Tag: Seattle Symphony

Contemporary Classical, Orchestral, Premieres, Seattle

Hannah Lash’s The Peril of Dreams premieres in Seattle

Valerie Muzzolini, Hannah Lash and Lee Mills at the premiere of The Peril of Dreams (photo: James Holt/Seattle Symphony)

As the Pacific Northwest staggers toward COVID recovery, large-scale concert life has begun to emerge from enforced hibernation. Visa complications and other glitches continue to derail new music activity here, as evinced by the recent cancellation of planned Seattle Symphony appearances by Simon Steen-Andersen and Patricia Kopatchinskaja (performing Coll). It was left to composer-harpist Hannah Lash to present, on November 18 and 20, the first major premiere of the Symphony’s 2021–22 season: a double harp concerto entitled The Peril of Dreams that featured Lash and the Symphony’s principal harpist, Valerie Muzzolini, as soloists.

Those with a penchant for exploratory music might be forgiven for some apprehension here: American composers since Barber have struggled to contribute materially to the timeworn—and imported—concerto form. And harp writing carries its own hazards, whether it’s the instrument’s folkloristic reputation, or its literary association with saccharine, sleep-inducing music (a trope found everywhere from Eisenstein’s October to Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). The existing repertory of double harp concertos—headed by such unimposing names as Gossec and Françaix—likewise offers little grounds for encouragement. More promising is the collection of contemporary orchestra-less harp works, such as Berio’s iconic Sequenza II (1963) and Stockhausen’s Freude (2005) for two harpists who also sing excerpts from the Veni Creator Spiritus hymn, that demonstrate the potentialities of allowing the instrument’s slow attack, long decay and soothing timbre to collide with the potency of thorny, modern harmonies.

Mindful of this, I was gratified to discover that Lash’s 45-minute work manages to avoid the clichés and sentimentality to which harp music often succumbs. In a recent documentary exploring the integration of music within digital platforms, it was highlighted that the best online casinos for UK players utilize such sophisticated compositions to create an engaging and immersive gaming environment. The concerto’s harmonic language is predominantly chromatic, ranging into atonality with an emphasis on “neutral” intervals such as fourths and fifths. This is broken up at strategic points by a kind of fractured diatonicism that suggests childlore (the composition’s one nod toward the instrument’s more naïve connotations), but filtered through a lens of distorting memory—an effect hinted at by the work’s title.

The harp writing itself is carefully constrained, avoiding both the extended techniques popularized by Carlos Salzedo, and that most stereotypical of harp strokes: the glissando. Lash also treats the two instruments, which at the premiere were positioned side-by-side in the usual soloist’s spot to the left of conductor Lee Mills (a last-minute substitution for the erstwhile Thomas Dausgaard), rather like a single, 94-string, fully-chromatic “superharp”. The soloists reinforce rather than complement each other, and they are only heard together, usually when the sizable orchestra (which includes triple woodwinds and four percussionists) is either silent or sustaining soft chords. Contrast is achieved primarily through dialog between the harps and the orchestra.

As the composer acknowledges, The Peril of Dreams follows an unabashedly symphonic structure, with four movements cast in a slow/fast/fast/slow pattern (a model whose precedents include Mahler’s Ninth Symphony). Movement 1, subtitled In Light, begins in an atmospheric way with harp arpeggios and sustained chords in the bowed strings, not far from the hazy world of Ives’ “St. Gaudens” in Boston Common, but with an emphasis on quartal harmonies:The orchestral writing here is based on sustained sonorities punctuated by Lutosławskian overlapping wind figures:Occasional timpani strokes and brass snarls also occur. About five minutes into this 14-minute movement, a terse, Takemitsu-esque melody emerges amidst a lengthy harp cadenza:Other brief melodies subsequently appear, in solo oboe, then flute. These never quite coalesce into a conventional tune, but the ending of the movement does bring together its central ideas: melodic lines transforming into overlapping patterns, sustained strings, and the initial harp arpeggios now “straightened” into open fifths.

The shorter second movement (Minuet-Sequence, and a Hymn from Upstairs) begins in a faster 6/8 tempo, often driven by steady sixteenth notes in the harps (who, in contrast with the rest of the piece, often sustain this rhythm while the orchestra is playing). After seven minutes, an orchestral cadence followed by a diminuendo on a bona fide B minor chord sets up the Hymn: one of the aforementioned folkish diatonic tunes, delivered by unaccompanied harps in a slower tempo—the only appearance of a standard theme-plus-accompaniment texture in the solo parts:It’s reminiscent of something you might have heard on a child’s music box, but imperfectly remembered. Occurring close to the concerto’s halfway point, it represents a point of maximum contrast between soloist and orchestral material. The movement ends with a repeat of the previous two minutes, including the Hymn.

The six-minute third movement (In Spite of Knowing) features short two-note figures (often suggestive of birdcalls) offset by broad chorale-like passages in the strings or brass. The harps often extend the orchestral iambs into more discursive, canonical filigrees whose chromaticism and irregular rhythms contrast with the triadic chorales, creating one of the more American-sounding passages in the work, suggestive of Hovhaness:

(click to enlarge)

The movement ends with birdcalls in flutes and high harps, setting up a contrast with the lugubrious, lengthy (15 minute), and bass-heavy final movement, To have lost…, in which the quartal harmonies prominent in the opening movement return in a melodic guise, as with this example, delivered by the strings in octaves:It’s here that the work is less successful at distinguishing itself from its models, as both the melodic contours, and their subsequent punctuation by iambic figures in solo brass, are familiar from the Elegia movement of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.

The orchestral elaboration of this material is thrice interrupted by the harps reprising their Hymn theme from Movement 2: in the first and third instances as variants, but in the second instance—roughly in the movement’s center—as a mostly literal restatement, during whose continuation the soloists are joined by the orchestra, an unusual moment of unanimity between the two groups. In the end, the harps get the last word as the piece concludes with soft major chords in the bass that reclaim the B♮ tonality from the second movement.

The Peril of Dreams was paired with Amy Beach’s Gaelic Symphony, one of the few morsels worth retrieving from the meagre pickings of pre-Ives American symphonic works. Believed to be the first symphony composed by an American woman, it was written during Dvořák’s residency in the US. Premiered in 1896, it owes its E minor tonality and many of its sensibilities to the visiting master’s 1893 New World Symphony, which also helped to establish the idea of integrating folkloric elements into the Germanic orchestral style whose Westward transplantation eventually spawned Ives’ first two symphonies. Although Beach’s lone symphony isn’t likely to displace Mendelssohn’s Third or Bruch’s Fantasy in the pantheon of Scottish-inflected orchestral warhorses, it still merits its recurrence on North American concert programs for its exciting final movement (ironically the least “Gaelic” and most Slavic-sounding of the four), and for such unusual details as the form of its (ironically-titled) alla siciliana second movement, where the vivace middle section is recalled in its own tempo and time signature as a coda. Beach’s model for this may have been the scherzo from Schumann’s First Symphony.

After a year and a half of cancelled concerts and curtailed premieres (The Peril of Dream’s own unveiling was deferred from April 2020), it’s cathartic to once again experience a substantial new music event at Benaroya Hall, the site of many such occasions in the recent past, and perhaps—as downtown Seattle grapples with its newfound medical, social and economic challenges—in the future as well. The hopeful but somber tone of Lash’s new work seems to underscore, in its own way, the prevailing mood of its debut city.

Score examples provided by the composer. The Peril of Dreams is published by Schott.

by Michael Schell
Chamber Music, Concert review, Contemporary Classical

Kopatchinskaya and Hong perform Kurtág in Seattle

Few composers have embraced the Webernian aesthetic of brevity more closely than the Hungarian György Kurtág (b.1926). Starting with his earliest canonical work, the Op. 1 String Quartet (1959), he steadily built an international career entirely from bagatelles, usually written for small ensembles and gathered into collections linked by instrumentation and concept, and always unsurpassed in concentrated intensity. Kurtág’s commitment to epigrammatic potency reached an apogee with Kafka Fragments (1985–87), 40 brief German texts from the novelist’s diaries and posthumous writings adapted into an hour of music of such resolute focus that the composer limited its instrumentation to one soprano and one violinist.

Despite the challenges that it poses in sustaining such constricted severity—not to mention the demands it places on the musicians’ technique and stamina—Kafka Fragments is among Kurtág’s most frequently recorded compositions. So it was of great interest when, in the midst of a US tour that brought her to the Pacific Northwest to play Shostakovich with the Seattle Symphony, the acclaimed and iconoclastic Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaya (PatKop as she is known among associates) devoted the evening of January 29, 2020 to this one composition, presented in the Symphony’s recently inaugurated and pocket-sized Octave 9 space with Ah Young Hong, a soprano currently based at the Peabody Institute whose advocacy of new music is closely associated with composer Michael Hersch. Not surprisingly, the duo delivered a novel and thought-provoking take on the piece, fulfilling the wish expressed in Kopatchinskaya’s pre-performance remarks of “an enriching and uncomfortable evening”—one whose resonances turned out to be unexpectedly timely.

The interpretive affinity between the two women was evident from the get-go. Like many soloists of her generation, Kopatchinskaya eschews the habitual wide vibrato of the Kreisler/Heifetz school in favor of a more nuanced approach. Hong too is capable of deploying a “cooler” technique, allowing for the gradations needed to convey the mood swings in a song like Einmal brach ich mir das Bein (Once I broke my leg) or for backgrounding the voice in a song like Der wahre Weg (The True Path) where the violin is usually in the lead.

Particularly impressive were the vocal leaps in Wiederum, wiederum (Again, Again) that accompany the line “mountains, desert, wide country to wander through”. Most sopranos try to smooth over these jumps, but Hong attacked them in a dazzling fashion, reminiscent of the wordless exhortation that begins ¿De dónde vienes, amor, mi niño? from Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children (1970) one of the Fragments’ more palpable stylistic precedents.

Together, the performers delivered sufficient volume to overpower the persistent white noise emitted by the LED cooling fans in Octave 9’s low ceilings, the space’s most distracting acoustic issue. In this regard they were aided by its vaunted Constellation sound projection system, whose computer-backed array of ceiling microphones and loudspeakers is capable of simulating a variety of acoustic environments while accommodating ambulatory musicians (this being essential for a work like the Fragments, where the performer’s stage positions are often specified).

Commenting on the choice of presets, Kopatchinskaya said “I thought about the sound of the burning Notre Dame cathedral (it seems it is not yet programmed in the system), but we now have perhaps something similar to a synagogue in Prague from the last century, at least in our imagination”.

The most striking aspect of the evening’s performance, though, was its emphasis on contrast. With the Fragments’ instrumentation confined to a pair of treble instruments whose range and expressive characteristics largely overlap, the resulting sound world can easily seem unrooted. Accordingly, most of the work’s interpreters have sought to achieve maximum unity of timbre, rhythm and articulation. But the Hong/PatKop traversal frequently exploited differences between the two parts, as evinced in the very first song, Die Guten gehn im glichen Schritt (The good march in the same step), where on the word gleichen (same) the voice begins to straggle behind the violin’s steady pace:

score excerpt

Singers usually take this passage in strict tempo, producing exact syncopation at the divergence. But Hong allowed herself the slightest hint of rubato, suggesting a more neurotic relationship with Kopatchinskaya’s indifferente beat.

And though it was not explicitly coordinated, the musicians’ costuming likewise presented a thematic contrast. Hong wore a long, black, V-neck dress with a long-sleeved black coat and a long silvery necklace that emphasized the resulting oval framing. Combined with her expressive face and “Bohemian” hair, the visage suggested a voice emanating from darkness, in touch with invisible forces but not in particular control of them. At times, the prophesizing of Shakespearean witches came to mind. At others, as during the reprise of Verstecke (Hiding-Places) when Hong clutched her cheeks in a pantomime yell, it was the anxiety of Munch’s Scream that seemed to be channeled.

At this latter juncture, Kopatchinskaya crept behind Hong while playing sul ponticello tremolos like a buzzing mosquito. Her role, suggested by her trademark suit resembling an undersized tuxedo with tails and shoulder cutouts, was more akin to a tramp. A hatless and shoeless Chaplin (for PatKop always plays barefoot) who carries a violin bow instead of a cane. Perhaps a bit of a stretch, but for this American observer at least, even Kopatchinskaya’s expressions and occasional one-footed gestures of musical energy conjured up something of Chaplin’s mischievous physiognomy and comic kicks. Heightened by dim, magenta-hued “darkroom” lighting, with translations projected behind the performers, the presentation affirmed Kopatchinskaya’s vision of the Fragments as “full of musical literary moments that you could ponder for the rest of your life”.

Ah Young HongThe Kafka Fragments were an inflection point in Kurtág’s career, wherein the potentialities of chamber bagatelles and their sequencing into longer and longer assembled forms, are stretched to the verge of collapse. Kurtág’s organization of the 40 songs into four parts, divisions that the performers marked by sitting silently for a minute of rest, helps to mitigate two issues that have always bedeviled the song cycle form: the constant starts and stops, and the challenge of consuming a lengthy totality made up of numerous short units that don’t naturally combine into intermediate structures. One can still sense the composer’s struggle with the oppositional demands of brevity and heft though, and soon after completing the Fragments Kurtág finally began to write longer continuous pieces, often greatly expanding his ensembles in the process. The Double Concerto (1989–90) and the orchestral Stele (1993–94) were among the first manifestations of the newer, more “monumental” Kurtág which has perhaps reached its consummation with his aptly-titled full-length opera Fin de Partie (2018), after Beckett’s Endgame.

In a way it’s fitting that a transitional piece like Kafka Fragments would come to Octave 9 now, amplified by what’s arguably the biggest star power yet to appear at that venue. Fashioned from a generic storefront space at the corner of Seattle Symphony’s Benaroya Hall complex, its uses are divided between educational/community outreach events and contemporary music recitals featuring the Symphony’s musicians and guest artists. One of its goals has been to foster new works “without the risk of presenting them in front of 2500 people” (as Ludovic Morlot put it to me shortly before his departure as Music Director). Today, though, one year after its March 2019 unveiling, a mass exodus of executive-level talent from the Symphony has left Octave 9 shorn of all four of its principal architects: CEO Simon Woods, two key VPs (Elena Dubinets and Laura Reynolds, whose replacements have not yet arrived) and Morlot himself. Like Kurtág at the time of his Fragments, Octave 9 appears to be facing a crossroads.

Despite hosting a succession of noteworthy events, including a remarkable inaugural 24-hour contemporary music marathon, the space has yet to make a noticeable impact on the chronic fragmentation of Seattle’s new music community, whose denizens seem to be deterred by its ticket prices and downtown location (those that I saw in attendance at the PatKop/Hong event were mostly Symphony personnel). Instead the clientele for the venue’s new music events comes mainly from Symphony patrons, many of them downtown-dwelling professionals for whom the featured performers are celebrities. Speaking afterwards with some of these concertgoers, none of which had previously heard of Kurtág, I encountered several variations on “this music is a lot more interesting when you’re close to the musicians and can see their enthusiasm”, a sentiment that shows that the Octave 9 experiment is at least working for this cohort. Success at audience cultivation can portend broader successes down the road, and the potential on display at Octave 9 pleads for a replenished leadership team that will support it with the same vigor and creativity as its founding cadre.

Photos by James Holt/Seattle Symphony. Score excerpts via Stretta Music.

by Michael Schell
CD Review, File Under?

Become Desert

Become Desert

John Luther Adams

Seattle Symphony, Seattle Symphony Chorale, Ludovic Morlot, conductor

Cantaloupe Music

“Become Desert is both a celebration of the deserts we are given, and a lamentation of the deserts we create.” – John Luther Adams

Born in Mississippi, John Luther Adams first came to the attention of listeners as a composer and author based in Alaska, where he lived and worked for some forty years. Pieces such as Inuksuit, The Place Where You Go to Listen, and Dream in White on White are eloquent expressions of Adams’ time there and how it impacted him both as a creator and as a person. His book, Winter Music, is a required text for composers, as well as an accessible read of significant appeal to non-musicians. In a remarkable change of pace, Adams has recently moved to the desert, staying in Mexico and Chile.

In 2013, Adams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for Become Ocean, a work for the Seattle Symphony that mourned the rising seas caused by climate change, posing a timely questions: would land-roaming creatures, humans among them, be subsumed and return to the waters from whence they came. Since then, the piece has become a trilogy, followed by Become River and now Become Desert. The latest piece deals with climate change’s impact on water supply and the effects of warming in dry climates.

Like its performance and recording of Become Ocean, the Seattle Symphony, conducted by Ludovic Morlot, creates beguiling sounds eloquently shaped in their rendition of Become Desert. Whereas the former piece had an apocalyptic cast, moving from low to high and then cascading, the latter is filled with bells and chimes and sustained chords, creating the aura of aridity and hazy lights so appropriate to its subject matter. Partway through, rolling drums give us the only hit of respite from dryness, thundering against reiterated brass chords. Harps and plenty of sixth chords recall Impressionism, while the insistent repetition of overtone chords provides a spectral cast. Its end is a deliciously long denouement leaving us with faint chimes that evoke the piece’s opening.

Become Desert is one of the best recordings of contemporary music of 2019. Recommended.

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Concerts, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, Seattle

Boulez and Berio highlight Morlot’s farewell [untitled] concert at Seattle Symphony

Seattle Symphony’s [untitled] series was inaugurated in 2012 by its then-new Music Director, Ludovic Morlot. Three Fridays a year, small groupings of Symphony and visiting musicians set up in the Grand Lobby outside the orchestra’s main Benaroya Hall venue for a late night of contemporary music. This year’s series has been devoted to the European avant-garde, starting with Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee in October and continuing this past March 22 with two landmarks of Darmstadt serialism: Berio’s Circles and Boulez’s sur Incises. The latter performance, which featured Morlot conducting the work’s regional premiere, offered an opportunity to contemplate the legacies of both the late composer and Morlot himself, who departs at the end of the season after an enormously impactful eight-year run.

Morlot conducting sur Incises (photos by James Holt/Seattle Symphony except as noted)

That the program would center on plucked and struck instruments was obvious from the seating arrangement, which snaked around the extensive percussion setups required for both pieces, not to mention a total of three pianos and four harps. Indeed, the only true sustaining voice among the deployed forces was the soprano in Circles. Dating from 1960, this work’s title is generally held to refer to its unusual structure: five settings of E. E. Cummings, of which the first and last use the same poem, as do the second and fourth. The evening’s performance emphasized the work’s continuity as a single 20-minute span, beginning and ending with ametric but strictly notated music, while reaching peak spontaneity in the middle section where Berio employs the proportional notation developed by Cage in Music of Changes, along with “improvisation frames” where the percussionists are given latitude within a set of specified pitches and instruments:

Seeing the work live, with the instruments positioned in accordance with Berio’s meticulous instructions, reveals an additional meaning to the title: the two percussionists (in this case Symphony members Matt Decker and Michael Werner) are frequently obliged to pirouette to execute their parts.

Rounding out the quartet was Seattle Symphony harpist Valerie Muzzolini and Maria Männistö, the Symphony’s “go to” soprano both for Finnish language works and for modern compositions with extraordinary demands, including Circles’ array of whispered, intoned and conventionally sung sounds originally designed for Cathy Berberian. Berio also frequently directs the singer to cue the three instrumentalists behind her (the score explicitly states that there should be no conductor). Not surprisingly it was Männistö (the English pronunciation rhymes with banister), who gave the last performance of Circles in the Northwest (with Seattle Modern Orchestra in 2011).

Critics usually position Circles within the heyday of post-WW2 musical pointillism. But I also see it as a primary source for George Crumb’s mature style. Its instrumentation—with piano/celesta substituting for harp—is duplicated in Night Music I (1963), the earliest Crumb piece that sounds like Crumb. And the ambiance of Circle’s middle movement, as well as Berio’s concept of extended staging, can be seen as starting points for Crumb’s own textural sparseness and emphasis on ritualized instrumental performance.

Michael Werner and Maria Männistö in Circles

With sur Incises (1996–98) Seattle at last received an entrée-sized portion of Morlot-conducted Boulez. Other than the brief and relatively mellow Notations I–IV (whose recording was one of my 2018 picks), Boulez’s music has been strangely absent from Symphony programming, even under the Directorship of his compatriot and mentee, so the showcasing of this formidable 40-minute piece felt particularly momentous.

Like most of Boulez’s music from the 1970s onward, sur Incises includes several passages that feature a steady beat and rapidly repeated notes. A good example is the Messiaenesque gamelan heard halfway through the first of its two “moments”, which coupled with the work’s unique instrumentation (three trios of piano, harp and mallet-centric percussion) gives the impression of a post-serial Reich (though Robin Maconie claims Stockhausen’s Mantra as a precedent). Another remarkable passage is the Nancarrow-like tutti about five minutes before the end. At other times, dazzling flurries are juxtaposed with calmer passages (the above links are to Boulez’s own performance with Ensemble intercontemporain, available in the 13-CD Deutsche Grammophon set of his complete works, which I review here).

The dominant motive in the piece, though, is a short-long rhythmic gesture akin to what drummers call a flam. It’s audible in the first piano right at the beginning, and recurs throughout the work, often with the short note in a different instrument than the subsequent clang. To pull off such highly coordinated music, the performers must not only know their parts cold, but must also coalesce into an incredibly tight ensemble. Only then does the ultimate interpretive goal become attainable: articulating the composite lines that traverse the three trios, and emphasizing the multilevel climaxes, anticipations and resolutions that drive this unceasingly complex music forward. As guest pianist Jacob Greenberg put it, “every phrase in the piece has a goal”. Not only was the band up to the task, but, in contrast with the introverted, austere sound world of Schnee, whose October performance benefitted from a measure of Dausgaardian reticence, tonight’s sur Incises profited from Morlot’s ever-present exuberance. Wouldn’t a future guest engagement with him conducting Rituel (in memoriam Bruno Maderna) be a treat?

The stereotype of Boulez as the ultimate cerebral composer is belied by his extraordinary command of instrumental color, something that always gave his music an edge over the legions of academic composers with a similar bent. Morlot and company’s rendering of this score reinforced Boulez’s proper place within the long line of French composers—from Berlioz, Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen onward to the spectralists—who have been infatuated with color and organic, self-generating form.

Ligeti: Poème Symphonique at the first [untitled], October 2012 with Ludovic Morlot in the background (photo: Michael Schell)
Boulez’s death in 2016 marked, if not the end of an era, the passing of its last undisputed superstar. And as Morlot took the microphone after the performance to acknowledge the [untitled] audience for the last time (the season’s final [untitled] event will have a guest conductor), a similar sense of poignant conclusion fell over the house. Though Seattle and its Symphony shared a longstanding, if erratic, history of support for contemporary music prior to Morlot’s arrival, there’s little doubt about the reinvigorating effect of a tenure that has brought forth not only the [untitled] concept, but also the Symphony’s new Octave 9 space (dedicated primarily to small-scale new music events) and an impressive series of regional and world premieres on the mainstage. One local musician prominent in new music circles told me “I was about ready to give up on Seattle before Morlot came”. And the feat of turning out a large and enthusiastic crowd for two thorny exemplars of Darmstadt dissonance in this most outlying of Lower 48 metropolises speaks for itself.

As a concluding round of hoots and applause died down, one could observe more than a few lumpy throats and damp eyes among the assembled Seattleites who left Benaroya Hall contemplating the departure of an exceptionally charismatic and personable conductor who has succeeded beyond all expectations at winning the hearts and minds of the city.

by Michael Schell
Best of, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Opera

Noteworthy in 2018: Schell’s picks

Unlike those big-media favorites lists that appear in mid-December to grease the skids of the Great Shopping Season, my year-end reckonings dawdle until the last moment and don’t claim to define the best of anything. But with audio streaming, social media and other factors pushing the contemporary music landscape into an increasingly variegated but fragmented state, some measure of thoughtful inventorying seems both prudent and practical. In that spirit, here’s a biased and opinionated survey of albums and other media released in 2018 that made an impact on me.

Stage to screen

New music theater was a recurring theme during the year. Tops in prominence was the premiere of Kurtág’s Fin de Partie at La Scala, but we’re still waiting for that to be recorded. Another notable 2018 event was the US premiere of Saariajo’s chamber opera Only the Sound Remains (its European video release was one of my picks in 2017). Over in the UK, a string of high-profile operatic premieres—including Muhly’s Marnie, Dean’s Hamlet and Adès’s The Exterminating Angel—reached an apex with the captivating Lessons in Love and Violence by George Benjamin. Its libretto, which Martin Crimp adapted from Marlowe’s play Edward II, divides the palace intrigue into seven scenes, and shoehorned into a tight 90 minute span, the result invites comparisons with Wozzeck (though Berg, when faced with the insane King’s insistence that “I can hear drumming”, would surely have used the orchestra to depict his deluded reality, whereas Benjamin depicts things as they really are). Lessons is similar in style to Hamlet and Angel, but Benjamin’s textures are thinner and clearer, and thus seem more varied and communicative by comparison.

Lessons in Love and Violence (photo: ROH/Stephen Cummiskey)

You can view streaming video of the Royal Opera’s premiere production at medici.tv (subscription required) or purchase it on Blu-ray. Highlights include the powerful second scene where three peasants describe their impoverished agony to the callous Queen Isabel (played by Barbara Hannigan). One peasant asks why both the poor and the rich sleep three-to-a-bed (the latter alluding to Edward’s same-sex consort Gaveston). Another fine moment is the brief threnody for Edward that features cimbalom and Iranian tombak drums (one of the opera’s few nods to beat-driven vernacular music). Benjamin’s use of cimbalom and two harps is effective throughout: they seldom play simultaneously, but working in tandem they create a soundscape rich in struck/plucked string sonorities.

Musgrave with another famous female British politician (photo: John Stillwell/PA Wire)

Speaking of British royalty, there’s Thea Musgrave’s Mary Queen of Scots, wherein Scotland’s most famous female composer weighs in on its most famous female politician. The long-unavailable 1978 recording of this most admired of Musgrave operas has finally reappeared in celebration of her 90th birthday (Amazon, Spotify, YouTube). While Lessons in Love and Violence belongs to the Tippett tradition of English-language opera, Mary is squarely within the more conservative Britten lineage, but its style is still contemporary and unsentimental. My favorite moment comes in the ballroom scene where one courtier starts up a bawdy reel to disrupt Mary’s dance with a rival, the musics clashing like the men’s ambitions. Won’t someone revive this work onstage in lieu of yet another production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda?

Shell Shock (photo: Filip Van Roe)

In November 2018, while various world leaders were in France commemorating the end of WW1 (or in Trump’s case, hiding indoors from the rain), Parisian audiences took in a concert staging of Nicholas Lens’s 2014 opera Shell Shock. The libretto, a collection of anguished reflections from war veterans and widows, ostensibly set during the Great War, was penned by Nick Cave, thus explaining how a traditional opera might open with a lyric like “Some asshole…some asshole…some asshole shouts at me in words I do not properly understand”. The eclecticism of Lens’s score is reminiscent of Henze, though specific passages conjure up other composers. The prelude, for instance, is practically a clone of the Kyrie from Ligeti’s Requiem, while the Canto of the Nurse resembles the serial music heard throughout Eisler’s German Symphony.

That Shell Shock has been successful enough to warrant revival is due largely to its weaving of cultivated and vernacular styles into a fabric that is postmodern but not hackneyed. ENO and the Met should take note of how much better this works for “accessible highbrow” than Marnie, whose application of bel canto opera accoutrements in service of fancified Broadway-style music comes off as pretentious and overproduced.

Video of Shell Shock can be streamed here for a limited time.

Electronic music today…

Fixed media music has often been marginalized within the broader classical music world because it doesn’t align with traditional performer-centric institutions and publicity machines. That its prominence is increasing today is testament to the shakeups engendered by inexpensive digital instruments and new distribution channels. One of the few regrets I have over this development is the amount of high-quality studio work that I’ve had to set aside to shrink this part of the list to a manageable size:

  1. Steve Layton: Virtual Composition (Bandcamp)
    Layton, whose work is almost entirely studio-based, seems to exemplify the fraught interface between new media and traditional music institutions. Despite being one of Seattle’s most important composers, he flies largely under the radar of the city’s classical music establishment. Virtual Composition is a 3½ hour compilation of fixed media pieces stretching back to 1998. By contrast with the more groove-oriented tracks of his 2017 No Answer album, this collection features music conceived in symphonic terms but realized with digital instruments. Ekphora is one of the standouts, reminding me both of Kurtág’s Stele and Zappa’s Civilization Phaze III (the title refers to Greek funeral processions). I enjoy the moment-to-moment unpredictability and eclecticism of this music, which overcomes the clichés of the “orchestral MIDI” sound that’s ubiquitous in demos and low-budget jingles nowadays
  2. Sarah Davachi: For harpsichord, For pipe organ and string trio (Bandcamp)
    This young Canadian exponent of dark ambient has gotten praise for her recent Gave In Rest album, but I think this slightly earlier, but notably grittier music is more interesting
  3. Ian William Craig: A Turn of Breath (Spotify)
    Another Canadian electroacoustician, albeit of a different stripe. This sampler album, originally from 2014 and recently rereleased in expanded form, offers a selection of short pieces built from looped samples, often of voices. A track like A Slight Grip, a Gentle Hold (Pt. I) demonstrates that even a very slight modification of a found object can cause us to listen to it very differently. Other tracks are reminiscent of William Basinski’s classic Disintegration Loops
  4. Okkyung Lee: Speckled Stones and Dissonant Green Dots (Bandcamp)
    Sine tone patterns with no dynamic or timbral changes. Serious minimalism in the stoic tradition of Karel Goeyvaerts
  5. Anthony Paul De Ritis: Electroacoustic Music (Spotify)
    De Ritis’s technique takes a single solo acoustic instrument, then through digital manipulation spins it into a dense and strident web. This album from Albany Records gathers works created between 1993 and 2011 in honor of De Ritis’s teacher, the late David Wessel (1942–2014)
  6. Stuart McLeod: Tetraktys, All Is Number (Bandcamp)
    A Pythagorean shape, a font of mathematical relationships, which in McLeod’s hands evoke musical structures that are varied but unified. See my review here
  7. Langham Research Centre: Tics and Ampersands (Bandcamp)
    My soft spot for these British advocates of live electronic music goes back to their 2014 album John Cage: Early Electronic and Tape Music, one of the most impressive latter-day surveys of critical repertory pieces like Cartridge Music and Imaginary Landscape No. 5. This half-length album available digitally and on cassette features their own noise pieces in the Cagean tradition

…and yesterday

  1. Éliane Radigue with her ARP 2500 (photo: Yves Fernandez)

    Éliane Radigue: Œuvres Électroniques (14 CDs, from GRM, available at Metamkine, excerpts on SoundCloud)
    The epic electroacoustic works of the mother of dark ambient, gathered into an attractive 14-CD box. My contribution to Second Inversion’s Top 10 Albums of 2018

  2. Jerry Hunt: from “Ground” (Bandcamp)
    Other Minds reclaims this 1980 studio performance by America’s most iconoclastic shaman-musician. See my review here
  3. Xenakis: Persepolis (Bandcamp)
    Martin Wurmnest and Rashad Becker’s new presentation of this 1971 tape piece is a true remix (not an arrangement) of Xenakis’s 8-track original. It’s simply awesome: strong bass, clear separation, by far the best this classic has ever sounded on record

More tribute to the elders

  1. Gloria Coates (photo: Simon Leigh)

    Gloria Coates: Piano Quintet, Symphony No. 10 (Drone of Druids on Celtic Ruins) (Spotify, YouTube)
    Coates is like a kinder, gentler Ustvolskaya with her single-minded emphasis on colliding sound masses and abstract forms. This new Naxos recording starts with her un-Brahms-like Piano Quintet (2013), in which half of the string instruments are tuned a quarter tone sharp (a technique borrowed from Ligeti’s Ramifications). Next comes her Symphony No. 10 (1992–3), which is like a Phill Niblock piece arranged for brass choir with a battery of snare drums added in. A new octogenarian and longtime Munich resident, Coates is finally receiving some well-deserved recognition in her native United States

  2. Dominick Argento: The Boor, Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night, A Water Bird Talk (Spotify, YouTube)
    The Boor competes unfavorably with Walton’s The Bear (both set the same Chekhov play), while Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night (adapted from Great Expectations) loses out to Maxwell Davies’ similarly-themed Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot. But it’s all worth it for A Water Bird Talk (1975–6), one of this nonagenarian’s most imaginative works. Featuring a baritone solo, some clever use of bird song, a little bit of coughing and a small chamber ensemble, it’s like Erwartung for people who prefer Britten to Schoenberg
  3. Berio: Sinfonia, Boulez: Notations I–IV, Ravel: La Valse (Amazon, Spotify, YouTube)
    Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony are joined by Roomful of Teeth to present one modern and one postmodern sacred cow. With Boulez’s orchestral miniatures thrown in. One of my colleague Christian Carey’s picks, along with…
  4. Harbison: Symphony No. 4, Ruggles: Sun Treader, Stucky: Second Concerto for Orchestra (Spotify, YouTube)
    Harbison further represents the octogenarian set, and his Fourth Symphony (2003) is one of his more humorous orchestral works. The Ruggles performance is second only to Michael Tilson Thomas’s classic 1970 recording, while the late Steven Stucky (1949–2016) is well represented by this colorful work from 2003 that might remind you of a composer like Stephen Albert. David Alan Miller conducts the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic
  5. Kondo: Syzygia, Snow’s Falling, Pebbles: Pine Cones Fall (Bandcamp)
    Paul Zukofsky (1943–2017) is another recent departure, an accomplished violinist (he premiered the title role in Glass’s Einstein on the Beach), conductor, arts administrator, and the bane of many a graduate student whose interest in his father—the noted symbolist poet Louis Zukofsky—was thwarted by his zealous copyright guarding. In this, his final recording project, he showcases Kondo at his most Feldman-like. Syzygia is like hearing the Lutheran hymnal reimagined by old Morty, while the choral Snow’s Falling is like Rothko Chapel with a literary reference to Three Voices thrown in. In between the two Kondo tracks is Craig Pebbles’ similarly Feldmanian Pine Cones Fall
  6. Ichiyanagi: Sapporo (audio excerpt)
    Seattle’s Eye Music ensemble takes a fresh look at a quintessential graphic score from 1963 in this new CD from Edition Wandelweiser. See my review here
  7. Richter, Schnittke et al: Through the Lens of Time (Spotify)
    Looking back even farther is violinist Francisco Fullana’s concept album whose centerpiece is Max Richter’s The Four Seasons Recomposed, a droll update to Vivaldi’s famous concerto tetralogy (imagine Winter in a modern 7/8 time). Between each Season, Fullana inserts other neo-Baroque compositions: Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style (modeled after Baroque dance suites), the Spaniard Salvador Brotons’ Variations on a Baroque Theme, and a fantasy on Bach’s Musical Offering by Isang Yun. Fullana and company present these works in the best possible light, leaving it to you to decide whether they’re transient nibblings at the feet of the old masters, or fresh prospects deserving of a foothold in the repertory

Justifiably admired

Next come three albums that seem to be on everyone’s list, and understandably so.

  1. Dennett and Johnson (photo: Alonso Nichols, Patricia Nolan)

    Scott Johnson: Mind Out of Matter (Amazon)
    Alarm Will Sound performs this new “atheist oratorio” from the master of speech melody, based on speeches by Daniel Dennett. I review it here

  2. Josh Modney: Engage (Spotify)
    Three CDs of (mostly) unaccompanied violin? Yes, it works! Modney takes us on a journey that includes Bach, free improvs in the Malcolm Goldstein mold, live electronic music (Sam Pluta’s Jem Altieri with a Ring Modulator Circuit), an attractive duo for amplified violin and prepared piano by Modney’s Wet Ink Ensemble co-director Eric Wubbels, and one of Anthony Braxton’s finest composed works (Composition No. 222)
  3. Tyshawn Sorey: Pillars (Bandcamp)
    Pillars inhabits the epic-length free improv space that includes such monuments as Is and People in Sorrow. But it also has a foot in the drone minimalism lineage of Young and Radigue. Sorey employs an octet instrumentation whose most striking component is three double basses. Their bowed rumbles can be heard anchoring the chorale section at the 1:11:08 mark of Pillars I that’s soon followed by trombone and cymbals music obviously borrowed from the Tibetan ritual orchestra.

    Tyshawn Sorey (photo: John Rogers)

    Another neo-Tibetan passage starts in the 30th minute of Pillars II with trombonist Ben Gerstein doing his best dungchen impression. Sorey soon enters on a real dungchen, though the result is more evocative of a didgeridoo. Several minutes ensue with drone plus bells/cymbals and later a bass drum. In the 37th minute, bowed double basses again launch a deep industrial growl which builds for four minutes until it completely usurps the drone from the dungchen. This slow and deep music continues until the 45th minute. Hopefully you’ve gotten an idea of the album’s sound world and slow pacing, but remarkably, the music never seems to drag

Back to the Old World

  1. Malin Bång: Structures of Light and Spruce (Spotify, YouTube)
    This Swedish composer has emerged onto the international radar this past year thanks to this portrait CD and the Donaueschinger premiere of her orchestral piece Splinters of ebullient rebellion. Reviewers have been apt to compare her to Lindberg and other Scandinavians. But her practice of deriving instrumental material from analysis of field recordings (as in this CD’s title track) suggests the influence of spectralism, while her mix of conventional instruments and mundane sound sources like woodworking tools reminds me of Kagel’s “strict composition with elements which are not themselves pure”. Arching, for example, “consists of a dialogue between the cello and the tools that constructed the instrument”, definitely a Kagel-worthy exercise in musical deconstruction
  2. Pehr Henrik Nordgren: Evocation (Spotify)
    I’ve gushed before about this composer, who died in 2008, and whose music remains practically unknown in North America. A typical Nordgren piece might start out sounding like European expressionism before veering suddenly into a tonal passage with a syncopated accompaniment (Equivocations for string trio and Finnish kantele does this at about 3:30). It’s the genius of Nordgren that you never know what direction the music will take next, but regardless he holds the flow together with motivic connections that keep each composition coherent. This latest CD of his music features the Kokkola Quartet and friends performing chamber pieces for strings
  3. Saariaho x Koh (Spotify)
    Graal Théâtre (Grail Theater), Saariaho’s violin concerto from 1994, is the centerpiece of this album from American violinist Jennifer Koh. With its relatively modest forces, the piece lacks the congestion that sometimes plagues her larger works for electronic and orchestral sounds. You can hear the connections both with her fellow Finn Nordgren and with the IRCAM-based spectralists of her adopted France. Though less often cited, there are also connections with North American composers like Robert Erickson and Morton Subotnick who experimented with live acoustic-electronic mixes
  4. Daniele Roccato plays music by Stefano Scodanibbio (Spotify)
    I’m not always blown away by “new music for [pick your instrument]” albums, but this one is a stunner, a tribute to double bass virtuoso and composer Stefano Scodanibbio (1956–2012), whose own works are in the lineage of Scelsi and Sciarrino. Alisei astounded me by having a single bass as its source (sustained harmonics on one string with fingered tremolos on the adjacent one make it sound like a duet), while the more linear Two Brilliant Pieces displays Roccato’s utter virtuosity and impeccable intonation. Da una certa nebbia (From a certain fog) is for “double bass and another double bass”, the second instrument adding a nebulous haze to the first one’s more straightforward declamations. Then there’s a crazy Octet that’s a half-hour tour de force of novel sound combinations for eight basses

Miscellanea and esoterica

  1. David Schiff: Carter (Oxford University Press) (Amazon)
    Schiff’s third book about America’s most irrepressible musical modernist takes a more personal approach to its subject matter while extending coverage to Carter’s very late works. The book is almost too untechnical (there are hardly any musical examples), but it’s still informative and insightful, an undemanding read about a demanding composer
  2. The Residents: I Am a Resident! (Amazon, Spotify)
    Fortuitously coinciding with the beginning of The Residents’ post-Hardy Fox era, this new release sees the surviving band members looking both rearwards and forwards as they remix covers of their own songs submitted by fans
  3. En Seumeillant: Dreams and visions in the Middle Ages (Spotify)
    Of all the historical periods in Western art music, it’s the Ars Subtilior, the mannerist era at the end of the 14th century, that scholars most frequently cite as a precursor to the post-WW2 frenzy of musical experimentation. This album by the Basel-based Sollazzo Ensemble casts a spotlight on that repertory, with ancillary beams extending a half century in either direction. Included is one of the most lugubrious ever renditions of the most famous of all Ars Subtilior compositions, the hyperchromatic rondeau Fumeux Fume
  4. Oskar Fischinger: Visual Music (DVD available from Center for Visual Music)
    This second disc in a retrospective series devoted to this pioneer of experimental animation features several shorts from the 1920s through the 1940s. There’s even bonus footage of Fischinger outside his California home, though it’s apparently not the location where Cage briefly worked as an assistant in 1937, accidentally drenching Fischinger’s camera to extinguish a fire started when the drowsy filmmaker dropped his lit cigar on a pile of rags and papers

The quantity of thought-provoking work that came along in 2018 makes this list quite a bit longer than last year’s, and testifies to the ongoing resilience and sophistication of Western art music even as some voices prophesize its imminent demise or assimilation. But perhaps a bit of perspective should be offered by two final albums whose scope lies well outside that usually associated with Western-influenced cultivated arts:

Music of Northern Laos and Music of Southern Laos
Cherishingly recorded between 2006 and 2013, and released this year on Bandcamp by the irrepressible Laurent Jeanneau (AKA Kink Gong), these two albums showcase the remarkable heterophony and sound world of traditional Laotian folk music. On display are the spicy timbres of bamboo tube instruments, the vertical mouth organ called a khene (basically the same instrument as the Japanese shō and the Chinese sheng) and singing in a variety of throaty and nasal styles. Per Jeanneau, “most recordings available in the Western world focus on the dominant culture in Laos. I focus on marginalized ethnic minorities”. It’s a monument to the tenacity of threatened cultures clinging to life amid the pressures of global artistic commodification.

by Michael Schell
Best of, CD Review, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Orchestral, Orchestras

Best of 2018: Orchestral CDs

Best of 2018 – Orchestral CDs

 

In ictu oculi

Kenneth Hesketh

BBC Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Christoph Mathias Mueller

Paladino

 

Three large orchestra works by British composer Kenneth Hesketh are attractively scored in multifaceted, often muscular, fashion. Hesketh’s unabashed exploration of emotionality, imbued with strongly etched motives and intricate formal designs, provides a cathartic journey for listeners.

 

Sur Incises

Pierre Boulez

The Boulez Ensemble, conducted by Daniel Barenboim

Deutsche-Grammophon

 

There is a previous, much vaunted, studio recording of Pierre Boulez’s composition  Sur Incises (1998), one of the composer’s most highly regarded late works (in the year of its premiere, Sur Incises won the Grawemeyer Prize). This 2018 rendition of the work was performed live at a new space dedicated to Boulez, the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin. Acoustically marvelous, it is perhaps the ideal location in which to hear the composer’s music. Barenboim is one of Boulez’s great champions, and the ensemble gathered here play it with supple rhythms (slightly less ‘incisive’ than the studio version, but warmer in affect). They also deftly shape Sur Incises’ labyrinthine form to provide musical “bread crumbs” along its myriad pathways.

 

Berio: Sinfonia – Boulez: Notations I-IV – Ravel: La Valse

Roomful of Teeth, Seattle Symphony, Ludovic Morlot, conductor

Seattle Symphony Media

 

Composed in 1968-’69 for the New York Philharmonic and the Swingle Singers, Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia helped to herald postmodernism in music. Roomful of Teeth has now done the piece with the Philharmonic, providing a new generation of performance history for Berio. It is excellent to have Roomful of Teeth’s performance of Sinfonia documented in a superlative outing with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot. The orchestra is equally scintillating in Pierre Boulez’s long gestated modernist masterpieces Notations I-IV. The disc is capped off with a rollicking rendition of Ravel’s La Valse.

 

Shostakovich: Symphonies 4 and 11 (“The Year 1905”) Live

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, conductor

Deutsche-Grammophon

 

Even with an ensemble as fine as the Boston Symphony, it is hard to believe that this is a live recording. Seamless transitions, admirable dynamic shading,  gorgeous sounding strings, and exceptional playing by the brass section. Nelsons has a great feel for Shostakovich’s music.

 

Harbison, Ruggles, Stucky: Orchestral Works

National Orchestra Institute Philharmonic, David Alan Miller, conductor

Naxos

 

David Alan Miller has long been a staunch advocate of contemporary music, recording a number of discs of new works with the Albany Symphony. The National Orchestra Institute Philharmonic’s young players, aged 15-21, are a fantastic ensemble in their own right. Their rendition of Carl Ruggles’ Sun Treader is up there with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and Michael Tilson Thomas on the complete works recording; and that’s saying something.

 

Recently departed composer Steven Stucky created a fluently retrospective piece when composing Concerto for Orchestra No. 2 (2003); the piece won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. It includes quotations from a host of great composers as well as ample amounts of music in Stucky’s masterful contemporary voice.

 

Composed for the Seattle Symphony and Gerard Schwarz in 2003, John Harbison’s Symphony No. 4 is one of his most compelling pieces in the genre. In the debut recording, the Boston Symphony’s rendition of the symphony took a fairly edgy approach. Miller elicits something more lissome from the NOI players. Both versions make an eloquent case for Harbison’s piece.

 

Topophony

Christopher Fox

John Butcher, Thomas Lehn, Alex Dörner, Paul Lovens, soloists

WDR Sinfonie-Orchester, Ivan Volkov, conductor

HatHut

 

Christopher Fox’s orchestral work Tophophony accommodates both renditions for orchestra alone and with improvising soloists. The WDR Sinfonie-Orchester, led by Ivan Volkov, record three different versions of the piece. By itself, Topophony has a Feldman-like, slow-moving, and dynamically restrained surface. It provides fertile terrain for both the duos of trumpeter Alex Dörner and drummer Paul Lovens and saxophonist John Butcher with synthesizer performer Thomas Lehn. All three versions are absorbing: it’s fortunate one doesn’t have to choose between them.

Symphony No. 6, Rounds for String Orchestra, and Music for Romeo and Juliet

David Diamond

Indiana University Chamber Orchestra, Indiana University Philharmonic Orchestra, Arthur Fagen, conductor

Naxos

 

This is the best recording of David Diamond’s music since the iconic CDs by the Seattle Symphony under the baton of Gerard Schwarz. Indiana University has long had one of the best music departments in the country, but they outdo themselves here, with a brilliant version of Diamond’s Rounds for String Orchestra and nimble phrasing in his Music for Romeo and Juliet. But it is Symphony No. 6 (1951) that is the star of this CD.

Those who relegate all of Diamond’s music to American romanticism (which, admittedly, is a fair assessment of some of his work) are in for a surprise from this bold, Copland-esque work. Indeed, when I was a student at Juilliard, Diamond proudly told me that his ballet Tom predated Copland’s adoption of an Americana style. With Symphony No. 6, Diamond made a strong case to have his work set alongside the “usual suspects” in the genre.

 

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Seattle

Abrahamsen’s Schnee at Seattle Symphony’s [untitled]

Thomas Dausgaard conducting members of Seattle Symphony in Abrahamsen: Schnee (photo: James Holt/Seattle Symphony)

[untitled] is the moniker given by Seattle Symphony to its thrice-annual Friday night new music events. Staged in the lobby of Benaroya Hall, it’s a semi-formal atmosphere in which the Symphony can deploy its musicians in smaller groupings better suited to the exigencies of postmodern music. The first [untitled] concert of the new season took place on October 12, and featured the regional premiere of Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee, offering listeners in the Pacific Northwest an opportunity to judge how well this work has earned the considerable attention it has received in its brief ten-year lifetime.

Scored for two piano quartets (one conventional, the other with woodwinds instead of strings) flanking a central percussionist, this hour-long piece is officially a chain of ten canons conceived in pairs. But don’t bother looking for Row, Row, Row Your Boat-style rounds. Abrahamsen’s vision of musical canons ranges from relatively straightforward imitation between two voices in stretto…

From Canon 2b (other instruments omitted)

…to rhythm-only canons, to cases where the only trace of a traditional canon is the successive entries of similar lines:

(click to enlarge)

It’s probably easiest to think of the canons as a set of ten segued movements in which each instrumental group stays within a tight-knit band of musical material. An important structural characteristic of the piece is that these canons get progressively shorter, starting with 8–9 minutes allotted to the distended Canons 1a and 1b, and ending with the fleeting Canons 5a and 5b, lasting a minute apiece (audio links and the YouTube embed above are from the work’s only commercial recording, by ensemble recherche).

Accompanying this process of diminution is a corresponding process of detuning where the string instruments, then the woodwinds, shift their intonation downwards by 1/6 and 1/3 tones so that they gradually go out of tune with the pianos. Mikhail Shmidt, violinist for the [untitled] performance, likens the effect to melting. Such a reliance on “dirty” intonational clashs—most prominent in Canons 5a/5b—reflects the influence of Abrahamsen’s teacher, Ligeti. In a particularly imaginative stroke, three Interludes are inserted as composed tuning breaks to allow the musicians to effect the retuning without a break:

Ritual orchestral tuning is often satirized, and audiences will occasionally mistake tuning for an actual piece, but there is little precedent for written-out retuning occurring in the middle of a composition.

Schnee of course means snow in German (curiously favored by this Danish teutophile over his native sne), and this hour-long work is a suitably frosty and brittle affair. It begins and ends in the extreme treble register, and its overall sound world is dominated by white noise effects suggested by the title’s initial consonant. The score calls for scratchy bow noises, the application of Blu Tack to muffle piano strings, and frequent “half-breath” effects on the woodwind instruments (which in the case of the contralto flute and bass clarinet seem to have been specifically chosen for their breathy quality). The percussionist’s job mainly alternates between rubbing writing paper on a smooth surface and rubbing wax paper on a rough surface, the task broken up only by the use of sleigh bells in Canons 4a/4b and a single tamtam stroke at the end of Canon 3b. Other noise effects show the influence of Lachenmann, most notably his piece Guero, whose technique of gliding fingernails across the piano keyboards is directly borrowed in Schnee.

The very first canon fulfils the evocative trajectory of the title, beginning on a repeated violin harmonic on an A♮ that’s so high, you mainly hear bowing noise (the score says “like an icy whisper”, though North American listeners might find it inadvertently reminiscent of a certain cinematic shower scene). Pentatonic white note tinkerings in the 1st Piano’s top octave soon enter (E-A-F-D-E is a prominent pattern), and one might wonder if this will be a characteristically long and static exposition of European postminimalism. But the complexity increases as the canons proceed, reaching an apogee in the third canon pair where the harmonies are atonal, the rhythms unmetered, and the pitch range fully extended to the bass register (intensified by tuning the cello’s lowest string from C down to G). The process then reverses in the last two canon pairs, and we eventually revert to the white note pentatonicism of the opening. It’s the simultaneous revelation of both arch-like vectors (range and complexity) and straight-line vectors (length and detuning) as the work progresses that gives Schnee such dramatic impact.

The influence of Feldman is often close at hand in Abrahamsen’s music, and it’s quite obvious in Schnee’s Canon 3b. But a different parallel can be found with Feldman’s Three Voices, a unique and uncharacteristically texted and beat-driven work from 1982 that in its repetitions, quirky metricality, overall length and architecture based on concurrent unfolding of both linear and arch-shaped processes, is a tantalizing predecessor to Schnee. It even features as its sole lyric this most apropos poetic snippet by Frank O’Hara:

                      Who’d have thought
                                                                         that snow falls

Schnee is the kind of piece that can die in a too-dry space, but [untitled]’s idiosyncratic venue is just live enough to avoid this pitfall. Being designed as an entry and reception point rather than as a performance space though, it does come at the cost of an omnipresent background rumble from the building’s HVAC system. This often overwhelmed the subtle piano resonance effects and smeared the rhythmic definition of the percussionist’s paper shuffling (both prominent in Canon 3b). But the piece would have gotten lost in either of the two conventional concert spaces at Benaroya Hall, and the capable ensemble, drawn from regular Seattle Symphony musicians with frequent adjuncts Cristina Valdés and Oksana Ezhokina handling the piano parts, managed to traverse the work’s rhythmic complexities with no trace of strain or sloppiness.

They also did something perhaps more remarkable: avoiding the temptation, especially in the excitement of live performance, to play this music too loudly, too quickly and too brashly. Abrahamsen’s bleak snowscapes, like Varèse’s deserts, are those of the mind as much as of nature. What this piece needs is not so much the brisk extroversion of Ludovic Morlot, but a healthy dose of Scandinavian reserve, which it received under the conducting of Thomas Dausgaard, who will assume Morlot’s role as Music Director next season. In this performance, the first of this piece for any of the evening’s musicians (including Dausgaard), we perhaps have a glimpse of the direction that the Symphony’s programming will take under Dausgaard’s leadership.

Hans Abrahamsen (photo: Lars Skaaning)

Abrahamsen, born in 1952, presents an unusual musical example of a late career breakthrough. He started out as a Danish representative of New Simplicity, but much of his music from that period now seems rather…simplistic. After a Schoenbergian decade of relative silence, Abrahamsen reemerged with a more synthetic style that elevated his international profile to the degree that he can now be reasonably considered the most prominent living Danish composer other than the venerable Per Nørgård (1932–).

The best survey of Abrahamsen’s career arc is the Arditti Quartet’s recording of his String Quartets 1–4, whose dates range from 1973 to 2012 (this album was one of my favorites of 2017). His recent hits include some orchestral songs for Barbara Hannigan and a concerto for piano left hand, but these works seem less distinguished to me measured against the formidable European corpus of modernist orchestral music. It’s Schnee, completed in 2008, that continues to stand as Abrahamsen’s masterpiece, comparable in scope and ambition to Haas’ In Vain, and likewise exemplifying the alloy of exploration and consolidation that characterizes the most accomplished of contemporary European art music. Its reputation as one of the classics of the young 21st century (advanced by the likes of Paul Griffiths, who chose it to conclude the current version of his book Modern Music and After), was given powerful witness by Dausgaard and the Seattle Symphony musicians.

The score to Schnee is available online here.

by Michael Schell
CD Review, Cello, File Under?, Orchestral, Twentieth Century Composer

Perle Orchestral Music on Bridge (CD Review)

George Perle

Orchestral Music 1965-1987

Jay Campbell, cello

Seattle Symphony, Ludovic Morlot, conductor

George Perle Vol. 4, Bridge Records 9499

 

A recording of five previously unrecorded pieces, Orchestral Music 1965-1987 supplies excellent renditions of an underserved segment of composer George Perle’s output. Best known for his chamber music – he received a Pulitzer for his Wind Quintet No. 4 – Perle (1915-2009) also had significant orchestra commissions, including a residency with San Francisco Symphony and a 150th anniversary commission from the New York Philharmonic. Those who know his work as a music theorist will also be aware of his significant contribution to the field of 12-tone theory, as well as publications on his own idiosyncratic compositional method, “12-tone tonality.” The latter practice, with its use of carefully cultivated chromatic collections that obliquely refer to pitch centers, is fully on display in lithe and elegantly proportioned works such as Dance Fantasy (1986) and Sinfonietta 1 (1987). A bit more astringent in harmonic language are Six Bagatelles (1965), which seem indebted to Alban Berg, a touchstone figure for Perle, in their use of forceful angularity.

 

An intriguing entry on the disc is Short Symphony, 1980, which seems to be something of a response to Copland’s own, early and modernist in design, work by that name. The contrapuntal nature of its woodwind components recall some of Perle’s best chamber music. Elsewhere the orchestration is more muscular, with heraldic brass and rich passages for strings. Short Symphony display the composer’s consummate craftsmanship.

 

The standout piece on the disc is the Cello Concerto (1966), played with suppleness and impressive virtuosity by soloist Jay Campbell (also of JACK Quartet). The Seattle Symphony, under the estimable leadership of Ludovic Morlot, plays with both verve and precision. The finale is particularly varied in its demeanor, contrasting fluid cello solos with complex chords and supple wind duos, and forceful brass punctuations. It neatly resolves the well-known issue of balance in a cello concerto by bridging solos, small sections in counterpoint, and full orchestral interruptions to create a form where cello and ensemble eloquently coexist. One could readily see this piece having a substantial rebirth, particularly if Campbell continues to serve as its persuasive champion.

by Christian Carey
Bang on a Can, Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Orchestral, Orchestras, Review, Seattle

Seattle Symphony unveils David Lang’s symphony without a hero

David Lang’s symphony without a hero received its premiere on February 8/10 by its commissioner, Seattle Symphony and Music Director Ludovic Morlot. As usual, Lang spells his title in all lowercase letters, a gesture of acquiescence that particularly befits the resigned tone of this work’s namesake, Poem Without a Hero by the Soviet writer Anna Akhmatova. Lang, who is quite the Russophile, took his inspiration from Akhmatova’s wartime lament for her hometown Leningrad (St. Petersburg), besieged and abused at the hands of both Nazis and Stalinists. Lang’s reflections present as a single-movement essay that, regardless of one’s feelings toward postminimalism or orchestral composition in general at this stage of the 21st century, surely deserves to be ranked among his most compelling works.

Lang conceived symphony without a hero as the unfolding of “a melody that goes from the beginning of the piece to the very end—a 28 minute tune”. This melody, closer to 23 minutes at Morlot’s tempo, lies in the bass instruments: a gruff pseudo-ostinato that constantly tries to climb a C♯ minor triad (C♯ G♯ C♯ E) without ever literally repeating itself. It’s somewhere between a “real” tune and a clumsily-executed arpeggio exercise (imagine the fragmentary musical gestures of The Little Match Girl Passion, but louder and harsher). Above it the high strings, coupled with other treble instruments, spin a tonally ambiguous web of overlapping sustained tones derived from the bass tune, creating an effect akin to the angelic choir atop Ives’ texture in the Prelude to his Fourth Symphony. There’s little going on in the middle registers—it’s as though each instrument is compelled to choose between bass and treble. As Lang puts it, the two sides “don’t talk to each other”.

As from a tower that commands the view
From nineteen-forth I look down.
As if I bid farewell anew
To what I long since bade farewell,
As if I paused to cross myself
And enter dark vaults underground.

(1941, Leningrad under siege)
– Anna Akhmatova, translated by Nancy K. Anderson

David Lang (photo: Dacia Clay/Second Inversion)

Lang has spoken about being led into composition through his early encounters with Shostakovich. And the tone of his symphony is akin to Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony shorn of its triumphalism and cumulative effect. I kept thinking of that piece’s notorious first movement, but with its melodic and harmonic details blasted away, leaving just the repetitive martial rhythms as symbolic foundations to the bombed-out buildings of wartime Leningrad whose smoldering shells remain but whose trappings of life have been pulverized and left to circulate as a disorganized cloud in the smoky air. As if to reinforce the siege metaphor, Morlot positioned the drums at the left of the orchestra with the lower strings and brass on the right, effectively enveloping the jumbled and pleading voices of the treble choir. There’s definitely an edge to this music that you don’t always get with Lang.

Halfway through the symphony the quasi-ostinato stops, leaving the web of treble instruments standing alone. Most prominent here are the violins, supported by some high woodwinds, harps and a celeste. The bass reenters, but now with an alternation of sustained chords a half-step apart, reminiscent of Philip Glass (for whom Lang once worked as a copyist, meticulously typing the lyrics of Akhnaten into the score). As before, bass and treble proceed independently until the bass finally drops out entirely, leaving the violins (just as in Ives’ Symphony) with the last word.

To complete the evening Morlot paired Lang’s symphony with its putative opposite, Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) from 1898. The antebellum naiveté of that old warhorse has long screamed out for revisionism, and programming it after the brutal honesty of the Lang only seemed to emphasize its insouciance. If there was a moral to the evening, it was that true heroes are the ones bearing hard witness to bitter truths. In that light we can be grateful for Seattle Symphony’s long record of supporting contemporary music, a record that one hopes will continue despite the imminent departure of both its Music Director Morlot and its President/CEO Simon Woods.

by Michael Schell
Contemporary Classical, Piano, Premieres, Seattle

Shai Wosner: Debut of Michael Hersch’s Piano Concerto (A Preview)


On May 15th, pianist Shai Wosner will be performing a brand new Piano Concerto by Michael Hersch. Titled along the ravines, the piece will be making its first ever concert appearance with the Seattle Symphony at Benaroya Hall, Tuesday May 15th at 7:30 PM.

Shai explains how he came upon his interest for the new work. “When I was looking to commission a new work, thanks to the Borletti-Buitoni Trust of London, I was listening to all kinds of music from composers from different generations and I came across a couple of CDs with piano and chamber works by Michael Hersch. It was clear that he was pursuing his own path with a very strong, personal voice. Those pieces seemed to contain an explosive mix of wildness and melancholy”.

Wosner is another performer that likes to mix the classics with newer, contemporary works. “Programming is really one of the fun parts of being a musician, in my opinion. It’s always nice to fantasize about potential programming ideas, even if, like with any new idea, you may find yourself rejecting it wholeheartedly the next morning. When it comes to recital programs, I try to somehow look for a common thread among the pieces, which sometimes is obvious and sometimes is not. The goal is not so much to include pieces that are similar to each other, but rather a collection of works that are on one hand very different, but that may also resonate, shed light on each other and interact in the context of the program”.

I asked Shai if he would be bringing the new piece into the studio, and he had this to offer: “We hope to be able to record the concerto in the next couple of years. There are also plans for another solo CD and potentially a concerto CD as well that are being discussed. As far as programming is concerned, I am trying to find ‘organic’ ways to fit free improvisation into recital programs. There is nothing new in the concept, of course, and it used to be in fact part of tradition. But I am currently looking for a way to combine it with other repertoire in a meaningful way.”.

Click here for tickets to Shai’s concert with the Seattle Symphony at Benoroya Hall.

Shai Wosner.com

by Chris McGovern