely programmed, and the ultralong set changes between each piece (often involving dozens of percussion instruments) were not accounted for in the production schedule. Nor were the often-lengthy introductions by Ortiz.

And, rather than presenting a spectrum of works by a range of composers, Ortiz programmed a great deal of her own music with a smattering of other works to provide context. This was in contrast to previous years in which a broader survey of music was presented.

Ortiz’s music is high-quality and thoughtful, employing interesting sounds and techniques, rhythms and sonorities, often telling a story in vivid colors and gestures. But pretty much every piece wore out its welcome, going on long after I felt it should have ended, without bringing in new ideas or furthering the experience of the piece.

A member of Tambuco playing the marimbula at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music 2025 (credit Gail Wein)

Which brought to mind a question that nags me from time to time – why don’t composers have editors? Authors of books have them. Journalists have them. But no one seems to be telling a composer, “Draw a double bar already, would ya?” Come to think of it, it may be the test of time that serves this purpose. There’s a lot of music written over the past 500 years that is justly neglected. Conversely, there’s good reason that many war horses in the canon have endured. It’s collective taste making, standing the test of time.

The program on July 25, “Mexico, Cuba, the U.S., and One Hundred Years of Percussion” featured, predictably, a barrage of percussion, and in every piece at least one unusual instrument was on stage. In Ortiz’s Rio de las Mariposas for two harps and steel drum, the disparate instruments blended surprisingly well. The glass harmonica gave Mario Lavista’s Musicas de Cristal a soundscape all its own. The soft slow music was enhanced by the ambient rustle of trees outside Ozawa Hall. Amadeo Roldán’s Rítmica V and Rítmica VI included a cascade of diverse instruments, the most unusual of which was a marimbula, a cross between a giant mbira (African thumb piano) and a cajón (a wooden box which the percussionist slaps with their hand). Hearing the mechanical sirens in Edgard Varese’s landmark Ionisation, was the peak of a memorable performance of that iconic 20th century work.

On July 26, the program “Music of Migration and Exile” included music by Ortiz and the Mexican-American composer Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon. This program, as all the others that I heard at the FCM, were marked by truly spectacular performances by the fellows. All around they play like much more seasoned pros, and with an enthusiasm and bravado that more experienced hands sometimes lack.

Zohn-Muldoon’s Suite from Comala is an extract of a larger work based on Pedro Páramo, a classic Mexican novella by Juan Rulfo. Zohn-Muldoon added guitar to this score for Pierrot ensemble plus percussion and guitar. The combination worked especially well in this alluring work, as the guitar sometimes aligned with the strings, and at other times with the percussion.

In addition to the programs I detailed above, the festival highlighted the talents of the American composers Ellen Reid and Gabriela Smith. It was great to hear some concert music from Mexico that doesn’t often get to U.S. stages. And there’s nothing like getting to revel in the sounds of contemporary concert music for four days, especially in the picturesque environs of the Tanglewood Music Center.

by Gail Wein
Composers, Concert review, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music: Orchestra Concert

Thomas Wilkins conducts TMC Orchestra.
Photo: Hilary Scott (courtesy of BSO).

 

2025 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music

Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra

July 28, 2025

 

LENOX – This year’s Festival of Contemporary Music was curated by composer Gabriela Ortiz. Born in Mexico City, Ortiz is one of the most prominent Latinx figures in twenty-first century classical music. Among other honors, she is composer-in-residence at Carnegie Hall and the Curtis Institute. Revolucióndiamantina, a recording of her music by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, won three GRAMMY Awards in 2025. This year, FCM has spotlighted music from Mexico, as well as that of women composers. After four chamber ensemble programs, including one consisting entirely of music for percussion, the festival concluded with a concert performed by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Wilkins and two fellows, Yiran Zhao and Leonard Weiss (Zhao is a former student of mine, so I will limit my remarks to saying that her teacher was proud). TMC is a student orchestra, but their talent and hard work abetted a high level of playing throughout. All of the concert’s music was written in the twenty-first century by living composers.

 

Bioluminescence Chaconne (2019), by Gabriella Smith (b. 1991), is built around overlapping ostinatos. String tremolandos are prominent in the beginning, and glissandos take on an increasingly important role. The piece has a gradual buildup to a powerful central section with brash tutti and stretches of syncopated percussion, followed by a return to its opening demeanor to conclude. Smith is a violinist, and it shows in the deft deployment of strings here. She has cited Bach’s D minor Chaconne as a touchstone, but its form repeats in a more symmetrical fashion than the shape of Bioluminescence Chaconne. The first word of the title may be more telling, as Smith has suggested that her experiences scuba diving, accompanying a team of researchers, was an inspiration for the piece. The piece works well, so well that next year the Boston Symphony Orchestra is playing it too.

 

Ellen Reid (b. 1983) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, and her piece When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist (2019) was commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic. In addition to a large orchestra, it features three sopranos in wide ranging wordless parts encompassing animated and sustained passages. Zoe McCormick, Kerrigan Bigelow, and Sarah Davis sang skilfully, blending well together and with the orchestra. Like Smith, Reid uses ostinatos, and these are contrasted with aching pitch slides and clusters. When the World… is likely her most dissonant piece, with both major and minor seconds featuring prominently in the motivic and harmonic material. Weiss brought out dynamic contrasts and imbued the legato sections with a strong sense of line.

 

Reid wrote When the World…  for the NY Phil’s Project 19, which celebrated a centenary of women’s suffrage in the United States. Her program note suggests that it doesn’t directly reflect this issue, and is instead focused on an emotional artistic journey, delineated in stages not dissimilar to those frequently found in grieving, moving from questioning to anger to acceptance.

 

Ortiz had two pieces on the program, one concluding the first half and the other played after intermission. Guest flutist Alejandro Escuer was the soloist on Altar de Viento (“Altar of the Wind,” 2015), a concerto specifically written for him. Escuer’s proficiency with extended techniques is comprehensive, and Ortiz makes good use of them in the piece. Escuer’s approach is also attuned to rhythm, and he even moves a bit during interludes where he isn’t playing, underlining the dance rhythms so often present in Altar de Viento. Indeed, the percussion section once again got a workout, playing traditional dances and new music gestures with equal aplomb. The rest of the orchestra was game to groove as well, and Wilkins led them through myriad metric shifts with suavity and clarity.

 

Hominum, Concerto for Orchestra (2017), is an imposing half-hour long piece. One of Ortiz’s finest, it was premiered in 2017 by another exemplary student ensemble, the Juilliard Orchestra. There’s nothing about the concerto that suggests it was sculpted with emerging artists in mind, as it is quite challenging. Composers who write a concerto for orchestra usually provide each cohort of the ensemble with music that spotlights their capacities and instruments’ essential characteristics. Ortiz revels in exploring the many textures that an orchestra can achieve in the twenty-first century. The virtuosity that talented musicians possess is explored as well. Hominum is at turns vivacious, brash, reflective, and powerful, and served as a rousing closer for FCM.

 

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Concerts, File Under?, New York

Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio and Friends

Photo: Michael Priest.

Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio and Friends

Midsummer Musicfest at Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd Street Y

July 9, 2025

 

NEW YORK – July often finds New York-based musicians playing in summer festivals well outside the city. The 92nd Street Y’s Midsummer MusicFest enticed a small handful of luminaries back to town to play chamber music at the venue’s Kaufmann Concert Hall. Violinist Joshua Bell, cellist Steven Isserlis, and pianist Jeremy Denk have joined forces before, but not for a while in New York. In 2024, to commemorate the one hundredth year of his passing, they toured programs of music by the French composer Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924). They revisited these works at the Y on Wednesday, July 9 and Saturday, July 12. 

 

As Isserlis pointed out in remarks from the stage, Fauré isn’t usually mentioned in the same breath as Debussy and Ravel, but he probably should be. The likely reason is that relatively little of his music was large-scale, and of these only the orchestral arrangement of the Pavane and the Requiem are regularly programmed. On the other hand, his songs and chamber music are a rich repertoire demonstrating abundant compositional gifts; memorable melodies, vivid harmonies, and consummate craftsmanship. Isserlis’s case for Fauré was eloquent, and the playing by the trio, joined by violinist Irène Duval and violist Blythe Teh Engstroem, even more so. 

 

One of the most challenging aspects of playing Fauré’s music is the issue of tempo, namely how much rubato one should use. Reports of the composer’s frequent performances as a pianist suggest that he preferred steady tempos, with flexibility where indicated, seldom admitting extravagances. This became even more true in his late performances, where profound hearing loss meant that coordination with collaborators became all the more important. 

 

In their renditions of the Violin Sonata No. 1 in A Major, Opus 13, Bell and Denk proved that one can be amply expressive without excessive rubato. Their version of the sonata presented its many beautiful tunes and intricate phrasing with both detailed attention and luminous warmth. Its soaring first theme is tempting to exaggerate in the aforementioned manner. Bell instead played expressively, never overdoing it. The audience at the Y couldn’t restrain themselves from bursting into applause after the conclusion of the first movement, enthusiasm trumping any worries about a faux pas. Fauré was ambidextrous, and even when they are not virtuosic, his piano parts can prove challenging. Denk enjoys a good challenge, and he inhabits Fauré’s music with estimable suavity. The sense of ensemble reminded one that these are avid chamber musicians who, by long association, are attuned to one another with razor focus. The second and third movements were no less impressive, and the applause after the entire work’s conclusion was no less resounding. 

 

Isserlis joined Denk for a duo version of the Barcarolle in F-sharp Minor, Opus 66. The cellist has performed Fauré’s Cello Sonata with Denk, but on this evening he contented himself with arrangements of some of the composer’s best-loved piano pieces, their melodies underscored by the addition of cello. In the second half, he also performed the Sicilienne, Opus 78, and Berceuse, Opus 16. The pieces recast in this way underscore memorable melodies, and elsewhere resonant bass notes are doubled and thereby amplified. Denk made sure that the piano, despite inherently different attack and decay profiles from the cello, was in sync with the string instrument, making for a beautiful blended sound. 

Photo: Michael Priest.

Duval and Teh Engstroem performed with the trio in the Piano Quintet No. 1 in D minor, Opus 89. The resulting group had a simpatico interaction, its opening allegro movement’s interlacing lines being given particular attention, and throughout a buoyant sense of phrasing. D minor is often used in funereal contexts, the Mozart Requiem and Bach’s D minor Toccata for solo violin to name two. Even in its lyrical slow movement, Fauré’s Piano Quintet never seems to plumb dolorous depths. Instead, the piece feels like a dramatic journey that seldom loses hope for a destination. The concluding third movement was an ample payoff. Instead of ending in minor, it is in D major, with its main theme principally scalar in design. There are little modal inflections around the edges, imparting an impressionist ambience. The performance itself was effusive and unerring, with pinpoint execution of complexly overlapping entrances, thoughtfully nuanced dynamics, and rousing tutti passages. Its close was triumphal in character.

 

There may not be many hits among Fauré’s orchestral works, but the quintet is chamber music writ large. It is an ambitious piece cast in three sizable movements that clocks in at around a half hour in duration. The composer took great pains to create the version that audiences hear today, starting it around 1887 and taking nearly twenty years to finalize the score. He wrote a second in C minor, completed in 1921, and they both have set a high standard for the genre. The Y’s Midsummer Musicfest fete of Fauré did well by him, and one hopes that it doesn’t take an anniversary year for further championing of this fine composer. 

 

  • Christian Carey
by Christian Carey
Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

The Met Orchestra Plays Ortiz, Blanchard, and More at Carnegie Hall

Photo: Arthur Elgort.

 

The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Music Director and Conductor

Angel Blue, Soprano

Carnegie Hall, April 18, 2025

Published on Sequenza 21 

By Christian Carey

 

NEW YORK – Virtually since its inception, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Met Orchestra for short, has given concerts alongside its main role accompanying operas. For over a hundred years, this has allowed the ensemble to stretch itself, performing vocal works, unstaged or semi-staged operas, repertoire staples, and several premieres. Yannick Nézet-Séguin has relished the opportunity to work with the musicians in this capacity. On Wednesday night, the Met Orchestra premiered a suite from Fire Up in My Bones, an opera staged at the Met by Terence Blanchard. They also performed pieces by Carnegie Hall’s current Debs Composer Chair Gabriela Ortiz, Leonard Bernstein, and Antonin Dvořák. 

 

Ortiz’s piece, Antrópolis (2018, revised 2019), was an ebullient opener, recalling the various nightclubs the composer had frequented during her youthful years in Mexico City. The piece is a showcase for percussion, with varied dance rhythms, ranging from mambo and rumba to incipient techno, articulated by timpani soloist Parker Lee and the rest of the percussion cohort.

 

Symphony No. 1, “Jeremiah,” (1942), was written when Bernstein was twenty-three. Its directness of expression betrays a bit of naivete that makes it somewhat less compelling than his musical theater pieces of the forties. Still, the orchestration demonstrates an impressive grasp of mid-twentieth century music, both the Americana style of Aaron Copland and Roy Harris, and the neoclassical music of Stravinsky, who seems to loom large over the piece. Mahler, a composer for whom Bernstein, throughout his career, advocated strongly, serves as another touchstone, particularly in the inclusion of a soprano soloist in the final movement of Jeremiah. The texts are taken from the Hebrew Bible book “The Lamentations of Jeremiah,” selected to analogize the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem with the plight of Jewish people in Europe under the Nazi regime. 

 

Soprano Angel Blue, standing on a platform in the midst of the orchestra, declaimed the music with an authoritative demeanor that underscored its mournful message, singing with flawless legato and rich tone. Here and elsewhere, Nézet-Séguin was a commanding presence, underscoring the rhythmic vitality of the piece’s earlier mixed meter sections only to build it to a stirring climax by the symphony’s conclusion. 

 

Terence Blanchard’s opera Fire Up in My Bones was staged with jazz musicians, including Blanchard, participating. He created a suite of music from the opera with the Met Orchestra’s forces, sans additional musicians, in mind. Apart from an interlude depicting the sounds of a chicken processing plant, which includes syncopated percussion in playful fashion, Blanchard instead presents the opera’s powerful thematic material depicting human struggle. Charles M. Blow’s memoir, in which, among other experiences, he discusses being abused as a child and coming to terms with his homosexuality, is a compelling story, and the arias from Fire Up in My Bones provide it with the gravitas it deserves. The suite presents selections from these set pieces in sweeping melodies that are romantic in scope. The harmony sits astride Mahlerian late tonality and a fluid use of jazz vocabulary, ending on a charged chord rife with dissonant extensions. Blanchard’s scoring is fluent in a variety of idioms, and even if the suite only tells part of Fire Up in My Bones’s musical story, it is replete with well-paced dramatic contrasts.

 

The concert concluded with one of the most beloved pieces by Dvořák, his Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” It was written in 1893, during his extended visit to the United States. Dvořák advocated for composers from the United States to explore their own nation’s folk music, mining it for material, just as he did with vernacular Czech music. Viewing the music of native Americans and spirituals as the most consummately authentic folk music in the US, he recommended that their works be collected and employed by the predominantly white male students who were his composition pupils in New York. One can argue about the authenticity of this practice through a contemporary lens, but it certainly made an impression on US composers of that generation and successive ones. 

 

Musicologists love debating the derivation of the materials Dvořák used in the New World Symphony. He insisted that there were no direct quotations in the piece. Apart from the rhythm of a tom-tom drum, that is likely the case, although its most famous tune, the achingly beautiful theme from its second movement, was later used to create a spiritual-styled song. Much of the music sounds like it could just as easily have been written while Dvořák was in Europe. Whatever the pedigree of its sources, the Ninth Symphony is a fantastic piece and the Met Orchestra performed it gloriously. 

 

Nézet-Séguin approached the piece in energetic fashion, allowing it to speak for itself mostly in tempo rather than using too much rubato. This returned a sense of balance to the phrasal and rhythmic construction of a piece that can, upon occasion, seem  schmaltzy in its presentation. The sections of the aforementioned second movement that called for pliable moments seemed all the more noteworthy as a result. This was abetted by superlative playing from the winds and brass, particularly Pedro R. Díaz, who performed the English horn solo in eloquently beautiful fashion. The strings had many moments to shine as well, playing the theme of the scherzo, marked molto vivace, with rhythmically incisive élan. The blend in tutti sections was impressive as well. 

 

While there were no pains to overstate it, the program was nicely tied together by the Symphony “From the New World.” Each composer in their own way explored the cultural and musical traditions that resonated with them. Ortiz’s Latin dance, Bernstein’s Jewish liturgical references and tropes on folk music, and Blanchard’s jazz chords, however different they sounded, came from a place of deep cultural resonance for each respective composer. Thus, the Met Orchestra’s concert was both diverse in its offerings and well curated. A memorable evening of music.

 

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Concert review, Contemporary Classical, early music, Festivals, File Under?, New York

Alisa Weilerstein’s Fragments 3 Program at Zankel Hall (Concert review)

 

Photo: Richard Termine

Fragments 3: Alisa Weilerstein at Zankel Hall

May 20th, 2025

Published in Sequenza 21

By Christian Carey

 

NEW YORK – Alisa Weilerstein is a supremely gifted cellist, and it is hard to imagine being anything less than riveted by her playing. At Zankel Hall last Tuesday, she made decisions for her Fragments project that seemed to be needlessly distracting. 

There are six Fragments programs all told, each based on one of the Bach Suites, joined by new pieces commissioned for the project. Fragments 3 featured the third cello suite alongside pieces by Joseph Hallman, Thomas Larcher, Jeffrey Mumford, and Carlos Simon. A design team helped to bring Weilerstein’s concept to life. The set, by Seth Reiser was elegantly simple, a multi-sided screen behind Weilerstein, and costume designer Molly Irelan did a fine job creating a chic yet downtown look for the cellist. The effective lighting, also by Reiser, included various spotlights as well as a moving magic lamp that accompanied moments of intensity. Director Elkanah Pulitzer did not seem to overtly interfere with Weilerstein’s usual performing demeanor. Perhaps ordering and pacing were part of her remit. 

 

The fragmenting of the pieces themselves is where things got challenging for listeners. Instead of presenting each of them in toto, individual movements of all of the pieces, Bach included, were excerpted out of order. In addition, audience members weren’t given a listing of the ordering of these sections, having to wait until after the concert to download a program, using a QR code found in the booklet. In remarks that were printed for consumption beforehand, Weilerstein exhorted the audience to “just listen.” This, by the way, is every reviewer’s nightmare – playing “name that tune” with pieces that you have never yet heard. 

 

It is laudable that so many new works for solo cello have come from this project. However, one feels for the composers, who, instead of being given a bow, were represented by the fragmenting of their pieces into a mix without metadata. It can be said with confidence that all four of the commissioned composers know cello writing authoritatively, including a catalog of extended techniques that featured Weilerstein’s adventurous streak and admirable facility to excellent advantage. Indeed, Simon and Hallmark seemed to invigorate their writing with extra doses of well-integrated 21st century virtuosity.

 

It was a bit disorienting to hear the Allemande, the second movement of Bach’s suite, appear as the penultimate fragment. Out of order though its movements may have been, the performance of the Bach suite was engaging, played with consummate care and thoughtful phrasing. Most of the program relied on the juxtaposition of old and new music. Only Mumford, with a few ostinatos in an otherwise dazzlingly modernist endeavor, provided a hat tip to Bach. Weilerstein finished the recital with the third movement of Thomas Larcher’s now here, which culminated with a rocket-fueled flourish, dazzling lamplight included. 

Photo: Richard Termine

In the bygone times of analog mixtapes, curation seemed a prerequisite. Playlisting mixes has now become the way that many people usually listen on digital platforms, often passively and without worrying about the aforementioned metadata. When it comes to music consumption, an encroaching facelessness of content seems to be what’s trending. Revising the recital is a welcome endeavor, and annotating program booklets needn’t be an ossified affair. When engaged, just listening is fine, and may be preferable to constantly rifling through the program notes instead of fully attending to the performance. Perhaps supertitles briefly listing who is being played could be a compromise, a mix without undue preconceptual baggage. 

 

All six installations of Fragments will be presented this week at the Spoleto Festival  over four nights: May 26, 28, 29, and 31. Bring your cell phone and click on those QR codes as soon as the applause concludes. 

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
Choral Music, Concert review, early music, File Under?, New York

Stile Antico Sings Palestrina at St. Mary’s

Photo: Eduardus Lee.

Stile Antico Sings Palestrina at St. Mary’s

March 29, 2025

Church of St. Mary the Virgin

 

NEW YORK – Celebrating their twentieth year, the vocal ensemble Stile Antico brought a program dedicated to the 500th anniversary of the composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s birth to Miller Theatre’s Early Music Series. The concert was held at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in midtown, a space that Miller has employed to host a number of Renaissance music performances.

 

Stile Antico appeared with only eleven singers, instead of their usual complement of a dozen. Baritone Gareth Thomas was ill and couldn’t perform. Between numbers, several of the singers hid surreptitious coughs, leading one to think that a bug had plagued the group en route. The quality of the performance didn’t suffer: they still sang sublimely. 

 

The centerpiece of Stile Antico’s latest recording, The Golden Era: Palestrina (Decca, 2025), is perhaps his most famous piece, Missa Papae Marcelli. A great deal of lore has grown up around it, with a story that Palestrina wrote it in part to convince the more conservative members of the Council of Trent that they needn’t ban polyphony and revert exclusively to plainchant in services. Composers could write in multiple parts and still clearly convey the text. While it is unlikely that the Pope Marcellus Mass served as a test piece, Palestrina took pains to write polyphony that never obscured the words. Many composers, some even generations later, imitated what had come to be called the stile antico style of declamation and use of dissonance. 

 

Stile Antico’s performance of Missa Papae Marcelli on the recording is impressive, a standout that is among the best in a crowded field. Their diction is crystal clear, and the tone and blend of the ensemble is particularly beautiful. At St. Mary’s, the mass’s Credo was featured, and it was an expansive display that was well-paced to express the drama inherent in various passages of the piece. 

 

A number of motets by the composer were also included on the program. Tu es Petrus and Exsultate Deo displayed fleet runs and ricocheting exchanges. Sicut servus was performed with fetching delicacy, and Nigra sum sed formosa was imbued with stately elegance. 

Photo: Eduardus Lee.

Composers besides Palestrina who also served in Rome were on the program as well. Josquin’s Salve regina, with a stark bass motive and a texture frequently divided into duets, represented one of the most prominent elder statesmen of the early Renaissance. Jacques Arcadelt’s Pater noster is an example of the florid writing and frequent use of extra-liturgical texts and tunes that contributed to the aforementioned controversy at the Council of Trent. It is hard to lay blame at Arcadelt’s doorstep when hearing his music, which is pleasing in its bustling rhythms and multihued chords. Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Trahe me post te and Orlando de Lassus’s Musica dei donum represented works by esteemed contemporaries. The former has an austere yet attractive manner and the latter, a six-voice motet, is more intricate in presentation. Christus resurgens was by Gregorio Allegri, a composer of the next generation, who continued in Palestrina’s footsteps, composing music in stile antico style. The piece’s use of antiphony is particularly striking. Another later composer, Felice Anerio, who succeeded Palestrina in the Papal Choir, combined passages of relatively homophonic declamation with expressive chromaticism in his Christus factus est.

 

The program also included a new work, A Gift of Heaven by the English composer Cheryl Frances Hoad, who used the preface to a publication by Palestrina, in which he flattered the dedicatee, as the text for her piece. Sumptuous polychords undergirded a solo tenor imparting what Frances Hoad describes as “buttering up a patron.” 

 

Sadly, Stile Antico at eleven could not finish the program with the impressive 12-voice motet Laudate Dominum a 12. They substituted another Palestrina work, Surge Propera Amica Mea, with corruscating runs and an impressive final cadential section, creating an exuberant finale. The group returned to offer something completely different for an encore, “The Silver Swan,” a madrigal by the English composer Orlando Gibbons. It provided a delicately lyrical close to an evening of exquisitely well-performed music. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Classical Music, Concert review, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Lincoln Center, New York, Orchestras, Twentieth Century Composer, Vocals

Remaking a Rug Concert: Boulez at 100

David Robertson conducts NY Phil
Photo: Brandon Patoc

Sound On: A Tribute to Boulez

The New York Philharmonic, Conducted by David Robertson

Jane McIntyre, Soprano

David Geffen Hall, January 25, 2025

By Christian Carey – Sequenza 21

 

NEW YORK – If you think that audience development is a relatively new practice, then you may not have heard of Rug Concerts. In the 1970s, during Pierre Boulez’s tenure as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, these were an experiment to attempt to attract young people and downtown artsy types to try a concert at Avery Fisher Hall. Instead of rows of seating, rugs were strewn about the hall, inviting audience members to lounge in informal fashion while hearing a concert. Revisiting the first of these concerts, its program was presented in its entirety, albeit to audience members in the conventional seating setup of David Geffen Hall: no rugs rolled out. 

 

The first half of the concert featured repertory works. J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major was given a period-informed performance by a small ensemble. Sheryl Staples, the concertmaster for the evening, providing the aphoristic solo part with suave elegance, and bassist Timothy Cobb and harpsichordist Paolo Bordignon were an incisive continuo pairing. 

 

Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 2 in B-flat is an impressively beautiful piece, especially considering that it was completed when the composer was just eighteen. I have heard three different conductors lead this symphony with the NY Phil, a proto-romantic and broadly lyrical rendition from Kurt Masur, a breakneck-pace version informed by early music practice given by Alan Gilbert, and Robertson’s, which deployed a chamber-sized orchestra and emphasized the classical elements in Schubert’s early instrumental music. One hesitates to make a Goldilocks comparison, but Robertson’s interpretation felt just right. 

 

The second half of the program consisted of music from the twentieth century. Anton Webern’s Symphony, completed in 1928, was a totemic work for the postwar avant-garde, notably Boulez. It is a set of variations that uses the 12-tone method in a way that points toward the systematic organization of serialism, and is also filled with canons, reflective of Webern’s dissertation on the Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac. The piece is aphoristic with a thin texture, but deceptively challenging to perform, to connect the web of its lines in convincing fashion. The NY Phil navigated these demands under Robertson’s detailed direction with an ease of delivery that one seldom hears in the performance of Webern. Principal clarinetist Anthony McGill, who was given particularly disjunct lines to play, demonstrated a keen awareness of the importance of legato in the piece, even when leaping through dissonances.

Photo: Brandon Patoc

Boulez’s Pli selon pli: Portrait de Mallarmé, composed in 1957, was one of the pieces that put him on the map as an important creator. Its vocalist is tasked with significant interpretative challenges and a detailed and rangy score. Jana McIntyre performed commandingly, rendering the surrealist poetry with a wondrous exuberance for its strangeness, singing clarion top notes and plummy ones below the staff. A singer to watch for. The percussion section, which channels more than a bit of gamelan influence, played superlatively. Robertson was a close colleague of Boulez, and is a former director of Ensemble Intercontemporain. His conducting of Pli selon pli is the most authoritative that we have left since the composer’s passing. 

 

The concert concluded with Igor Stravinsky’s concert suite version of L’Histoire du Soldat. Composed in 1918, it is for a septet of musicians and includes eight sections from the larger piece. One of the last pieces in Stravinsky’s Russian period of composition, it mixes folk tunes with prescient shadings of the neoclassicism that was to follow in his music. Three dances, a tango, waltz, and ragtime, were particularly well-played, with Staples animating the characteristic rhythms of each. Trumpeter Christopher Martin and trombonist Colin Williams played with crackling energy, McGill and bassoonist Judith LeClair navigated dissonant intervals with laser beam tuning, and Cobb and percussionist Chris Lamb imbued the march movements with propulsive kineticism. 

 

It is fortunate for the New York Phil that Robertson works in the neighborhood, just across the street as Director of Orchestral Studies at the Juilliard School. One hopes that they continue to avail themselves of his considerable talent and warm presence on the podium.

Photo: Brandon Patoc

 

by Christian Carey
Classical Music, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, New York, Opera, Vocals

Compelling and Visceral: “In a Grove” and Arooj Aftab at Prototype

In a Grove at Prototype Festival 2025 (credit Maria Baranova)

PROTOTYPE – OPERA | THEATRE | NOW defines itself as a “festival of visionary opera-theatre and music-theatre works”. Its presentation of In a Grove (January 16 – 19, 2025) was as close as Prototype comes to conventional opera in the context of eschewing tradition. It was also one of the most compelling productions I’ve seen in a long time. The intimate setting at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater augmented the visceral impact.

The story unfolded in four sections, each expressing a different character’s point of view of a murder in the woods. If that description sounds like the Kurosawa film Rashomon, it’s because that film was based on the same book: In a Grove, a century-old short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

The four singers: John Brancy, Chuanyuan Liu, Paul Appleby, and Mikaela Bennett, all excellent vocalists and actors, played multiple roles. Surtitles were projected above the stage, but for the most part they were not necessary to decipher Stephanie Fleishman’s effective libretto.

Christopher Cerrone’s melodic material was memorable without being trite. As I left the theatre after the performance, the haunting lament of the last scene continued to ring in my ears. Director Mary Birnbaum’s concept was exceptionally powerful in its simplicity, with no props and no set, save for a large pane of glass that glided in to bisect the stage at certain points. The glass panel also served as a mirror in some scenes.

Cerrone’s vocal score was accompanied by ten instrumentalists of the Metropolis Ensemble, led by Luke Poeppel (standing in for music director Raquel Acevedo Klein on the day I attended). The orchestration included some appropriately eerie effects, such as drawing a violin bow across the edge of a xylophone.

I was very much captivated by this powerful drama and its excellent performance.

The Pakistani-American singer and composer Arooj Aftab’s performance couldn’t be classified as an opera at all, though one can think of her concept album Night Reigns as a dramatic song cycle in the guise of pop culture. She appeared with her band for a one-hour set at HERE’s Dorothy B. Williams Theatre January 15 – 17.

Aftab’s style bridges world music and jazz with an ethereal aesthetic. Her presentation was casual and unusual – she distributed shots of whiskey to the audience in mid-show. It was also transporting; an atmosphere and music that took me out of the real world, and her clear lilting voice had an emotional impact. Never mind that most of the words were in Urdu. The meaning came across easily.

In this intimate space, seeing Arooj and her band – harpist Maeve Gilchrist, bass player Zwelakhe-Duma Bell Le Pere and Engin Kaan Gunaydin on percussion – was a visceral, and, enhanced by whisps of smoke created by dry ice, often ethereal experience.

by Gail Wein
CD Review, Concert review, File Under?, Piano, Twentieth Century Composer

Jeremy Denk at 92nd Street Y (Concert Review

Jeremy Denk, piano
Kaufmann Concert Hall
92nd Street Y

 

92nd Street Y

Thursday, December 2024

Photos courtesy of Joseph Sinnott

 

NEW YORK – When devising a recital program, pianist Jeremy Denk always provides thematic interest to abet the musical diversions. The centerpiece and entire second half of his performance at the 92nd Street Y was the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives, a totemic work in the repertoire of twentieth century piano music. Denk is an Ives specialist, having recorded both the piano and violin sonatas for Nonesuch (more on that later). 

 

The first half of the recital complemented Ives with a composer he revered (and quoted in the Concord Sonata), Beethoven. The Opus 90 Piano Sonata in E-minor is a two movement piece that moves to E-major in the second movement. It is relatively brief but chock full of mercurial scalar passages in its first movement. The second movement, at a slower tempo but still played with quicksilver ornaments, is a theme and variations of a fetching melody, “to be played in a singing manner.” The recital’s first half concluded with a sonata from Beethoven’s late period, his second to last to be written, Op, 110 in A-flat Major. The first movement, marked moderato cantabile, is slower than the usual allegro one finds in this part of a sonata. However, it has two distinct themes and a minor key development, keeping it in the sonata genre. It’s no accident that during this time period Beethoven was also working on the Missa Solemnis. The incisive second movement features bold attacks and anapestic cascades of short motives. The finale is fascinating, with material that imitates recitatives and quotes Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which is followed by a fugue in the tonic key. Denk played both sonatas fluently, occasionally looking out at the audience to share Beethoven’s mood with a bold visage.

 

Sandwiched between the sonatas was a group of miniatures that explored Black American musical genres. Scott Joplin’s rag Bethena began the group with characteristically syncopated rhythms and imaginative chord progressions. This was followed by The Banjo, a piece by Louis Moreau Gottschalk that Denk took at a spirited pace. Its refrain is a keen imitation of the African instrument transplanted to the US, but the piece takes off into stratospheric arpeggios and nimble runs that transform the material into a virtuosic vehicle. William Bolcom was a pivotal figure in the ragtime revival, and one of his rags, “Graceful Ghost Rag,” provided a stylistically true homage to the composer. A musical theater song, “Just in TIme,” by Jule Styne was presented in an extroverted arrangement by the pianist Ethan Iverson of Nina Simone’s iconic recording. 

Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860,”  pays tribute to the American transcendentalists, an important philosophical movement for Ives. Its gestation is a moving target, the first edition composed between 1916-1920 and the piece, characteristic of Ives, being edited over and over until the premiere in 1938 by John Kilpatrick. It is intricately notated, with few barlines, complex rhythms, and overlapping lines and chords. Ives felt that the lack of conventional structuring would help the music to flow.

 

The first movement, “Emerson,” introduces the opening motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as an idée fixe that interpenetrates other movements of the sonata, but is developed, treated in counterpoint, and presented in the midst of shards of dissonance. As is Ives’s practice, frequent incongruous asides occur, including a stride passage in the middle of the movement and quotations of hymns and popular songs. This persists throughout.

 

The second movement, “Hawthorne,” begins with scherzo-like figures and continues to introduce sprightly material, even including a bit of ragtime, and later sonorities that are meant to evoke a church service, including bell sounds created by pressing the black keys with a block of wood. The Beethoven theme is only joined by the “main theme” of the piece in the third movement, “The Alcotts.” The polytonal voicing of the variations on Beethoven 5 move it into the harmonic world of Stravinsky. In the final movement, “Thoreau,” Claire Chase was the guest flutist that is an optional component of the sonata, providing a mischievous cameo. The piano meanwhile, incorporates snatches of popular music from the 1910s all the way back to the Civil War, the two themes, and Protestant hymnody into impressionist water music that signifies Thoreau’s residence at Walden Pond. 

This was an authoritative performance, unbelievably accurate and technically assured despite its herculean challenges. Denk is one of the great Ives interpreters of our time. The audience applauded for more, but how do you follow the Concord Sonata? Denk took off his jacket and picked up his wood block to indicate that the memorable evening was concluded. 

The 150th anniversary of Ives’s birth is being celebrated this year by a number of concerts and recordings. Denk’s recorded contribution is Ives Denk (Nonesuch). A double disc, it includes a remastered version of his benchmark recording of the piano sonatas as well as a recording of the violin sonatas with Stefan Jackiw. The violinist is an excellent partner, understanding the roles of quotation, collage, the doppler effect, and dissonance in these pieces. The revival meeting movement of the second sonata is incandescent, and the final movement of the first sonata opens with a thrill ride redolent with popular music. Its central section is slow, with folk melodies haloed by ambiguous arpeggiations. A gradual accelerando returns the music to its earlier demeanor, then the sonata concludes with a tremolandos and a fade. The entire Fourth Sonata, “Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting,” is delightful. 

 

Denk’s traversal of the piano sonatas displays dazzling playing and thoughtful interpretations. Ives has emphatic tendencies, but his music can also display great tenderness. Denk embodies all of the contrasting shifts that result, providing detailed dynamic and articulative contrasts, shading the music with myriad tone colors. Ives Denk is one of my favorite recordings of 2024.

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
Choral Music, Concert review, early music, File Under?

Two Early Music Groups Visit New York (Concert Review)

PHOTO CREDIT – Richard Termine

Two Early Music Ensembles Visit New York

Iestyn Davies, countertenor, Fretwork, viols, and Silas Wollston, organ and virginal, Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, December 3rd, 2024

The Tallis Scholars, presented by Miller Theatre’s Early Music Series at Church of St. Mary the Virgin, December 5th, 2024

NEW YORK – This past week’s concert schedule featured two early music ensembles, one specializing in early baroque music, and the other known for renaissance repertoire but presenting a more wide-ranging program. 

The countertenor Iestyn Davies is a highly regarded interpreter of Handel’s operas. He also appeared in Claire van Kempen’s play Farinelli and the King, which bowed at London’s Globe Theatre and on Broadway. At Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, he joined the viol quintet Fretwork – Emilia Benjamin, Jonathan Rees, Joanna Levine, Sam Stadlen, and Richard Boothby – and Silas Wollston, who played organ and virginals, for a program of seventeenth century cantatas. Much of the program was from the CD Lamento (Signum Classics, 2021), and was organized as a geographical tour of repertoire. 

Franz Tunder (1614-1667) was from Northern Germany, and a talented, underappreciated composer. His Salve mi Jesu and An Wasserflüssen Babylon began the concert. The sense of connection among the musicians was immediately apparent. Davies has a remarkably even and sleek-toned voice. Throughout his entire range in an extensive program of challenging repertoire, the countertenor never showed a hint of difficulty. 

The viols, arranged from small to large in size, are fascinating instruments to watch being played, and Fretwork’s long acquaintance – they have performed together for four decades – was immediately apparent. They elicited tone colors that were alternatingly sweet, boisterous, and tinged with melancholy. After the Tunder, they performed a Canzon á 5 by Samuel Scheidt (1587-1654), which alternated between contrapuntal passages and vibrant tutti. A still more elaborate Canzona by the composer was included in the second half. Also on the first half was a suite of dances by Johann Hermann Schein (1586-1630), who was cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where J.S. Bach later worked. These elegant works embodied the various demeanors listed above with rhythmic suavity. An additional suite by Shein, with a more doleful cast, was performed on the second half. 

Another northerner, Christian Geist (ca. 1650-1711) was represented by Es war aber an der Stätte, which featured tasteful organ playing by Wollston on an extended recitative. The first half ended with a composer in the prolific Bach line, Johann Christoph (1642-1703), the first Southerner represented, who spent his career in Eisenach. Ach, dass ich Wassers gnug hätte, subtitled Lamento, is a moving work, with harmonic swerves and chromatic embellishments that emphasize its grief-stricken text. Davies embodied the work’s sense of pathos with an emotive but elegantly rendered performance. 

The second half first returned to a Northern German composer, Dietrich Buxtehude (ca. 1637-1707), whose Jubilate Domino, omnis terra changed the mood to one of ebullience. Davies fluidly sang the piece’s melismatic lines, while the syncopated rhythms of the viols and the organ’s ornaments emphasized the text’s joyous mood. The composer was also represented by Klage Lied, which returned to the mood of lamentation. 

A program of seventeenth century music wouldn’t seem complete without Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672), and he was represented with Erbarm dich mein, O Herre Gott. In its tragic mood, one could hear the pain and suffering inflicted during the Thirty Years War, which virtually cleared Dresden’s choir loft and left the composer to write many solo cantatas and duos. 

The program concluded with O dulce nomen Jesu, by the Italian composer Giovanni Felice Sances (ca. 1600-1679), who worked in Vienna at the Imperial Palace.  The piece was quite akin to early opera, with the mellifluous repeated trills used by Monteverdi, triple dance rhythms, and dashes of modal writing. Davies’ operatic background made him right at home. 

There were two encores, the first a surprise, Dave Brubeck’s “Weep No More” (arranged by Jonathan Rhys), which was performed with a bluesy,noirish feel. Fretwork proved that viols can play West Coast Jazz, and Davies adopted a cornet-like tone. The second, Wer sich dem Himmel immergëben by Philipp Heinrich Erlebach (1657-1714) left the audience basking in the ambience of the German baroque.

Tallis Scholars
Photo: Hugo Glendinning

On December 5th at Church of St. Mary the Virgin in midtown, Miller Theatre’s Early Music Series presented The Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Phillips. A nearly annual occurrence, the group often performs Renaissance music with a Marian subject.Last year the visit of angels to the shepherds provided different repertoire that included stirring music by Clemens non Papa. This year, the group focused on chant and chant-inspired pieces from the Christmas season that ranged in date from the 11th to the 21st centuries. 

The theme for the concert was In dulci jubilo, and it began with two verses from the eponymous work by Hieronymous Praetorious (1560-1629). The plainchant In principio omnes by the cloistered nun and polymath Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) followed, with sopranos from the choir performing the chant and the rest holding a drone in octaves. Shifting to the later Renaissance, Salve Regina by Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina (c. 1525-1594) alternated between canonic and tutti passages. It was followed by another chant by Hildegard, O virtus sapientiae, performed by the group’s women. Hildegard’s chants can be rangy, and the solid tone from top to bottom was impressively blended. Two more were featured later on the program, O ignis spiritus, in a poised solo by alto Elisabeh Paul, and a group performance of O ecclesia oculi tui. 

Peter Phillips has written about the difficulties posed by the music of Orlando de Lassus (c. 1532-1594). Its ranges benefit from the incorporation of instruments on some of the parts, but the composer’s Nunc dimittis ‘Il Magnanimo Pietro’ sounded incredibly assured. Its performance was one of the best of the polyphonic music on the program.

The works of a living composer were also included. The Estonian Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) has been championed by the Tallis Scholars, who have recorded a disc of his music. Pärt writes in a bespoke style he calls tintinnabuli, where the titular bell sounds are created by two voices, one singing a linear, chant-like part, and the other arpeggiating triads. The result is lustrous with tangy dissonances. Magnificat is one of his best known pieces, and the Tallis Scholars performed it with superb tuning and imposing fervor. Da Pacem Domine was written in 2004, and dedicated to victims of the Madrid train bombings. Chords cascade between voices, including a downward lamento motive. 

The program’s subordinate theme was Salve Regina, one of four antiphons dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In addition to the Palestrina motet, the group sang the antiphon and two other motets incorporating the chant. Salve Regina by Hernando Marco (c. 1532-1611) is among the first music written in Guatemala, and formidable in its demands. Tomás Luís de Victoria’s Salve Regina is a double choir piece in which the chant’s incipit begins the piece and the chant is threaded throughout the polyphony, ricocheting between the singing groups. 

The program finished with a nineteenth century version of In dulci jubilo by Robert Lucas Pearsall (1795-1856), a colorful anthem featuring a tune that has remained part of the hymnody of various denominations. The encore returned to Praetorious for his setting of Joseph lieber, Joseph mein, concluding in a gently lyrical fashion. The Tallis Scholars at St. Mary’s always brings a welcome start to the season with a bevy of glorious singing.

-Christian Carey 



by Christian Carey