Monday, December 1, 2008

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / December 2008



21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

December 2008

Volume 15, Number 12


Work-in-Progress, November 3, 2008


Lively Dead State / Mark Alburger

Circus Tango / Mark Alburger

Calendar for December 2008

Chronicle of October 2008

Publication

Recording

Illustration / Bernard Rands - As All Get Out


Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Michael McDonagh
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Andrew Shapiro
CORRESPONDENTS


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21ST-CENTURY MUSIC invites pertinent contributions in analysis, composition, criticism, interdisciplinary studies, musicology, and performance practice; and welcomes reviews of books, concerts, music, recordings, and videos. The journal also seeks items of interest for its calendar, chronicle, comment, communications, opportunities, publications, recordings, and videos sections. Copy should be double-spaced on 8 1/2 x 11 -inch paper, with ample margins. Authors are encouraged to submit via e-mail.

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Lively Dead State / Mark Alburger


Years ago when visiting Bruges, Belgium, I didn't get any sense that the locals were fretting over the characterization of their fair city as Bruges-la-Morte (The Dead City of Bruges), the title of Georges Rodenbach's 1892 novel. If there are any lingering 116-year-old resentments, they can be laid to rest in the San Francisco Opera's lively presentation of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City), based on the Rodenbach.

Concert and film composer Korngold and his 1920 smash-success opera both fell out of favor in the intervening years, but are on a course of revival, and this co-production -- first given in 2004 at Vienna and Salzburg and presented now from September 13 through October 24 at the War Memorial -- makes a persuasive case.

The music is wonderful: a colorful post-Puccinian, Straussian score tinged with New Viennese danger (though the composer and his co-librettist, music-critic father were clearly not of the Arnold Schoenberg / Alban Berg camp). Not that the initial story or stage action seem promissing.

A man ("Paul" -- changed from "Hugues" in the Rodenbach -- is it a co-incidence that Erich's father's pseudonym was "Paul Schott"?) pining for his dead wife for how long? Get over it! A woman, beautiful of voice and visage (Emily Mcgee as Marietta) appears, who is the living image of the departed (Mcgee doubling as Marie), and he fails intially to go for her? In the words of one of the Pink Panther movies: "What, are you blind?" "Yes!"

The set (original production by Willy Decker) and singing save this early scene (Act I, actually), with a simple set of stark chairs on a violently raked stage, under a looming white ceiling, backed by black graffiti-stewn walls and graced with a giant reproduction of John Singer Sargent's Portrait of Miss Elsie Palmer (1890, the first of numerous manifestations of this painting throughout the evening). To this, add the shining sonics of Torsten Kirl (Paul), Mcgee, and Lucas Meachem (as Paul's friend Frank), and there was not much to complain about, aside from the languid pace.

But then the action and fever perk up in Acts II and III, to really match the always high level of the music. From a series of strange, moving blue rooftops, to alarming catterwonky shifts of the Sword-of-Damocles ceiling -- the visuals matched the continuing, imaginative, unfolding surprises of the sounds and story line.

Among the most amazing visual moments was among the most effect portrayals of a staged dream state that has been seen: an exact double of the dreaming Paul and his room unfold upstage, and a team of ghost-white actors is presaged by the appearance of balloons one-by-one suddenly appearing upstage.

This was true German-style, surreal decadence that the Germans do so well. Yet as depraved and sensual-sexual as it all was, somehow it almost all kept within the realms of good taste (well, maybe the crucified maid Brigitta [Katherine Tier] scene was a bit over the top). The shocking strangulation of Marietta with the locks of the dead Marie connected with the recent John Steinbeck Mice and Men SF Community Music Center production, and the "turns out it was all just a dream, after all" conclusion made for a still-ominous denouement.

As the Gary Snyder character (Japhy Ryder) in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums said, "Comparisons are odious." But this was opera on the big stage that was arresting and ultimately, in retrospect, engaging from beginning to end, with staging that was astounding (without being pandering) yet somehow essential and spare. There is seeming nothing that Conductor Donald Runnicles and Costume Supervisor Kristi Johnson cannot do in bringing a show fully into its splendor, and a good time was had by all in this uncommonly living City of the Dead.

Circus Tango / Mark Alburger


"Plink, plink.
Here's a little song,
But it won't last long.
Plink, plink."

Don't judge a Stravinsky by its size. Oakland Opera's recent production (October 23 to November 2) of Igor Stravinsky's Renard (The Fox) (1916) made a compelling case for this c. 15-minute often-overlooked mini-masterpiece.

Written during World War I, while the composer was a high-class refugee in Switzerland, the work is a mixed-theatre piece for two tenors, two basses, and chamber orchestra (flute/piccolo, oboe/English horn, clarinet/Eb clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, two horns, percussion, cimbalom, and string quintet. OO slimmed and altered the ensemble somewhat, with one horn, trombone (in exile from Histoire du Soldat, the larger companion piece earlier in the evening), piano (intriguingly John Cageianly prepared-tack-piano altered), and strings limited to violin and bass (again from the Soldier's Tale), in an ingenious rescoring by pianist Skye Atman.

True confession. When my daughter was a babe in arms, I used to play this composition (along with many others) to see if a growing set of unprejudiced ears would take to 20th-century classical sounds. Evidently it worked. She used to shout, "Play the fox and the chicken, Daddy!"

And what's not to like, certainly from an engaging Oakland Opera -- from the rustic, splintered opening march; through surreally stylized musical violences (OK, I skipped some of the details when my daughter was listening to it in the days of yore); to moments of beauty and high camp. The singers sing from the pit (or, in this case, the raised platform in back) and have no one-to-one correspondence with the acrobat/actor/dancers/mimes on stage. Not only did this assist in distancing Stravinsky from his operatic upbringing (his father was an opera singer at the Mariinsky Theatre for 26 years), but it allows for onstage machinations far beyond what could be reasonably expected from bel canto vocalists.

While Ballet Russes's 1929 revival, choreographed by Michel Fokine, was said to have been "ruined chiefly by some jugglers [Sergei] Diaghilev had borrowed from a circus," here the big-top elements added to the visceral excitement. Breona Noack's Fox found her scaling two strips of cloth and doing a joint-defying split, her legs in an outstretched line ten feet above and parallel to the floor. David Hunt's Rooster spasmodicaly strutted to a finale comfortably aloft on an outstretched rope, again well-suspended above the stage.

Add to this the lithe, smiling contributions of Erin Shrader (Cat) and Jodie Power (Goat), and quite possibly among the sexiest baby chicks and foxes (Christie Welter, Abigail Munn, Artemis Anderson, and Sarah Moss) that one is ever likely to encounter, decked out respectively in feather pompom bustiers and furry brassieres -- a definite multimedia spectacular (although for once at Oakland Opera, no projected visuals beyond supertitles, which was just a fine situation). The libretto, Stravinsky's Russian own, based on Russian folk tales from the collection by Alexander Afanasyev, was translated into French by C.F. Ramuz, English by Rollo H. Myers, and co-credited in the OO's program booklet to Robert Craft -- a neat trick, since the latter was not born (1923) until after the piece's 1922 premiere.

And the singing? Oh yes, the singing. Well-executed throughout by Ben Jones, Darron Flagg, Igor Vierra, and Richard Mix, with the ensemble incisively conducted by Diedre McClure, despite the fact that some of the sound gets lost in the cavernous upper reaches of the OO's new venue (N.B. this is not your grandparents' grand opera for warhorses, but rather a rustic warehouse -- having recently moved from a smaller, yet somewhat similar space -- where resident genius composer/director/empressario Tom Dean holds forth in a stained t-shirt).

And the rest of the program? Oh yes, the rest of the program. A fine micro-mini masterpiece (Pastorale) from grand singer, Oakland Opera board member, and fellowette Dominican University musica alumna Kimarie Torres (the original Curley's Wife for my opera on John Steinbeck's [Of] Mice and Men back in the early 90's); and the ever-popular Solder's Tale.

Perhaps too popular these days. If Renard is underdone, perhaps Histoire has been heard a bit more in the opposite direction. It's still a great work, of course, and, as the Oakland Opera notes "Renard looks back, while Histoire looks forward to [Stravinsky's] neoclassic period. It also is the first of the composer's pieces to -- how shall we say this decorously...well, I guess we can't... -- show a bit of laziness, of putting in the time. While Stravinsky had never before, and probably never again, literally recapitulated so much (and so little) music, and while this does make for a singular, telling effect... Still, it's a little much. After after multiple variants of the three opening selections, I, for one, am always ready and relieved when the music finally moves on.

In this appropriate resetting of the work to the current Iraqi war, Histoire solidly joins the ranks of older stage pieces whose scenarios cannot be left alone. Winning interpretations by all-american Soldier Ben Jones, merchant-cum-Devil Mathias Bossi (who brought just the right amount of ambiguous sexual preference to the role), and soldier-girl Narrator Kirya Traber brought the witty but over-long (the words even interupted the supposed segue between the Tango and Waltz) libretto to life. Projected images of Iraq atrocities made us yearn for a proper outcome to the election (which will be known by the time this finds its way into newsprint).

Never in this reviewer's viewing has the Tango been more sensuously realized than in Munn's amorous interpretation, which directly followed her comic, mal-a-tete as a hungover Princess. And, after an evening of such winning musical theatrics, our heads were spinning a bit, too.

Calendar for December 2008


December 5

Kronos Quartet performs George Crumb’s Black Angels. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.

Chronicle of October 2008


October 1

Lorin Maazel conducts the New York Philharmonic in Bernard Rands's Chains Like the Sea. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "This orchestra has regularly favored new pieces from composers who combine rigorous methods with more lyrical inclinations. Mr. Rands, English-born but based in the United States since 1975, creates pieces filled with technical demands that make them gratifying to the performer, as well as sufficient sensual beauty to appeal to listeners. Poetry has provided the spark for some of his strongest creations; Chains Like the Sea, an instrumental work about 20 minutes long, was inspired by Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill. Certain phrases, Mr. Rands explained in a program note, conjured memories of early years spent in Wales. True to its title, The Sabbath Rang Slowly, the first of two sections, was a broadly paced sequence punctuated with bell tones made from stacked notes that shimmered and rippled in combination. Patches reminiscent of Debussy seascapes and early Stravinsky lullabies floated in a dreamlike drift, meant to evoke the tedium of slow, pious Sundays. A more animated second part, Rivers of the Windfall Light, repeatedly surged with chattering gusts of horns, brass and percussion. Mr. Rands has an unerring knack for lucid orchestration; here, scintillating details regularly pricked through an overall melancholy tone. A brief, gentle duo for solo violin and muted trumpet midway through the second part, for instance, seemed to leave behind a humid, bluesy wilt in its wake. Mr. Maazel, who does some of his best work when confronted with challenging new scores, provided an exactingly detailed account. The orchestra’s polish and commitment earned a warm response from the audience" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 10/2/08].


October 4

Looking Forward, in a program exclusively looking back at the 20th Century. Igor Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite, the first song of Benjamin Britten's Les Illuminations, Claude Debussy's Danse Sacree et Danse Profane, Olivier Messiaen's Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine, Edgar Varese's Intgrales, Steve Reich's Clapping Music, and excerpts from Lukas Foss's Time Cycle. New York City Opera in "a very fine concert of notable 20th-century works." St. George Theater, New York, NY. "To demonstrate opposite stylistic camps of the 20th century [George] Manahan conducted Varèse’s Intégrales, an arresting work of raucous sound clusters and brutal rhythms from the mid-1920s, scored for brass, [wood]winds and percussion, and then introduced Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, an early landmark of minimalism, performed, or rather, clapped by four percussionists from the orchestra [N.B. the work is scored for two clappers]. The inclusion of excerpts from Lukas Foss’s spiky, alluring Time Cycle, with the agile soprano Jennifer Zetlan as soloist, was a nod to the 12-tone camp, a place Mr. Foss visit[s] but [does] not live in" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 10/5/08].

Toronto Symphony Orchestra in "a wrenching, full-throttle account of" Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 and Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins (with Ute Lemper), directed by Peter Oundjian. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "The Seven Deadly Sins (1933) [is] a dark Brecht-Weill collaboration with more than casual links to their earlier Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. It is not unusual to amplify the vocalists in this work, but Ute Lemper was miked so heavily that when she sang, the orchestra was barely audible. This did Ms. Lemper no favors: her voice sounded metallic and harsh. Even so, she created a compelling portrait of the two sisters, Anna I and Anna II, who make their way around the United States, falling into the various sins along the way. The vocal quartet Hudson Shad, less vigorously amplified, sang the Family passages effectively. When the orchestra could be heard -- most notably in the Pride movement’s waltz interlude, and in the brassy introduction to Lust -- it produced a fluid, reedy sound well suited to Weill’s score. The Shostakovich 11th, called 'The Year 1905,' was originally planned for 1955 but was not written until 1957. From the Soviet state’s point of view, it was meant to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. On its surface the work commemorates the massacre of petitioning workers outside the czar’s Winter Palace on Jan. 9, 1905, and its second movement includes a harrowing tone painting of the gunshots and the crowd’s terror. But Shostakovich was adept at giving his pieces hidden programs, and it is generally agreed (to the extent that the phrase can be used about any aspect of Shostakovich) that this symphony was as much about Stalin’s terror as the czar’s. Mr. Oundjian, in a spoken introduction, seemed intent on sticking to the official program and didn’t even mention the subtext. No matter; whichever way you read this score, his dramatic shaping of the work illuminated its searing passions, and the orchestra responded with a remarkable fluidity and power. The strings played with a unity and control that made the icy, melancholy serenity of the opening movement palpable, and that magnified that effect when the music returned in the finale. And the woodwinds, brass and percussion evoked the terror and chaos that drives the second movement, as well as the eerie calm of the elegiac third movement" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/6/08].


October 5

The Met Orchestra, conducted by James Levine, in Olivier Messiaen's Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, scored for brass, winds and metallic percussion. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Unlike many of Messiaen’s works that explore ecstatic, wondrous realms of spirituality, this 1964 piece commemorating the fallen of two world wars is a stark rumination on death and the hope for resurrection. The movements, each a response to a biblical quotation, have boldly episodic structures. Primordial chants are jolted by gnashing outbursts, wailing harmonies, pungently dissonant chorales and more. Perhaps Mr. Levine was striving to convey grim spirituality. But the performance came across as ponderous and inert. During dramatic moments of silence, the tension dissipated completely. Between movements Mr. Levine took so much time, whether to gather himself or to set the mood, that you feared he might have been unwell. . . . I have long wondered why the Metropolitan Opera has not seen fit to present Messiaen’s visionary opera St. François d’Assise. Could it be that Mr. Levine has little feeling for Messiaen’s work? . . . I still do not know what to make of Mr. Levine’s baffling performance of the Messiaen, offered in tribute to the composer’s centennial" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 10/6/08].

Fete Francaise. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Maruice Ravel's Tzigane, Pierre Boulez's Derive I, and music from Darius Milhaud's La Creation du Monde. New York Society for Ethical Culture, New York, NY. "Some of [the Quartet's] many hauntingly beautiful moments are in the fifth movement, titled In Praise of the Eternity of Jesus. . . . [T]he cellist Paul Watkins performed that movement’s ethereal melody with delirious intensity over the insistent piano chords played by Gilbert Kalish. Mr. Watkins’s dedication was matched by the violinist Daniel Hope and the clarinetist David Shifrin, who played his solo in Abyss of the Birds with piercing fervor. Mr. Hope also gave an impassioned and virtuosic performance of Ravel’s Tzigane, his gypsy rhapsodizing spiraling into a frenzied whirl at the work’s conclusion. He was accompanied with panache by the pianist Wu Han. . . . Fête Française, included two other colorful 20th-century French pieces, including Pierre Boulez’s Dérive 1 (1984) for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and vibraphone, derived from the set of pitches that Mr. Boulez used for a 1976 tribute to the conductor Paul Sacher. Trills and darting fragments ripple throughout this rigorous work of a sensual modernist. The concert opened with Darius Milhaud’s jazz-inflected concert suite for piano quintet, which he arranged in 1923 from his ballet Création du Monde. The work was inspired by Milhaud’s visit to Harlem jazz clubs and the ballet scored for the same combination of instruments he heard there" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 10/6/08].


October 13

John Adams's Doctor Atomic. Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY. "A-bomb is a hit" [Ronald Blum, Yahoo News].


October 16

Manuel de Falla's La Vida Breve. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "Falla wrote that he had both poetic and pragmatic goals for the opera: to make money while evoking sentiments of 'fear and joy, of hope and torment, of life and death, of exultation and depression.' Given that the premiere of this piece of Spanish verismo was delayed for eight years after its completion in 1905, Falla probably didn’t initially make much money. He did invoke a spectrum of operatic emotions in his first significant work . . . Falla wrote La Vida Breve after composing six zarzuelas, only one of which was staged. He integrated Cante Jondo (Deep Song) in the work, which won an opera competition sponsored by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. The prize included a staging of the opera, but the work didn’t receive its world premiere until 1913, in a French translation in Nice, France. Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos conducted a detailed, evocatively shaped performance that illuminated the Andalusian flavors of the score. The Coro Nacional de España sang vibrantly, although the soloists were less memorable. María Rodríguez sang with a bright but hard-edged soprano as Salud, the most developed role. . . . The tenor Vicente Ombuena as Paco, the mezzo-soprano Marina Pardo as the grandmother, and the bass Josep Miquel Ramón as Tío Sarvaor sometimes had trouble projecting. Gustavo Peña sang with a clear, bright tenor as the Voz de la Fragua (Voice of the Forge), his voice projecting well from the back of the stage" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 10/17/08].

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Jacque Ibert's Hommage a Mozart and Paul Moravec's Brandenburg Gate. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Gate is part of the ensemble’s project to commission six composers to write works inspired by Bach’s "Brandenburg” Concertos. Mr. Moravec’s 20-minute contemporary concerto grosso creates restless interplay and feisty competition between the chamber orchestra and a solo group: flute (Susan Palma-Nidel), clarinet (Alan Kay), trumpet (Louis Hanzlik) and violin (Renée Jolles). The breathless first movement is all skittish runs and riffs, with some 12-tonish inner lines lurching through the textures to lend some punch to the composer’s essentially tonal language. The slow middle movement adopts an unabashedly Neo-Romantic tone, with a pensive theme in the cellos and astringent, chorale-like passages for the soloists. In the finale fractured motifs soon coalesce into hard-driving phrases. Mr. Moravec’s compositional skill is apparent throughout this well-made and agreeable score. For me, especially in the slow movement, there is a little too much “Romantic” and not enough “Neo" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 10/17/08].


October 18

Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor and his ensemble in a program of Persian classical music. Zankel Hall, New york, NY.


October 20

Remembrance Concert. Isabel Bayrakdarian with the pianist Serouj Kradjian and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra in music of Gomidas, a composer revered as an architect of Armenian music, plus works by Ravel, Bartok, Skallkotas, and Klein. Zankel Hall, New York, NY. "Gomidas, a priest as well as a composer, collected and arranged hundreds of Armenian folk songs around the turn of the 20th century, before his career was cut short by the events of 1915. Though his life was spared through the intervention of notable associates, his spirit was shattered; he died two decades later in a French psychiatric clinic. Some selections, like “Andooni” (“Without a Home”) and “Groong” (“The Crane”), overtly conveyed the ache of the concert’s premise. But even in gentle songs dealing with themes of youth, nature and love, a hint of sadness lingered. . . . Mr. Kradjian’s transparent orchestrations provided a flattering backdrop, with colorful flourishes like pattering raindrops in Antsrevn Yegav (It’s Raining) and rustling winds in Dzirani Dzar (Apricot Tree). Some songs featured gorgeously breathy sounds from Hampic Djabourian on duduk, a double-reed instrument that sounds something like a soprano saxophone. Yet the loveliest selection was the simplest: Akh Maral Jan (Ah, Dear Maral), in which Ms. Bayrakdarian’s voice soared over Mr. Kradjian’s spare arpeggios. . . . Ravel’s “Two Hebraic Songs,” and Variations on a Moravian Folksong by Gideon Klein, a Holocaust victim, forged a connection to the horrors of World War II. . . . Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances and Nikos Skalkottas’s Greek Dances, like the Gomidas songs, preserved folkloric sources in concert-music guise." [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 10/21/08].

James Levine conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Leon Kirchner's The Forbidden. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Kirchner’s 14-minute score [is a] reworking . . . that first appeared in 2003 as a piano sonata, then morphed into a string quartet. . . . The title, taken from a passage in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, suggests that in this score, Mr. Kirchner, who studied with Schoenberg in the 1930's and was powerfully influenced by the 12-tone technique, is grappling with the forbidden -- that is, old diatonic tonality. The onrushing music swings between atonal, pointillist outbursts and diatonically grounded lyrical passages. For all the darting phrases and layered textures, a clear thematic line runs through the music, almost like a narrative voice. Mr. Levine drew a vibrantly colored and clear-textured performance from the orchestra. Though unsteady on his feet, Mr. Kirchner, with some help, appeared onstage to acknowledge the ovation" [The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 10/21/08]


October 23

Bela Bartok's Violin Concerto No. 2. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY.

David Bruce's Gumboots for clarinet and string quartet. Zankel Hall, New York, NY. "[The] work [was] inspired by South African gumboot dancing, a form that originated during apartheid. Since workers were often prohibited from talking while they labored, miners -- who wore Wellington boots because of frequent flooding -- communicated by slapping their boots in certain patterns, the origin of the rhythmic, energetic gumboot dance. . . . The work is divided into two parts, with a wistful, tranquil prelude preceding six jubilant 'gumboot dances,' which according to the composer can be interpreted as a celebration of the regenerative power of dance" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 10/24/04].


October 24

Leonard Bernstein's Mass. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Leonard Bernstein suffered crushing disappointments as a composer. The most hurtful of them all was surely the premiere of his Mass in September 1971, inaugurating the Kennedy Center in Washington. That he conceived this eclectic score as A Theater Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers did not give pause to the many critics, mostly classical music critics, who dismissed it as a vulgar exercise in antiestablishment pandering. It was fairly daring to turn a setting of a liturgical Mass into a drama about a shattering spiritual crisis for a pastor and his disillusioned and rebellious congregation. And Bernstein’s unabashed mixing of musical styles in Mass (Mahlerian richness, show-tune pizazz, hard-driving rock, 12-tone counterpoint, hymnal simplicity and more) was considered glib and cheap. If only Bernstein could have been at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights on Saturday afternoon. There is nothing like young performers to refresh older pieces. And the performance of Bernstein’s “Mass” that Marin Alsop conducted at this palatial former vaudeville house involved hundreds of young, inspired and inspiring performers. This was actually the second performance of Mass in two days. As the major event in its contribution to the citywide celebration of the 90th anniversary of Bernstein’s birth, Carnegie Hall sponsored the Bernstein Mass Project. On Friday night Ms. Alsop conducted the work at Carnegie with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, a dynamic roster of solo singers and two ensembles of gifted choristers: the Morgan State University Choir (Eric Conway, director) and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus (Dianne Berkun, director). On Saturday afternoon Ms. Alsop took all those performers up to the Heights, where they were joined by some 250 schoolchildren from the New York area, including the members of the All-City High School Chorus. Seated in the first 12 rows of the theater, facing the orchestra, the students lent their ardent voices to several of the work’s pivotal choruses. The theater almost shook with the vehemence of the music-making during the most bitterly angry section of the work, the Dona Nobis Pacem, when the Celebrant, here the charismatic baritone Jubilant Sykes, collapses in despair over the inflamed protests of the people he has been trying to reach, who are demanding peace, demanding proof and answers: 'Give us something, or we’ll just start taking!' As a rock band drove the orchestra through spiraling riffs of pummeling rhythm, the soloists portraying the street people encircled the Celebrant, shaking their fists, shrieking 'Dona nobis' at him. The choristers onstage and the hundreds of schoolchildren in the hall joined in, singing with vehemence, swaying in sync, as drums pounded and steely rock guitars wailed. Some pieces that seem trendy at their birth soon fade away. But the essence and achievement of Bernstein’s Mass have become clearer over time. In other scores, like his loftily titled “Jeremiah” Symphony, Bernstein was perhaps guilty of self-conscious striving for profundity. But Mass was driven by a deeply personal agenda. He did not care if a passage seemed a rip-off of Copland, Pete Seeger, buzz-saw rock or Godspell, the musical that opened off Broadway while Bernstein was composing Mass. Bernstein even tapped that show’s creator, Stephen Schwartz, to help write the vernacular lyrics added to the Roman Catholic liturgy. Surely, viewed in retrospect, Uncle Lenny was worried about the young people who were protesting the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, the very generation he had tried to reach as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic through his landmark Young People’s Concerts. A lingering criticism of Mass is that with his brash mixing of pop and classical styles, Bernstein came across as just too hip. But the evocations are expertly done. And today such blending of styles is commonplace. Young composers, who disdain categories, borrow from any style they care to. And why not? Bernstein sweated the details in composing this score. A Simple Song is as alluring a tune as he ever wrote. The sublime chorale Almighty Father, with its hauntingly wide-spaced harmonies, had the audience at the United Palace Theater, full of restless families, utterly hushed and attentive. The Word of the Lord is an artful transfer of a Pete Seeger-type folk song into an orchestral setting. There are cringe-inducing moments in Mass, especially some too-clever lyrics, like the riff on “do, re, mi” that the Celebrant sings: 'Mi alone is only mi./But mi with sol/Me with soul/Mi sol.' But there are cringe-inducing moments in many works that I love, including Mahler symphonies and Beethoven’s Fidelio. . . . Had Bernstein taken better care of himself and had a little better luck, he might have been around for this day. And how he would have loved seeing his “Mass” touch so many people in Washington Heights" [Anthony Tommasini, The New Yrk Times, 10/26/08].

Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly. Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY.


October 27

Making Music: George Crumb: Vox Balaenae, The Sleeper, and Voices From the Morning of the Earth (American Songbook VI). Zankel Hall, New York, NY. "In an interview with Jeremy Geffen, the hall’s director of artistic programming, he said his output had dwindled into the ’90s because he was spending more time teaching than composing. His retirement in 1997 solved that problem. The program proved another point too: Fascinating as it is to hear composers speak for themselves, the music tells you what you really need to know. And because Mr. Crumb’s music is rooted in a sound world of his own creation — in which musicians hit, scrape, stroke and sing into their instruments, and notions of tonality and atonality are entirely fluid — his signature is unmistakable. [T]he avant-garde classic Vox Balaenae (1971), is driven by bending, microtonal flute and cello pitches and percussive inside-the-piano writing. . . . Two more recent vocal works showed the extent to which Mr. Crumb has continued to demand that virtuosity, while stripping away the outlandish effects. You still hear them in the sometimes swooping, sometimes whispered vocal lines and plucked piano writing of The Sleeper (1984). But in Voices From the Morning of the Earth (American Songbook VI) (2007), Mr. Crumb’s expansive arrangements of folk songs, spirituals and pop tunes, those sound effects give way to layered, contrapuntal percussion writing and deeply expressive reconfigurations of the vocal melodies. In an assertive performance by Ann Crumb, a theater singer and the composer’s daughter; Randall Scarlata, a baritone; and Orchestra 2001, led by James Freeman, the work’s finale -- a haunting version of Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone? -- was particularly gripping. Against a hazy chromatic backdrop, with an angular piano figure punctuating the verses, the two singers alternated lines, the stanzas sung with an acidic vehemence and the refrain ominously whispered. Mr. Seeger’s plaintive antiwar text has never sounded more grim" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/28/08].

Gustav Mahler's and Ellen Taafe Zwillich's respective Symphony No. 5's. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. Last week on the illuminating blog On an Overgrown Path (www.overgrownpath.com), Bob Shingleton, a retired recording executive who writes under the screen name Pliable, mused on the subject of fifth symphonies’ capturing what he termed the essence of their composers’ styles. He cited major figures like Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, as well as lesser-known worthies like Valentin Silvestrov, whose Symphony No. 5 prompted the post. 'Their fifth symphonies are not necessarily their greatest works, but somehow they capture the unique voices of those composers,' Mr. Shingleton wrote. That statement was put to the test on Monday night at Carnegie Hall, when the Juilliard Orchestra introduced Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s new Symphony No. 5. James Conlon, the conductor, paired the work with a famous Fifth, that of Mahler. Among the many noteworthy achievements in Ms. Zwilich’s career, her 1983 Pulitzer Prize, the first awarded to a female composer, usually tops the list. But before that, in 1975, she became the first female composer to earn a doctorate from Juilliard. In her program notes for the new symphony, which was commissioned by the school, Ms. Zwilich cites Juilliard as the place where she found her voice as a composer. Her mature style -- a mix of neo-Classical craftsmanship, roiling energy and tonal accessibility — came into focus slightly later, from her Pulitzer-winning Symphony No. 1 onward. Those qualities were also present in the new symphony, a 24-minute work in four movements. Subtitled Concerto for Orchestra, the symphony demonstrated Ms. Zwilich’s flair for orchestration. Focus restlessly shifted among sections, and from massed groups to isolated soloists. Unorthodox percussion instruments (like the spiral cymbal, a dangling, serpentine coil that offers a distant roar) and techniques (timpani played with a model of wire brush known as dreadlocks) showed that Ms. Zwilich keeps up with recent trends. A brooding fanfare and crackling martial tattoos in Prologue echoed and subtly evolved throughout the work. Celebration, which could stand alone as a rousing curtain-raiser, bubbled and bristled with youthful ebullience. Memorial, inspired by Mr. Conlon’s championing of composers silenced by politics and war, paid tribute with surprisingly languorous, bluesy figures, redolent of music by Copland and Bernstein. In Epilogue elements from the preceding movements resurfaced in a stormy finale. Determining whether Ms. Zwilich’s Fifth Symphony is among her strongest creations would require more than a single hearing. But the qualities that have long made her music personal and compelling were certainly present, and the Juilliard musicians took up the piece with diligence and vitality. They also responded admirably to Mr. Conlon’s thoughtful leadership in a thoroughly considered, powerfully rendered account of Mahler . . . music that contains not just the composer’s essence but some measure of his soul as well" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 10/28/08].


October 28

The 23 Constellations of Joan Miró, a multimedia suite by Bobby Previte. World Financial Center’s Winter Garden, New York, NY.


October 29

The complete works for string quartet by the "intensely complex modernist" Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), performed by the adventurous Jack Quartet, plus music of Corey Dargel. Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY. Justin Kantor and David Handler . . . decided to open a club that would present an eclectic mix of programming, not just old and new works from the classical music tradition, but rock, jazz, world music and anything else that might entice people, especially young people, who are curious about out-there music and care little about labels. The club’s motto is 'Serving Art & Alcohol,' and the owners count on revenues from drinks and snacks. The tables were filled on Wednesday night for the Xenakis immersion, and there were standees everywhere, drinks in hand, listening raptly, and then shouting whoops of approval during the ovations. . . . If challenging music is presented in an inviting and informal space, the theory goes, then open-minded young audiences will show up, whether the music is Bach, Ligeti or the stylistically eclectic singer-songwriter Corey Dargel, who performed the second show on Wednesday night. You could argue that the players of the Jack Quartet, who met as students at the Eastman School of Music, presented Xenakis in an almost anti-intellectual manner. There were no program notes and no spoken introductions to the pieces, except for a few teasers from the cellist, Kevin McFarland, who talked of the “insanity level” or the “computer-generated chaos.” Yet these musicians and the proprietors of Le Poisson Rouge are on to something. What is most essential is for audiences just to show up and listen. Though I am in the business of informing people about music, I have to concede that knowing about the matrix of complex theories that generated Xenakis’s music may not help listeners much. Born in Romania of Greek parents, Xenakis was also a trained architect who approached composition almost like an engineer, building 'sound constructions,' as he called them, generating musical materials from algorithms, wave forms, spectral screens and stochastic synthesis. Clearly, what mattered to the musicians and audience at Le Poisson Rouge were the visceral energy, weird sound effects, raucous busyness, sometimes pensive beauty and often sheer craziness that, on the surface, can be found in Xenakis’s pieces for string quartet. In Tetora (1990) there were gripping passages in which the string harmonic clusters slither up and down the scale, and episodes in which tightly bound chords pummel along relentlessly, like some fractured Greek folk dance. Amid the wailing, percolating rawness of ST/4 there were surprising moments in which delicate volleys of pizzicato pitches were traded among the players. And it was gratifying to see the audience so involved that they laughed out loud at Xenakis’s musical pranks, as in Ergma, when frenzied outbursts of counterpoint wind down and land with dull thuds on final chords. Mr. Dargel’s set was a release party for Other People’s Love Songs, his new recording of 13 original songs on New Amsterdam Records. As the title implies, these custom-made songs were commissioned by people for their significant others. For this occasion Mr. Dargel was backed by the Now Ensemble, a contemporary-music group. Mr. Dargel sings in a modest, sweet-toned, conversational way, and writes songs whose lyrics and melodies are at once wistful and wry, tender and irreverent. In Other People’s Love Songs, giving voice to the lives and relationships of his subjects, he invests melodies with playful melismatic turns, evoking Kurt Weill cabaret, Latino rhythms and more" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Time, 10/30/08].

N.B. All dates are from online editions of publications.

Publication


John Adams. Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "As he explains in his charming and illuminating memoir, Adams had a revelation in 1976, when he was a 29-year-old composer struggling to find his creative voice, and it led him to make caring the essence of his art. He was driving a Karmann Ghia convertible along a mountain ridge in Northern California, where he had moved from New England. He was playing a cassette recording of the first act of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung,” and he found himself blurting, to himself, “He cares.” Adams, until then an acolyte of the John Cage school of conceptual sonic experimentation, was unexpectedly moved by Wagner’s high emotionalism. He thought he could feel — or, rather, he felt he could now think about -- the capacity of music to connect with its listeners viscerally, as well as intellectually. That flash of obviousness constituted apostasy in the insular, parochial society of the musical vanguard. 'What was creating such a deep impression upon me in the music of these German composers was the pure expressivity of their art,' Adams explains in Hallelujah Junction. 'What Wagner and Schumann cared about was making the intensity of their emotions palpable to the listener.' This book, Adams’s first (and, let’s hope, not his last), is a cogent account of its author’s escape from the world of ­audience-alienating “process” music absorbed with its own making and his arrival at a place where intellectual adventurism and robust emotion coexist -- a pilgrimage from the Land Without Feelings to Hallelujah Junction. There happens to be an actual location called Hallelujah Junction, a highway crossroads near the Nevada-California state line; Adams came upon it -- inspiration tends to find him behind the wheel -- and he adopted the phrase originally, 10 years ago, as the title of an exhilarating four-hand, two-piano piece that employs, essentially, just two notes. Although the sojourner scheme is a cliché among books by creative artists, politicians and pretty much everyone else, Adams plays it lightly. There is no more self-aggrandizement in this wry, smart and forthright memoir than there is in the venturesome but elegiac music of Adams’s maturity. Indeed, Hallelujah Junction stands with books by Hector Berlioz and Louis Armstrong among the most readably incisive autobiographies of major musical figures. Adams can write prose, as he has proved with articles, program notes and lectures, some of which form the basis of chapters and sections in his book. (Most of the previously published material has been improved, often by the addition of more vivid detail.) Describing the Volkswagen Beetle he drove from Cambridge to California after finishing his graduate studies at Harvard, Adams writes, 'Perhaps sensing it was being flogged into making this one last trip only to die in an alien land, it made a noise like a spoon caught in a Disposall and sputtered to a halt.' He can even be droll. 'It has occurred to me,' Adams notes in a section on creative collaboration, 'that, next to double murder-suicide, it might be the most painful thing two people can do together.' Like many of Adams’s musical compositions, Hallelujah Junction is a collage of disparate elements -- demystifying ruminations on the creative process, sharp assessments of his and his peers’ work, sweet memories of his precocious childhood in New England, rants against pomposity and indifference in all forms (especially the kind passing for nonconformity), and traditional then-I-wrote sections, all organized with careful attention to balance, contrast and propulsive effect. Adams juxtaposes and paces the components with (what else?) great care to simulate spontaneity. Among the most vigorous sections of this book are Adams’s terse critiques of other composers, past and present, in and out of the avant-garde. Copland, he writes, 'was adept at playing the role of provocateur, particularly in his gift of melding the leanness and angularity of Stravinsky with the demotic energy and raucous timbres of ’20s jazz.' Adams deftly lacerates Schoenberg, Stockhausen and Babbitt for what he hears as mechanistic severity and coldness in 12-tone music and serialism. He reveres Ives for his famous iconoclasm and formal inventiveness, while admitting disappointment in the failure of Ives’s symphonies to stir him deeply. Adams is particularly fervent and persuasive in his advocacy of lesser-known contemporary composers like Glenn Branca, who has written a symphony for 100 guitars, and Robert Ashley, who, working in a realm between music and speech, creates grand vocal pieces that Adams describes as 'meditative, seemingly improvisatory, but in fact carefully constructed' -- a description that suits more than a few of his own compositions, especially his concerto for symphony and electric violin, The Dharma at Big Sur. Much the same, Adams praises Cornelius Cardew, founder of the Scratch Orchestra, because he finds Cardew’s music 'anti-elite and antihistorical to the max' and 'fresh, playful and humanistic.' In the awe-struck impressions of the West in Hallelujah Junction ('the land . . . untamed and mysterious'), as in the evocations of open landscapes in his music, Adams makes clear his fascination with the natural world; and for a composer to admire others whose music sounds very much like his own is only natural. . . . Adams’s importance as a composer is rooted not so much in his having done anything new, but, rather, in his having done very well the things he has done . . . . With Hallelujah Junction, Adams has put in prose an argument against the ideology of aesthetic continuum, a case that his music has always articulated eloquently by example. “That particular continuum I found ridiculously exclusive, being founded on a kind of Darwinian view of stylistic evolution,” he argues. If a composition 'didn’t in some way advance the evolution of the language, yielding progress either by a technological innovation or in the increasing complexity of the discourse, it was not even worth discussing.' Who cares? John Adams. And, so, now do we" [David Hajdu, The New York Times, 10/24/08].

Recording


Anthony Braxton. The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton. Mosaic. "[This is] an eight-disc set covering the output of this multireedist and composer during a major-label tenure as impressive as it was improbable. Recorded from 1974 to 1980 and previously available only on vinyl, the material ranges so broadly in structure and scale that it almost defies understanding as a single body of work. Yet Mr. Braxton’s vision is recognizably diamondlike, at once prismatic and tough. He knows exactly what he’s after, even when he struggles to articulate it. In the liner notes Michael Cuscuna, Mr. Braxton’s original producer and now the president of Mosaic, recalls the “blend of excited anticipation and dread” that he felt before planning each release. Mr. Braxton’s palette runs from the existential (unaccompanied alto saxophone) to the quixotic (Opus 82: For Four Orchestras), with a lot of action in between. His unstoppable Creative Music Orchestra turns up memorably, and so do several rough-and-tumble quartets featuring the bassist Dave Holland and Kenny Wheeler on trumpet or George Lewis on trombone. Taken as a whole the collection enables a new understanding of Mr. Braxton’s complicated mind-set as he works through a host of ideas about disjuncture and continuity, form and ritual, timbre and pulse. In some ways this was merely a foundation — he’s still furiously composing and performing — but that hardly diminishes its impact or its exhilarating sense of discovery" [Nate Chinen, The New York Times, 10/17/08].

Saturday, November 1, 2008

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / November 2008


21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

November 2008

Volume 15, Number 11


Work-in-Progress, October 3, 2008


Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) / Mark Alburger

Rick Wright (1943-2008) / Phillip George

Bernstein Bounce / Mark Alburger

Roll Dem Bones / Mark Alburger

Calendar for November 2008

Chronicle of September 2008

Illustration / Mauricio Kagel


Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Michael McDonagh
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Andrew Shapiro
CORRESPONDENTS


INFORMATION FOR SUBSCRIBERS

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC is published monthly by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. ISSN 1534-3219.

Subscription rates in the U.S. are $96.00 per year; subscribers elsewhere should add $48.00 for postage. Single copies of the current volume and back issues are $12.00. Large back orders must be ordered by volume and be pre-paid. Please allow one month for receipt of first issue. Domestic claims for non-receipt of issues should be made within 90 days of the month of publication, overseas claims within 180 days. Thereafter, the regular back issue rate will be charged for replacement. Overseas delivery is not guaranteed. Send orders to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. email: mus21stc@aol.com.

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INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC invites pertinent contributions in analysis, composition, criticism, interdisciplinary studies, musicology, and performance practice; and welcomes reviews of books, concerts, music, recordings, and videos. The journal also seeks items of interest for its calendar, chronicle, comment, communications, opportunities, publications, recordings, and videos sections. Copy should be double-spaced on 8 1/2 x 11 -inch paper, with ample margins. Authors are encouraged to submit via e-mail.

Prospective contributors should consult The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), in addition to back issues of this journal. Copy should be sent to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@aol.com. Materials for review may be sent to the same address.


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Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) / Mark Alburger


Mauricio Kagel (December 24, 1931 - September 18, 2008) was born into a Jewish family which fled from Russia in the 1920's. He studied music, history of literature, and philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires.

In 1957, he came as a scholar to Cologne, Germany, where he lived until his death. From 1960 he taught at the International Summer School at Darmstadt.

Kagel taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1964 to 1965 as Slee Professor of music theory and at the Berlin Film and Television Academy as a visiting lecturer. He served as director of courses for new music in Gothenburg and Cologne.

Many of his pieces give specific theatrical instructions to the performers, such as to adopt certain facial expressions while playing, to make their stage entrances in a particular way, and to physically interact with other performers. His work has often been compared to the Theatre of the Absurd, including such pieces as Match (1966), a tennis game for cellists with a percussionist as umpire.

In the radio play Ein Aufnahmezustand (1969), the incidents surrounding the recording of a radio play turn out to be the work itself .



Kagel also made films, including Ludwig van (1970), a critical interrogation of the uses of Beethoven's music made during the bicentenary of the elder composer's birth. In it, a reproduction of a Beethoven composing studio is seen, as part of a fictive visit of the Beethovenhaus in Bonn. Everything in it is papered with sheet music of Ludwig's pieces. The soundtrack of the film is a piano playing the music as it appears in each shot. Because the music has been wrapped around curves and edges, it is somewhat distorted, but recognizable exceprts can still be heard. In other parts, the film contains parodies of radio or TV broadcasts connected with the Beethoven Year 1770.

Kagel later turned the film into a composition which could be performed without the film -- the score consists of close-ups of various areas of the studio, which are to be interpreted by performer[s].

Staatstheater (1970) also demonstrates Kagel's absurdist tendency. The work is described as a "ballet for non-dancers," though in many ways it more resembles an opera, with musical instruments including chamber pots and enema equipment. In the spirit of Ein Aufnahmezustand, as Staatstheater progresses, the piece itself, as well as opera and ballet become its subject matter.

Other pieces include Con Voce (With Voice) (1972), where a masked trio silently mimes playing instruments, and Match (1966), a tennis game for cellists with a percussionist as umpire.

He was professor for new music theatre at the Cologne Conservatory from 1974 to 1997.

Kagel also wrote a large number of more conventional pieces, including music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and films.

Rick Wright (1943-2008) / Phillip George


[Pink Floyd in the 1970's: Rick Wright, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters]

Rick [Richard William] Wright (July 28, 1943 – September 15, 2008, London, UK) was a keyboardist best known as a founding member of Pink Floyd.

Wright's richly textured keyboard layers were a vital ingredient and a distinctive characteristic of Pink Floyd's sound. In addition, he frequently sang background and occasionally lead vocals onstage and in the studio with Pink Floyd (notably on the songs Time and Astronomy Domine).

Though not as prolific a songwriter as fellow band members Roger Waters (bass) and David Gilmour (guitar), Wright wrote significant parts of Meddle, The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Division Bell.

Wright was born in London and educated at the Haberdashers' Aske's School and the Regent Street Polytechnic College of Architecture, where he met future associates Waters and Nick Mason (drums).

He married his first wife, Juliette Gale, in 1964, and had two children with her, Jamie and Gala.

Wright was a founding member of The Pink Floyd Sound in 1965, and also participated in its previous incarnations, Sigma 6 and The (Screaming) Abdabs.

In the early days of Pink Floyd, the keyboardist was a prominent musical force in the group (although not as much as Syd Barrett, the band’s chief songwriter and front man at the time) and he wrote and sang several songs of his own during 1967-1968. While not credited as a singer on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, he sang lead on Barret's Astronomy Domine and Matilda Mother, and harmonies on Scarecrow and Chapter 24. His early songs included Remember a Day, Paintbox, and It Would Be So Nice.

As the sound and the goals of the band evolved, Wright became less interested in songwriting and focused primarily on contributing a distinctive style to extended instrumental pieces such as Interstellar Overdrive, A Saucerful of Secrets, Careful with That Axe, Eugene, and One Of These Days. and to musical themes for film scores (More, Zabriskie Point, and Obscured by Clouds).

He also made essential contributions to Pink Floyd's long works such as Atom Heart Mother and Echoes (on which he sang lead vocals) His four compositional collaborations on The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) were Breathe (with Gilmour and Waters), Time (with the previous and Mason, singing lead vocals on alternated verses with the guitarist), The Great Gig in the Sky (with Clare Torry, after she won a legal battle against Pink Floyd), Us and Them (with Waters), and Any Colour You Like (with Gilmour and Mason).

Wright is also credited as composer, with Gilmour and Waters, of the nine-part Shine On You Crazy Diamond, from Wish You Were Here, noting

"It's hard to say but it just happens to be the album for me that from the moment it starts 'til it finishes, it flows, the songs flow into each other and it just has a wonderful feeling in it" [In the Studio with Redbeard, March 1994],

and

"It's an album I can listen to for pleasure. And there aren't many of the Floyd's albums that I can say that about" [Pink Floyd Legends, 2001].

Wright recorded his first solo project, Wet Dream in September 1978. Battling both personal problems and an increasingly rocky relationship with Roger Waters, he was forced to resign from Pink Floyd during The Wall sessions by Waters, who threatened to pull the plug on the album's tapes if Wright did not leave the band. However, he was retained as a salaried session musician during the subsequent live concerts to promote that album in 1980 and 1981.

Ironically, Wright became the only member of Pink Floyd to profit from those hugely spectacular shows, since the net financial loss had to be borne by the three remaining "full-time" members. He was the only member of the band not to attend the 1982 premiere of the film version of The Wall. He and wife Juliet divorced in that same year.

In 1983, Pink Floyd released the only album on which Wright does not appear with The Final Cut.

During 1984, Wright formed a new musical duo with Dave Harris (from the band Fashion) called Zee. They signed a record deal with Atlantic Records and released only one album, Identity. This was also the year of his second marriage, to Franka

Wright rejoined Pink Floyd following Waters's departure. Because of legal and contractual issues from his "hired gun" status during The Wall world tour, Wright's photo was not included in the 1987 album A Momentary Lapse of Reason and his name was listed in smaller letters than Mason and Gilmour. By the time of the Momentary Lapse world tour and the 1988 live album The Delicate Sound of Thunder, Wright was contractually a member of Pink Floyd once again.

Wright and Franka divorced in 1994, the year in which he co-wrote five songs and sang lead vocals on one song (Wearing the Inside Out) for The Division Bell. This recording provided material for the double live album and video release P*U*L*S*E in 1995. Wright, like Nick Mason, performed on every Pink Floyd tour.

In 1996, inspired by his successful input into The Division Bell, Wright released his second solo album, Broken China, including contributions from vocalist Sinéad O'Connor, guitaristsDominic Miller (known from his guitar work with Sting) and Tim Renwick (another Pink Floyd, bassist Pino Palladino, and drummer Manu Katché.

Wright married his third wife Millie (to whom he dedicated Broken) in that year. Their only child is named Ben. Also in 1996, Wright's daughter Gala married Guy Pratt, a session musician who has played bass for Pink Floyd since Roger Waters's exit.

On July 2, 2005, Wright, Gilmour, Mason were joined by Waters on stage for the first time since The Wall concerts for a short set at the Live 8 concert in London. Wright underwent eye surgery for cataracts in November 2005, preventing him from attending Pink Floyd's induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame. Roger Waters, who was also unable to attend the band's induction due to rehearsals for the opening of his opera Ça Ira in Rome, appeared in video link and stated, tongue-in-cheek:

“Rick actually hasn't had an eye operation, he and I have eloped to Rome and we're living happily in a small apartment off the Via Venuti!”

Wright contributed keyboards and background vocals to Gilmour's On an Island, and performed with the latter's touring band for over two dozen shows in Europe and North America in 2006.

Wright died of an undisclosed form of cancer in his home in Britain on September 15, 2008 at 65. At the time of his death, he had been working on a new solo album, which was thought to comprise a series of instrumental pieces.

David Gilmour noted:

No one can replace Richard Wright. He was my musical partner and my friend. In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick's enormous input was frequently forgotten. He was gentle, unassuming and private but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognised Pink Floyd sound. I have never played with anyone quite like him. The blend of his and my voices and our musical telepathy reached their first major flowering in 1971 on Echoes. In my view all the greatest PF moments are the ones where he is in full flow. After all, without Us and Them and The Great Gig In The Sky, both of which he wrote, what would The Dark Side Of The Moon have been? Without his quiet touch the album Wish You Were Here would not quite have worked. In our middle years, for many reasons he lost his way for a while, but in the early 90's, with The Division Bell, his vitality, spark and humour returned to him and then the audience reaction to his appearances on my tour in 2006 was hugely uplifting and it's a mark of his modesty that those standing ovations came as a huge surprise to him, (though not to the rest of us). Like Rick, I don't find it easy to express my feelings in words, but I loved him and will miss him enormously.

Roger Waters's website displayed a picture as a tribute, showing an array of candles and poppies against a black background. Waters stated:

I was very sad to hear of Rick's premature death, I knew he had been ill, but the end came suddenly and shockingly. My thoughts are with his family, particularly [his children] Jamie and Gala and their mum Juliet, who I knew very well in the old days, and always liked very much and greatly admired. As for the man and his work, it is hard to overstate the importance of his musical voice in the Pink Floyd of the 60's and 70's. The intriguing, jazz influenced, modulations and voicings so familiar in Us and Them and Great Gig in the Sky, which lent those compositions both their extraordinary humanity and their majesty, are omnipresent in all the collaborative work the four of us did in those times. Rick's ear for harmonic progression was our bedrock. I am very grateful for the opportunity that Live 8 afforded me to engage with him and David [Gilmour] and Nick [Mason] that one last time. I wish there had been more.

Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason told Entertainment Weekly:

Like any band, you can never quite quantify who does what. But Pink Floyd wouldn’t have been Pink Floyd if [we] hadn’t had Rick. I think there’s a feeling now -- particularly after all the warfare that went on with Roger and David trying to make clear what their contribution was -- that perhaps Rick rather got pushed into the background. Because the sound of Pink Floyd is more than the guitar, bass, and drum thing. Rick was the sound that knitted it all together... He was by far the quietest of the band, right from day one. And, I think, probably harder to get to know than the rest of us... It's almost that George Harrison thing. You sort of forget that they did a lot more than perhaps they’re given credit for.

Bernstein Bounce / Mark Alburger


The Democratic and Republican National Conventions both provided "bounce" for their respective nominees Barack Obama and John McCain. Similarly, the opening gala of the 2008-2009 season, on September 3 at Davies Hall, proved likewise for candidates Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, in a bouncy program that featured music by Leonard Bernstein, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Leo Delibes.

The compositional front runner was unquestionably Bernstein's popular Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story", a perennial favorite that reminds us of just how important this composer and this work are and were to the American scene. Even a quick google can make a telling comparison, in terms of number of internet citations as of today (September 9):

Leonard Bernstein 2,870,000
Aaron Copland 1,110,000

West Side Story 5,130,000
Appalachian Spring 209,000

Certainly Bernstein's West Side Story would trounce Copland's Appalachian Spring (possibly the most-referenced American work in criticism, programming, and textbooks) in any musical Electoral College. And what Thomas and the Symphony reminded us was that WSS is appropriate not only for gala and pops concerts, but for any place and time, as a composition of beauty, depth, and energy. If the composer received assistance in its orchestration (by top orchestrators Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal), surely this points simply to Broadway deadlines, as, ironically, the work sounds as quintessentially Bernsteinian as anything Lenny ever wrote.

Styled as a series of nine attacca numbers, the Symphonic Dances feature much, yet not all, of the most arresting sections of the musical, as the entire evening's entertainment clearly has engaging music to burn (such memorable pieces as America, Maria, and Officer Krupke never make it out of the caucuses, for instance). What survives -- Prologue, Somewhere, Scherzo, Mambo, Cha-Cha, Meeting Scene, Cool Fugue, Rumble, and Finale -- makes for festive suite that proved the high point of the proceedings.

Also a contender was the Piano Concerto No. 3 of Rachmaninoff, with Yefim Bronfman on the docket. While not as immediately engaging as this fine conservative composer's second essay in the genre, the work certainly has its advocates, such as both the conductor and the soloist, who both blazed their way through blizzards of notes on this balmy night. If the work meanders a bit, there is much pleasure in the wanderings, and the finale evokes a romp along with the best of them.

The opener opened with Delibes's Cortege de Bacchus from Sylvia, featuring heroic brass fanfares and resonant string passage work.

Unlike the political rallies, however, the opener failed to provide us with any contemporary notions of diversity beyond the expected male European-American dominance. And, while the performers were certainly lively, the composers were, as is so often the case, all dead -- casting programming Music Director Thomas in an aesthetic position way to the right of a musical Sarah Palin.

Roll Dem Bones / Mark Alburger


Opera is always a gamble, and the more players, the more risk.

So it is no surprise that The Bonesetter's Daughter, a new roll of the operatic die by composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Amy Tan, commissioned and presented by San Francisco Opera (September 13 through October 3 at the War Memorial) is somewhat of a crap shoot -- an uneven work of high-rolling musical-theatrical fireworks and less-than-engaging table time.

Certainly it is a committed production. From the opening cavalcade of orchestral effects, graced by sona oboes (not trumpets, as erroneously designated in the program), everything is in place to astound. Wallace's score is appealing throughout, showing plenty of Western chutzpah in evoking matters Eastern in a world where the likes of Tan Dun and Chen Yi find their natural voices) -- this is perhaps not surprising, given the composer's previous success in Harvey Milk, where he demonstrated, as here, remarkable "suction-cup ears" (a recent characterization in the New York Times of peer Howard Shore's LA Opera endeavor, The Fly).

With flying Chinese acrobats (suspended on cables from the flies), stunning sets by Walt Spangler, winning vocal contributions by such artists as Zheng Cao (as Ruth Young Kamen), Ning Liang (LuLing Liu Young), Quian Yi (Precious Antie), James Maddalena (Art Kamen), and Hao Jiang Tian (Chang the Coffinmaker) there is much to enjoy.

But the story remains problematic. The opening "Fountain Court Chinese Restaurant, San Francisco, February 1997," while graced with wonderful projections (Leigh Haas) and costumes (Han Feng), veers (as does the whole show) between banality and pomposity. The seeming attempts to transform the ordinary into the archetypal and noble -- as so well achieved in, say, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men -- seems to elude the creators here.

The great climax of this story, where the villian Chang (who, as can be the case, has some of the greatest music and scenes here) gets his comeuppance, turns out to be a castration and descent into the pit. Hmm, we all showed up in our fancy clothes for this?

The last scene "A Hospital Room, San Francisco, 1997" (coming after the flashbacks "Immortal Heart, a small village on the outskirts of Beijing, late 1930's" and "Hong Kong Habor, 1940's") seems a tedious hit-us-over-the-head, with its protracted spelling out of reconcilliation. We got it, already.

Still, there was enough to take in and marvel that it was a pleasure to attend this, the most ballyhooed San Francisco Opera event of the season. Congrats to General Manager David Gockley, Director and Choreographer Chen Shi-Zheng, Conductor Steven Sloane, the assembled company of artists, and of course to creators Wallace and Tan. May we have more such talked-about evenings of new music drama!

Calendar for November 2008


November 7

San Francisco Cabaret Opera in Mark Alburger's Antigone, John Bilata's Quantum Mechanic, and Amy Beth Kirsten's Ophelia Forever. The Next Stage, San Francisco, CA. Repeated 11/8; also 11/14 (Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland) and 11/15 Temple United Methodist Church (San Francisco).


November 8

San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. Old First Church, San Francisco, CA.

Chronicle of September 2008


September 5

San Francisco Cabaret Opera presents excerpts from Mark Alburger's Mice and Men. Community Music Center, San Francisco, CA. Repeated 9/6, 12, and 14.



September 7

American premiere production of Howard Shore’s The Fly. Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles, CA. Through 9/17. "Given its location, it makes sense for Los Angeles Opera, of all companies, to recruit creative talents from the film industry to try their hands at energizing opera. This has certainly been a priority for Plácido Domingo as the company’s general director . . . With a libretto by the playwright David Henry Hwang, the opera is based on the director David Cronenberg’s 1986 film, for which [Howard] Shore wrote the music. Mr. Cronenberg, working closely with Mr. Shore, directed this opera, a co-production with the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, where the work had its world premiere in July. But despite the inventive staging and all-out efforts of an admirable cast -- especially the courageous performance of the Canadian bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch as Seth Brundle, the obsessed scientist who morphs into the hideous creature he calls Brundlefly -- The Fly is a ponderous and enervating opera, and the problem is Mr. Shore’s music. Mr. Shore’s scores for films like The Silence of the Lambs and, more recently, Mr. Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises evince his indisputable skills, keen ear for harmony and feeling for instrumental color. And moment to moment there are intriguing qualities in The Fly. As the opera begins, the ominous mood is introduced through pungent, elusive and quietly restless chords spiked with prickly dissonance. Film composers, who need to work in all manner of styles, tend to develop suction-cup ears, and Mr. Shore shows off his with music that recalls everything from Berg to Bartok and a swath of classic movie scores. But considering that Mr. Shore has worked on some feverishly intense films, his writing here is curiously tame. Singers exchanging dialogue in winding vocal lines are often accompanied by chords that pass by with strangely metronomic regularity, while a meandering counter-line in the lower strings is tossed in to keep things tense. A large contingent of offstage and onstage choristers portray guests at a party for science writers, boisterous regulars at a pool hall and others. But the choral writing is terribly ineffective. Words are typically set in block chords, with pummeling rhythms . . . . The most exasperating stretches of the score come when Mr. Shore is most somber. Wandering vocal lines intertwine with every-which-way instrumental lines that skirt tonality, while sustained orchestral harmonies provide a static support. With hints of 12-tone rows and Bergian richness, the music shows signs of Mr. Shore’s craft in almost every measure. But it never adds up. It’s as if Mr. Shore had abandoned his cinematic imagination to write a dutifully contemporary opera. Mr. Domingo conducted. The score is outside the realm of the standard repertory works he has mostly led. The performance he elicited seemed fairly assured and texturally balanced. Still, a conductor with real credentials in contemporary music might have made a better case for Mr. Shore’s work. . . . The opera is based not just on Mr. Cronenberg’s film, which was set in the 1980s, but also on the original short story from 1957 by George Langelaan. The setting has been moved back to the late 1950's. As depicted by the set designer Dante Ferretti, the computer in Brundle’s lab that connects the two huge teleports he has invented is a big, old-fashioned thing with knobs, lights and control panels. . . . In the opera we are simply told about Brundle’s eating habits in one of those clunky, offstage choruses, voicing the thoughts of the computer. But the conception of Brundle, at least as portrayed by Mr. Okulitch, has poignant allure. . . . At one point in Act II, Mr. Okulitch, his skin now covered in hideous scales, is suspended by wires. He enters his studio upside down, crawling along a ceiling crossbeam and then slithering head-first down a metal column, singing all the while. This is something voice students are not prepared for in conservatory training. Mr. Okulitch, who has a warm and lyrical voice, sings with conviction, intelligence and volatility. His voice is not large, and he is sometimes drowned out, though that may be the fault of Mr. Shore’s sometimes misgauged orchestration or Mr. Domingo’s conducting. The lovely Romanian mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose sings Veronica, the most dramatically pivotal role, with vulnerability, quiet intensity and lush colorings. She too takes risks with her portrayal. Wearing just a slip in an intimate romantic scene with Mr. Okulitch, she writhes with pleasure as he fondles her breasts and strokes her crotch. It’s hard to imagine even a go-for-broke artist from earlier times, like Teresa Stratas, consenting to such a thing. For better or worse, opera is breaking new ground. . . Now and then the music grabs you, as in an extended love duet for Brundle and Veronica. Finally, here are captivating lyrical phrases that flow with halting, elusive restraint, cushioned by bittersweet orchestral harmonies. Mr. Shore has clear strengths as a composer and may have a good opera in him. The Fly is not it" [Anthony Tommasini, 9/8/08].


September 9

Gustav Mahler’s sprawling, 80-minute Symphony No. 8 ("Of a Thousand”) scored for a massive orchestra, two choruses and nine vocal soloists. Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA. "Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a vibrant performance of this ecstatic and metaphysical work . . . on a balmy night. . . . [I]t was refreshing and moving to hear the piece at one of the world’s largest amphitheaters before an enthusiastic audience. . . . Both this facility, which opened in 1922 but has gone through several renovations since then, and the scene this concert generated were fascinating. . . . The Los Angeles Philharmonic offers a summer series, and there are also concerts by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. The seating area can accommodate 18,000 people, and some seats are in small boxes where makeshift tables can be set up for a picnic dinner. . . The Mahler performance attracted 9,128, according to the Bowl’s tally. In the park outside the Bowl before the concert, the mood was festive, with snack bars, restaurants and musical groups . . . . To make the immense stage and seating area feel more intimate, there are two enormous video screens on either side of the proscenium, carrying close-up images of the performers and, on this night, English subtitles to translate the Latin and German texts. . . . Salonen led an urgent, sweeping and nuanced account of the score. The piece was dubbed the 'Symphony of a Thousand' by the agent who arranged its 1910 premiere in Munich, conducted by Mahler. For that first performance Mahler assembled a roster of choristers and orchestra players that numbered just over 1,000. But he disliked the nickname and the 'Barnum & Bailey methods' used in promoting the work, as he wrote at the time. . . . Mahler might have been touched by the populist trappings of this concert and the sight of thousands of people enjoying dinners of roasted chicken, pasta, salad and wine, and then turning their attention to a symphony that juxtaposes the sacred and the secular, eternal life and eternal love, as Mahler described it. . . . Salonen had a more manageable roster of performers: the 100-member Los Angeles Master Chorale (Grant Gershon, music director); the 75-member Los Angeles Children’s Chorus (Anne Tomlinson, artistic director); the Philharmonic, 122 players strong; and the 8 vocal soloists, for a total of 305. . . . Mahler recalled in an account of the work’s genesis that he composed it in, for him, an astoundingly short burst of creative inspiration, mostly in 1906. “I saw the whole piece immediately before my eyes, and only needed to write it down, as though it were being dictated to me,” he wrote. There is little trace of the tortured, bitterly ironic Mahler in this work, perhaps his least convoluted and most openhearted symphony. Mr. Salonen’s performance managed to convey the piece as a whole, as a cogent entity. While the sudden emotional shifts of the music came through, both the passages of ruminative quiet and the tumultuous outbursts, so did the compelling narrative arc. . . The soloists were excellent: the sopranos Christine Brewer, Elza van den Heever and Stacey Tappan; the altos Nancy Maultsby and Elena Manistina; the tenor Anthony Dean Griffey; the baritone Alan Held; and the bass John Relyea. And Mr. Salonen seemed elated by the audience’s ovation. . . . [These] are his last concerts at the Hollywood Bowl as the Philharmonic’s music director: he steps down next spring, at the end of the season" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/10/08].



September 11

Robert Ward's The Crucible (after Arthur Miller). Dicapo Opera Theater, New York, NY. "The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s searing play about the 1692 Salem witch trials -- an allegory about Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and anti-Communist witch hunts -- was only eight years old when Robert Ward completed his Pulitzer Prize-winning operatic setting, in 1961. And with the Kennedy era just dawning (brief as that dawn turned out to be), the McCarthy era was still fresh in the national memory. The Dicapo Opera Theater’s spare but powerful revival of Mr. Ward’s score . . . was enough to make you nostalgic for that fleeting moment when new theater and new opera were socially relevant and could make common cause. It remains a powerful work. The McCarthy hearings may be nearly six decades behind us, but orthodoxies of all kinds continue to be corrosive. Mr. Ward’s work, with a libretto by Bernard Stambler, requires a large cast of townswomen, their husbands, a couple of preachers, a slave and a judge, as well as the young girls who, with a variety of unhealthy motives, denounce the women as witches. It is, mostly, an ensemble opera: the real beauty, tension and drama are found in crowded scenes, where characters with conflicting agendas create a rich, fast-moving vocal fabric. Even in the second act, a long confrontation between John Proctor and Abigail Williams, his former mistress and his wife’s accuser, the solo writing for the characters is more like an expansive duet than a series of arias. Throughout, Mr. Ward’s orchestration is vivid, rhythmically vital and melodically eclectic, with folkish vocal settings intertwined with a gently angular modernism. Pacien Mazzagatti’s conducting mined these characteristics astutely. Robert Alfoldi’s production, with its minimal sets by John Farrell and Puritanically colorless costumes by Sandor Daroczi, accomplishes much with little. The symbolism of the shallow pits in which much of the action takes place is clear enough, and white face paint gives the townspeople a ghoulish look: the accusers, the accused and the judges are all spiritually dead. The singing was uniformly strong, with Zeffin Quinn Hollis and Lisa Chavez working in tandem as a pained, sympathetic John and Elizabeth Proctor; Marie-Adeline Henry as a strikingly powerful Abigail, more misguided than malevolent; and Katherine Keyes as a rich-voiced Rebecca Nurse, the moral pillar of the piece. Michael Bracegirdle was a magnificently imperious Judge Danforth, and in smaller roles, Lynne Abeles (as Mary Warren), Matthew Lau (Rev. Hale), Nicole Farbes-Lyons (Tituba) and David Gagnon (Rev. Parris) contributed ably to Mr. Ward’s intense mosaic" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/12/08].


September 12

Douglas Geers's Calling: An Opera of Forgiveness, whose libretto is based on Wickham Boyle's A Mother’s Essays From Ground Zero. La MaMa E.T.C., New York, NY. "In the first scene, “Blue Sky,” singers enter the bare stage area from throughout the theater, intoning the words of the title over a tremulous accompaniment. . . . A tense undercurrent in the music builds to a sudden whine from Mr. Geers’s computer. As faces turn upward, sounds cease, and overhead lights go out. The cast is frozen in silhouette against a somber, blue-lighted backdrop. After an extended silence the vocalists stagger into motion, to fumbling lines on violin and cello. . . . Geers’s music, a tonal vocabulary punctuated with fidgets and squeals, aptly conveys contradictory moods, though it seldom asserts a character as personal as that of Ms. Boyle’s words. Several scenes feature the wordless chants and sighs characteristic of much post-Philip Glass opera. In the Apartment, in which the mother and father debate retrieving their younger daughter from a school near the towers, verges on musical-theater melodrama. In Empty Socket and The Clean Up, family members and relief workers declaim lines rather than singing them. A small ensemble, positioned to one side of the stage area and conducted by Hiroya Miura, played with polish and confidence. Another conductor, Carl Bettendorf, helped to coordinate the vocalists from a seat near the opposite wall. . . . Minor rough edges aside, “Calling” admirably translates Ms. Boyle’s singular observations of horror and hope into a genuinely touching theatrical experience" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 9/15/08].


September 13

San Francisco Opera premieres Stewart Wallace's The Bonesetter’s Daughter, with a libretto by Amy Tan. War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, CA. Mr. Wallace and Ms. Tan essentially wrote the piece in tandem, scene by scene. Their work involved several trips to China over three years, immersing themselves in the music of ethnic minorities and observing village funerals and weddings. The concept of the opera took on a more mythical dimension when the Chinese-born director and choreographer Chen Shi-Zheng became involved. And David Gockley, general director of the San Francisco Opera, who commissioned the work, also had a hand in shaping it. . . . And whatever anyone’s reaction to the piece (I had mixed feelings), it is certainly a work of total theater. Mr. Wallace incorporates aspects of Chinese music, including Hong Kong film scores, into his Western contemporary classical style. The music is so bound to the libretto, visuals, choreography and special effects that it is impossible to assess the quality of Mr. Wallace’s score on its own. It took him nine months, but Mr. Wallace convinced Ms. Tan, who was hesitant about the project at first, that her generational story of three Chinese women who are all, in different ways, searching for their voices, cried out for music. The main character is the American-born Ruth Young Kamen, who lives in San Francisco in the 1990s, married to Art Kamen, whose two daughters from a previous marriage resent their ethnic stepmother. Ruth works as a ghostwriter. So she is used to submerging her voice into that of her clients. Her immigrant mother, LuLing, is disgruntled and controlling, filled with unspoken resentments, yet tenaciously connected to her daughter. In childhood LuLing worked as a laborer in an ink-making studio in a village outside Beijing. She has long spoken with equal measures of reverence and guilt about the woman who reared her, Precious Auntie, the daughter of a renowned bonesetter, who mended broken limbs and collected precious dragon bones, as they were called, relics carved with sacred inscriptions or ground into potions for healing. Though LuLing grew up thinking Precious Auntie was just her nursemaid, she discovers that this facially disfigured and mute woman who communicates through grunts and hand gestures is actually her mother. In the novel Ruth learns the truth by reading LuLing’s diary. In the opera Precious Auntie first appears as a surreal and entrancing ghost, leading Ruth back into her mother’s youth in the 1930's. The mezzo-soprano who sings Ruth, Zheng Cao, symbolically becomes her mother during these pivotal flashback scenes, a conceptual twist more operatic, if also more melodramatic, than the novel. But the device allowed Mr. Wallace, Ms. Tan and the production team to enhance the work’s mysticism. This is a story about the pervasive impact of family history on an individual. And music is very handy for tapping into subliminal emotions. But the opera’s mystical dimension is overblown. The prologue, set in a timeless void, begins startlingly with the wonderfully reedy braying of two suonas, Chinese instruments that resemble oboes. Imagine the jazzman Steve Lacy evoking ethnic Chinese music with his wailing soprano saxophone. But when the three main characters -- Ruth, her mother and her grandmother -- appear and begin singing an ethereal trio amid billowing, ghostly stage fog, the vocal lines meander and the orchestra gets stuck in repetitive eight-note ostinato patterns, with thick-layered sustained harmonies quivering above. . . . Mr. Wallace’s. . . best-known wor [is], the 1995 opera Harvey Milk . . . [B]y immersing himself in Chinese music, he seems to have given a fresh, pungent jolt to his musical voice, at least in the score’s most effective episodes. He . . . let the Chinese sources influence him without directly quoting anything" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/14/08].

American premiere of Iannis Xenakis’s "sharp-edged, otherworldly" opera Oresteia. Miller Theatre, Columbia University, New York, NY. "Xenakis composed the core of the work as incidental music for a staging of that Aeschylus trilogy in Ypsilanti, MI, in 1966 and recast it as a concert suite in 1967. In 1987 he expanded it significantly, adding a long Kassandra section for bass and percussion. And in 1992 he added the finale, La Déesse Athéna (which is sometimes performed separately). What was heard at Miller was the first American performance of the final version. But given how compressed Mr. Xenakis’s gloss on this complex ancient story is, you get the impression that if he hadn’t died in 2001, he might still be adding to it. The 1987 and 1992 additions fill out considerable stretches of the story, which begins at the close of the Trojan War and touches on Agamemnon’s return with Cassandra, the captured daughter of the King of Troy, as well as the murder of them both by his wife, Clytemnestra. The matricidal vengeance taken by Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, is mentioned in passing, and the work ends with Athena’s establishment of mortal justice and her conversion of the Furies into the more benign Eumenides. Possibly because the work began as incidental music, a familiarity with the Aeschylus plays is presumed. It isn’t absolutely necessary: Oresteia works powerfully on its own terms. But having some background helps. The libretto alludes fleetingly to important events that are not otherwise discussed or enacted, and it must seem bizarrely cryptic to anyone who doesn’t know the story. In truth, Oresteia is less an opera than a hybrid oratorio and ballet. The choruses convey much of the drama in a highly stylized, changeable language that at first has the rhythmic and melodic character of church chant and later takes on a freer, more idiosyncratic accent that, combined with the text in ancient Greek, conveys a modernist’s vision of a starkly elemental, nuance-averse ancient ritual. The only solo vocal music is in the Kassandra and “Déesse Athéna” sections, and they are as idiosyncratic as can be: in the first, the bass switches between his natural voice and falsetto to produce a dialogue between Agamemnon and Cassandra; in the second, he sings as the goddess Athena, leaping between basso depths and falsetto heights: why limit a goddess to the vocal range of a mortal woman? Wilbur Pauley, the soloist at Miller, gave a vital account of these sections, with magnificent support from David Schotzko, the percussionist. Mr. Schotzko had plenty to do through the rest of the score as well, where the percussion is prominent in an ensemble of woodwinds, brass and a single cello. Mr. Xenakis’s scoring is ruggedly dissonant, with harsh quarter-tone chords, sliding sitarlike cello lines and screaming clarinets and oboes describing the tensions only hinted at in the spare libretto. The orchestral music also goes a long way toward describing the action, which is brought to life not by the singers, as in a conventional opera, but by six lithe dancers. Luca Veggetti, who directed and choreographed the production, found a fine, expressive balance between fluidity and jaggedness, modern sensibility and imagined antiquity. Pascal Delcey’s projected artworks, which melted into one another on a screen to the side of the stage, offered similar juxtapositions. With Steven Osgood conducting, the International Contemporary Ensemble and the three choirs — a men’s chorus, a women’s chorus and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City — performed the music with ample polish and not the least restraint. Mr. Osgood and his musicians understand Mr. Xenakis’s quirky, vibrant writing, and they make it exhilarating" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 14/08].


September 14

Memorial Event for Jorge Liderman: Tropes V (Jackie Chow, piano), Tiempo Viejo (Florian Conzetti, percussion), Aires de Sefarad(Matt Gould, guitar and Beth Ilana, violin), Antigone Furiosa (film clip), and Swirling Streams (Berkeley Contemproary Chamber Players).
Hertz Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA.




Movado Hour. Pavel Muzijevic, Robert Spano, Tomas Sherwood, and Charles Sette in a program including John Cage's In a Landscape (1948), George Crumb's Music for A Summer Evening (Makrokosmos, Volume III), and Steve Reich's Clapping Music. Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York, NY. "This is a side of Cage you don’t hear often, and you would be hard pressed to identify it as his work. Its textures are gentle, rippling, vaguely Debussian, with simple melodies weaving through a tissue of arpeggiated, diatonic noodling. How odd to think that as a young composer, Cage wrote music that could today be mistaken as the New Age meandering of George Winston. "Mr. Sherwood and Mr. Settle took the floor -- the large studio in which the Baryshnikov Center offers its concerts doesn’t have a stage -- for a performance of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music (1972). This is a classic of Mr. Reich . . . , when he was exploring the complex patterns created by two musicians performing a simple line (in this case a clapped rhythmic pattern) . . . . Short of someone’s messing up (these players didn’t), not much changes from one performance to the next, but the web of rhythms that Mr. Reich’s techniques produce never grows old. The program’s main work, the only one that involved the full roster, was Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III), George Crumb’s 1974 evocation of a rarefied, magical atmosphere. Mr. Crumb asks much of his percussionists and keyboardists: the pianists produce both plain sonorities and harpsichordlike, plucked sounds, and the percussionists move from conventional instruments to slide whistles blown into the piano and spooky vocalizations. Mr. Crumb’s writing ranges from delicate to explosive, from simplistic and childlike to densely chromatic. This is a score awash in contradictions, as his works often are. But Mr. Muzijevic, Mr. Spano, Mr. Sherwood and Mr. Settle played it with a convincing power and subtlety" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/15/08].




[Pink Floyd in the 1970's: Rick Wright, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, David Gilmour]

September 15

Death of Rick Wright, of cancer, at 65. London, UK. "[He was] the keyboardist whose somber, monumental sounds were at the core of Pink Floyd’s art-rock. . . . Wright was a founding member of Pink Floyd, and his spacious, somber, enveloping keyboards, backing vocals and eerie effects were an essential part of its musical identity. . . . [Syd] Barrett’s whimsical, asymmetrical songs and the band’s fondness for experimental sounds placed it at the center of London’s underground psychedelic movement in the mid-1960s. 'Music was our drug,' Mr. Wright once told an interviewer. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was released in 1967 and yielded pop hits in England, but LSD use and mental illness made Mr. Barrett so unstable that he left Pink Floyd in 1968. He recorded two solo albums; Mr. Wright and Mr. Gilmour produced the second one, Barrett, in 1970. Mr. Barrett died in 2006, at the age of 60. Pink Floyd’s late-1960's and early-70's albums mingled pop songs with extended pieces, like the 23-minute Echoes, which begins with single notes from Mr. Wright’s keyboard, on 1971’s Meddle. On the 1969 album, Ummagumma, which includes solo studio recordings by each band member, Mr. Wright’s four-part Sisyphus encompasses a majestic dirge with tympani, a piano piece that moves from rippling impressionism to crashing free jazz, a clattery interlude for keyboards and percussion, and a mostly elegiac improvisation with organ, guitar, tape effects and birdcalls. With The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd reined in its improvisation, came up with a concept album about workaday pressures and insanity and established itself as an arena-rock staple. The album stayed in the Billboard Top 200 album chart for 741 weeks. . . . But there were conflicts within the band. Mr. Waters, who had increasingly taken control of Pink Floyd, reportedly threatened not to release The Wall unless Mr. Wright resigned his full membership in the band. Mr. Wright quit, only to tour with Pink Floyd in 1980-81 as a salaried sideman. He does not appear on the band’s 1983 album, The Final Cut. After that album, Mr. Waters left Pink Floyd for a solo career, declaring the band a “spent force creatively.” Amid lawsuits, Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Mason regrouped under the Pink Floyd name; Mr. Wright rejoined them for the 1987 album A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell in 1994. Mr. Wright, who was married three times, is survived by three children, Benjamin, Gala and Jamie; and one grandchild. In interviews in 1996, Mr. Wright said he had not spoken to Mr. Waters for 14 years. Mr. Wright played keyboards on Mr. Gilmour’s 2006 album, On an Island, and went on tour with Mr. Gilmour’s band. Pink Floyd’s 1970s lineup reunited briefly at the Live 8 London concert in Hyde Park on July 2, 2005, performing four songs before sharing a hug" [Jon Pareles, The New York Times, 9/15-16/08].


September 17

Music on Macdougal, with Sequenza21, in a program celebrating the 50th anniversary of Minimalism, including Terry Riley's In C. Players Theater, New York, NY. "[M]any new-music historians, date minimalism to La Monte Young’s String Trio, composed in 1958 . . . . Joseph Kubera, the pianist, played two works -- both called Piano Piece (1958, 1960) -- by Terry Jennings, a friend and colleague of Mr. Young’s. They are minimalist in the sense that their textures are spare, with notes and chords played softly separated by long silences, in which a listener savors the decay of the sound. Yet Mr. Jennings used 12-tone rows and dissonances: from that perspective, these pieces have more in common with Webern than with Mr. Riley and company. [Steve] Reich and [Philip] Glass were represented by works composed in 1967 that show the different approaches each took to this new musical language. Mr. Reich’s Piano Phase — Russell Greenberg and Mike McCurdy gave a focused, energetic reading on marimbas — is one of several works in which Mr. Reich has two players beginning in sync, gradually moving out of phase and then coming back together in the final bars. . . . If phasing was Mr. Reich’s engine of choice, Mr. Glass’s was additive process, a technique in which repeated figures slowly take on (and later shed) extra notes and phrases. That was the point of Piece in the Shape of a Square, an intensely contrapuntal flute duet given an athletic, graceful account by Elizabeth Janzen and Jessica Schmitz. The second half of the program was devoted to a taut, if occasionally woolly, 30-minute performance of Mr. Riley’s In C, performed by an ensemble of conventional strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion and keyboard. Both admirers and detractors of minimalism might consider this: In the last four years, In C has probably had more performances in New York than any individual Beethoven symphony, and it will have an all-star performance at Carnegie Hall in April. But after . . . [beginning], no two performances sound alike" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/18/08].




September 18

Cassatt Quartet, celebrating Joan Tower’s 70th birthday with one of three concerts at Thalia Theater. Symphony Space, New York, NY. "[E]ach [concert] includ[es] a work by Ms. Tower as its centerpiece, with a score by a younger composer before it and a standard repertory piece after it. The idea is to put Ms. Tower’s music in context, and in the opening program, on Thursday evening, her dark-hued, violently driven Night Fields (1996) was surrounded by the premiere of Libby Larsen’s Quartet: She Wrote (2008) and the shimmering Ravel Quartet (1904). Introducing her work, Ms. Tower said that she almost called the piece Nightmare instead of Night Fields but changed the title because she thought Nightmare was too heavy. . . . Ms. Larsen’s engaging quartet was inspired by a staccato passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses about a young woman: 'On solitary paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out.' What Ms. Larsen said she sees in this fragment, and wanted to capture in her piece, is the moment when ideas coalesce — when Joyce’s 'she' knows what to write. That’s a lot to capture in a string quartet; or maybe it’s too little, given that this magical moment comes in a flash. In Ms. Larsen’s piece it turns up at the end of the first movement. The rest is narrative. Even the introspective third movement, How She Felt, paints a melancholy, turbulent inner portrait. In the finale Ms. Larsen affords her protagonist a moment of emotional liberation; a tense opening passage gives way to a blues section and then, by way of a pizzicato cello line, a more free-spirited, jazz-tinged ending" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times 9/21/08].

Steven Stucky's August 4, 1964, to a libretto by Gene Scheer, based on events in the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. Dallas, TX. "A haunted tenor voice will . . . lament that a terrible war was based on a hollow threat, and that millions might have died because of a 'mistake.' . . . The Dallas Symphony Orchestra wanted a grand piece of music to commemorate Lyndon B. Johnson, born 100 years ago, and it may have gotten more than it bargained for: a 70-minute oratorio with implicit reverberations about another war propelled by faulty intelligence, prosecuted by another Texan. The work . . . is based on a single day in Johnson’s presidency, and it joins a genre of classical music rife with worthy intentions and inherent risks: compositions that address current or recent events. On that date Johnson told the American people that North Vietnamese forces had attacked a United States ship in the Tonkin Gulf, prompting retaliation and precipitating the resolution used to justify the Vietnam War. The report turned out to have been false -- a result of mangled and probably falsified intelligence relayed to the president -- although an actual attack had occurred two days earlier. Robert S. McNamara, Johnson’s secretary of defense and an architect of the Vietnam War, later acknowledged that the August 4 attack had not occurred and said that if Johnson had known, he would not have ordered the retaliation. 'Had we known it was a tragic mistake,' sings the tenor portraying McNamara, 'Had we known on August 4th, 1964, we were not attacked. / Had we known we would not have ordered the first bombing of North Vietnam. / Fifty-eight thousand U.S. dead. / Three point seven million Vietnamese dead." But that is not the only historical resonance of the piece . . . . On the same day as the Tonkin Gulf incident, Johnson was dealing with a more immediate tragedy: the discovery of the bodies of three civil rights workers who had been murdered in Mississippi, Andrew Goodman, James E. Chaney and Michael H. Schwerner. The killings helped galvanize support for Johnson’s civil rights agenda, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which forced Southern states to ease the path of blacks to vote, more than four decades before the nomination of a black man for president. Using a collage of excerpts from Johnson’s official diary, transcripts of Oval Office telephone conversations, speeches and contemporary news reports, Mr. Scheer has woven the incidents together in a libretto presenting a nuanced view of a complicated man. It combines Johnson’s greatest and worst legacies and portrays him as noble and bitter, compassionate and bellicose. The characters are Johnson (Robert Orth, baritone), Mr. McNamara (Vale Rideout), Mrs. Chaney (Laquita Mitchell, soprano) and Mrs. Goodman (Kelley O’Connor, mezzo-soprano). The Dallas Symphony’s new music director, Jaap van Zweden, conducts. In interviews past and present officials of the orchestra, Mr. Scheer and Mr. Stucky all said they had been aware from the outset that the work drew a parallel between two wars, Vietnam and Iraq, and two presidents, Johnson and George W. Bush. But they studiously played down the political issues. 'I think we should all, as citizens, reflect on the reality of what’s going on, and this may help,' Mr. Stucky said. 'I certainly don’t want it to be seen as a statement about the present, because it is so much about the past too.' The Dallas Symphony said that the Bush family had not been invited, and that Johnson’s two daughters had declined to attend. But others connected with the Johnson administration were expected in the audience, the orchestra said, along with officials from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, which cooperated with the project. One historian given a copy of the libretto said he found the juxtaposition of the two issues 'weird.' But then, 'it must have been weird getting his mind around two such different crises happening simultaneously,' said the historian, Edwin E. Moïse of Clemson University, who wrote a book about the Tonkin Gulf incident. 'There’s a reason he looked like an old man when he got out of White House,' Mr. Moïse said. 'The strain must have been terrible.' August 4, 1964 raises other questions. Classical music in recent times, especially in this country, seems less potent than other art forms as a means of challenging the status quo or making political commentary. But there have been powerful recent additions to the genre, including Steve Reich’s Daniel Variations, inspired by the 2002 murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. The Dallas work serves as a reminder of both the pitfalls and the value of such ventures. Too much relevance can lead to political schlock, like bad Prokofiev, or cornball (if sometimes endearing) hagiography, like Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. For the creators too much topicality may distract from the goal of making a piece of art that will endure. Mr. Stucky said he had not thought of the work’s political implications as he was composing. 'If you’re put in the position of writing polemical music or agitprop, you’re not likely do a good job,' he added. 'I was concentrated on writing the best piece I could.' . . . Mr. Scheer pointed out that the McNamara lament, which occurs late in the piece, came about largely because he and Mr. Stucky felt that the tenor character did not have enough lyrical material. It also provided a sense of redemption for the character. In the short term, topical works like August 4, 1964 at least provoke conversation, and the attention that classical music institutions crave in a pop-ruled YouTube world. . . . The man behind the idea of commemorating Johnson was Fred Bronstein, who was president of the Dallas Symphony until he moved on to the St. Louis Symphony six months ago. Mr. Bronstein said he had not seen the libretto and pointed out that the creators were given free rein about subject matter. The only stipulation was a piece for chorus, orchestra and four soloists to commemorate Johnson. When asked about modern parallels, Mr. Bronstein answered indirectly. 'History repeats itself,' he said. 'How this war is judged, time will tell.' For Mr. Stucky the task was daunting. He is a much sought-after composer, a Cornell University music professor who receives regular commissions from major orchestras. The New York Philharmonic is giving the American premiere of his Rhapsodies, which it commissioned, on the same night as the August 4, 1964 performance. Mr. Stucky will be in Dallas. But he said he had not written for chorus and orchestra since high school, which he attended in Abilene, Tex. His family moved to the state from Kansas when he was 10, and Mr. Stucky attended Baylor University in Waco. The Dallas Symphony liked the Texas connection. . . . Mr. Scheer, also a songwriter, has collaborated with Tobias Picker on works including An American Tragedy at the Metropolitan Opera, and with Jake Heggie; their Moby-Dick is to be presented at the Dallas Opera next season. . . . 'Gene stumbled on this fact that we could encapsulate those two sides of America in the ’60s on that single date,' Mr. Stucky said. 'That was a brilliant stroke.' . . . Mr. Stucky said he had made a mental checklist of what not to imitate: Lincoln Portrait, Britten’s War Requiem, John Adams’s Nixon in China. He described the musical grammar as somewhere between tonal and atonal, with an extroverted quality. Johnson’s lines are slower and more lyrical; the McNamara music tends to be faster, more nervous. When the chorus sings a text based on Oval Office diary entries (“7 a.m. Awake and up. 7:05 a.m. Breakfast. At 7:15 did exercises.”), the music is “strongly pulsed,” he said, with minimalist tendencies. . . . Stucky said that attentive listeners might catch a ghost of the civil rights anthem 'We Shall Overcome' [Daniel Wakin, 9/12/08].


September 19

Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya, in a program of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, Jimmy Lopez's Fiesta!, and Ottorino Respighi's The Pines of Rome. Bass Performance Hall, Fort Worth, TX. "López, 29, is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Although Mr. Harth-Bedoya, in introductory remarks from the stage, called Fiesta! a 'miniature symphony,' it actually represents a genre with an even older tradition, a virtuosic suite of dances giving refined expression to popular idioms. Mr. López proves himself expert in orchestration" [James Oestreich, 9/22/08]


September 22

Death of Connie Haines, at 87. "[She was] a peppy, petite, big-voiced singer with a zippy, rhythmic style who most famously teamed up with Frank Sinatra as lead vocalists with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, then went on to a prolific career of her own" [The New York Times, 9/25/08].


September 23

New York Festival of Song, in music of Leonard Bernstein and William Bolcom. Merkin Concert Hall, New York, NY. "[W]ith the 90th anniversary of Bernstein’s birth (Aug. 25) celebrated far and wide, it made sense for the festival to open its 21st season with a hefty sampling of Bernstein’s songs . . . . Even so, Bernstein did not have the program to himself. . . . [T]he focus shifted to William Bolcom, who turned 70 in May, and whose music has a stylistic omnivorousness -- as well as a sense of humor -- similar to Bernstein’s. For the occasion the festival’s two pianists and directors, Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, assembled a cast of six singers, who performed together and separately, in a program shaped with dramatic flair. On the Bernstein half, ensemble pieces from the orchestral cycle Songfest framed selections from Arias and Barcarolles and a handful of theater works. It took the singers a few moments to find the right tone. Renée Tatum, a mezzo-soprano, applied an operatic intensity to Dream With Me that seemed wrong for this sweetly modulating outtake from Peter Pan, although Ms. Tatum’s personalized phrasing kept her account compelling. William Sharp’s theatrical approach to The Love of My Life, from Arias and Barcarolles, seemed miscalibrated as well, but he brought greater subtlety and suppleness to the introspective Seena, from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The heart of the Bernstein segment was a group of songs from Wonderful Town. Alex Mansoori, the tenor, gave a lively, smartly characterized performance of 100 Easy Ways to Lose a Man, and, with Sari Gruber, the soprano, a comic but sharply focused reading of Ohio. Ms. Gruber also moved easily between the comic spoken sections and the more deeply felt verses in her elegant performance of The Story of My Life. Mr. Bolcom’s music moves with a suave assurance that serves comic and dramatic impulses equally well, and he has an extraordinary facility for weaving the harmonic accents of blues and jazz into more formal and complex structures. Songs like How to Swing Those Obbligatos Around, sung zestily by Rebecca Jo Loeb, and the darker Otherwise, which Ms. Gruber sang, seem simple on the surface but are rich in surprising melodic turns. The most effective pieces were calling cards for two of Mr. Bolcom’s operas. From McTeague, Mr. Sharp gave a deftly characterized account of the retributive Jehosophat, and Ms. Gruber brought a mad eroticism to Golden Babies. And Mr. Mansoori gave an acidic reading of The Establishment Route from Casino Paradise. To close the concert the festival ceded the stage to Mr. Bolcom and his wife, the mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, for a brief cabaret set. As fine as the younger singers were, Ms. Morris’s superb way with a phrase in . . . Bolcom’s Over the Piano was a master class in comic timing" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/25/08].

Soprano Karita Mattila returns to portray the title character in Strauss’s Salome, a revival of the modern-dress Jürgen Flimm production created for Ms. Mattila and introduced at the Met in 2004. Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY. "Mattila’s emotionally intense, vocally molten and psychologically exposed portrayal four years ago made her seem born to this daunting role. And yes, during her uninhibited and kinetically choreographed performance of the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” she shed item after item of a Marlene Dietrich-like white tuxedo costume until, in an exultant -- and brief -- final flourish, she twirled around half-crazed and totally naked. Expect the same this time" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/17/08].


September 24

Michael Tilson conducts the San Francisco Symphony in an all-Leonard Bernstein program to open the 118th season of Carnegie Hall. New York, NY. "On paper the gala program raised doubts. Segueing with hardly a break from the ebullient Broadway star Christine Ebersole singing I Can Cook, Too from On the Town to the cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing the elegiac, intensely somber Meditation No. 1 from Mass seemed a risky idea. But Mr. Thomas knew what he was up to. The program kicked off a citywide festival, The Best of All Possible Worlds, to honor the 90th anniversary of Bernstein’s birth. More than any other composer of the 20th century, Bernstein embraced a wide range of traditions: classical music, musical theater, jazz, Latin American dance and more. And Mr. Thomas, a Bernstein protégé, born to a Southern California family that thrived in Yiddish theater, shares his mentor’s multifaceted interests and skills. Beginning with the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (1961), played complete, Mr. Thomas announced that this was not to be just a feel-good evening. The performance he drew from the San Francisco Symphony, which sounded great on this night, was the freshest, most incisive and respectful account I have heard of this undervalued score. There was plenty of jazzy energy and swing. But for Mr. Thomas, playing in a jazzy style does not mean loosening up on rhythmic execution. Riffs and rhythms were dispatched with a relaxed incisiveness. In the snappy Prologue and the restless Scherzo sections, the playing was crisp, lean and brassy. Mr. Thomas did not let a drop of sentimentality seep into the string playing for the soaring lyrical lines in Somewhere. He brought out all the intriguing subtleties of this score, for example, the ascending inner voices that crisscross the descending melodic line in the gently insistent Cha-Cha. And in the finale, which reprises the tragic conclusion of Somewhere, Mr. Thomas balanced the pungent chords so precisely that this passage seemed as harmonically inventive as anything in Stravinsky. . . Then, with the orchestra playing examples, [Thomas] took the audience through some specific passages in the work we were about to hear: excerpts from A Quiet Place, Bernstein’s 1983 opera. I keep waiting for a production of A Quiet Place to reveal this work as a great overlooked American opera. These excerpts did not provide that epiphany. Still, there are inspired touches in the music that was presented, especially the quietly ominous orchestra. . . Again, the mood shifted suddenly. [Dawn] Upshaw was charming in What a Movie, from the one-act 1951 opera Trouble in Tahiti, and Mr. Hampson gave a compelling account of To What You Said ..., a setting of a Whitman text, from Songfest, with Mr. Ma playing the poignant solo cello part magnificently. There was more. Five Juilliard School students portraying the roughneck Jets did a kinetically choreographed and delightful performance of Gee, Officer Krupke from West Side Story. The evening ended with Ya Got Me from On the Town. All of the soloists took part, each singing a verse, including Mr. Thomas, who proved an engaging, breezy and stylish singer. Can you imagine Lorin Maazel singing to his audience at the New York Philharmonic? [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/25/08].