March 1
The New York Times reviews Alarm Will Sound (Gyorgy Ligeti's Movimento preciso e meccanico, Harrison Birtwistle's Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum, Gavin Chuck's Philosophy of the World, Conlon Nancarrow player piano studies in chamber versions, John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony, and Mochipet's Dessert Search 4 Techno Baklava, 2/27, Zankel Hall); Elliott Carter's Piano Quintet, (2/27 Weill Recital Hall); and Benjamin Britten's Peter Grime (2/28, Metropolitan Opera). NY.
75th-Birthday Tribute to Julian Bream, including Frederic Hand's For Julian, Toru Takemitsu's All in Twilight, Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal, Heitor Villa-Lobos's Five Preludes, Joaquin Rodrigo's En los Trigales, and works by Manuel de Falla. 92nd Street Y, New York, NY.
Ensemble Pi in The Rest Is Silence. John Harbison's Abu Ghraib, Frederic Rzewski's Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier, Kristin Norderval's Far From Home, Lou Harrison's In Memory of Victor Jowers, Philip Miller's Nine Drawings for Projection, and Dimitri Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2. Cooper Union, New York, NY.
Vienna Philharmonic in Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.
March 2
William Bolcom's Symphony No. 8 performed by the Boston Symphony, conducted by James Levine. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.
Escher String Quartet in Alexander Zemlinsky's String Quartet and Maurice Ravel's String Quartet. New School, New York, NY.
March 3
Sequitur's cellist, Greg Hesselink, assisted at times by associates, in Harrison Birtwistle's Nine Settings of Lorine Niedecker, Harold Meltzer's Silas Marner, Bernard Rands's Walcott Songs, Warren Benson's Moon Rain and Memory Jane, Arlene Zallman's Per Organa di Barberia, and Morton Feldman's Voices and Cello. Merkin Concert Hall, New York, NY.
March 4
The New York Times reviews the Vienna Philharmonic's 2/29 performance of Claude Debussy's La Mer at Carnegie Hall. New York, NY.
Gabriel Faure's Requiem performed by the Oratorio Society of New York. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.
Death of Leonard Rosenman (b. 9/7/24, New York, NY), of a heart attack, at 83. Los Angeles, CA. "[He was] an Oscar-winning film composer who helped introduce avant-garde music to Hollywood movie scores. . . . Rosenman, who could also write lusty traditional film scores, composed the original music for dozens of well-known pictures. Among them were East of Eden (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), . . . [and] Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) . . . He earned two Oscars for musical adaptation: for Barry Lyndon (1975), which drew on music by Handel, Schubert [Vivaldi, J.S. Bach, Frederick The Great, and Irish folk music, the latter in renditions by The Chieftains] and Bound for Glory (1976), based on Woody Guthrie songs. With the composers Bernard Herrmann and Alex North, Mr. Rosenman was widely credited with bringing film music -- long awash in . . . Romanticism -- squarely into the 20th century. For The Cobweb (1955)), Mr. Rosenman wrote what is believed to be the first major Hollywood score to draw heavily on 12-tone techniques. . . . For Fantastic Voyage (1966), one of Mr. Rosenman's most highly regarded scores, he wrote urgent, atonal music that some listeners compared favorably to the work of Alan Berg. . . . He wrote music for The Defenders, Combat!, Marcus Welby, M.D. and many other shows. . . . [H]e earned a bachelor's degree in music from the University of California, Berkeley. He also studied composition with Schoenberg, Roger Sessions and Luigi Dallapiccola. Settling in New York, where he intended to make a career as a concert composer, Mr. Rosenman supported himself by teaching piano. One pupil was a young actor named James Dean. After Mr. Dean was cast in East of Eden, he introduced Mr. Rosenman to the film's director Elia Kazan. Mr. Kazan hired Mr. Rosenman to write the score. Mr. Rosenman was divorced twice and widowed once. he is survived by his fourth wife, Judie Gregg Rosenman; three children from his first marriage . . . and four grandchildren. Throughout his career, Mr. Rosenman continued to write concert music. Some of his work was performed by famous artists, including the violinist Elmar Olveira, who in 1997 played the world premiere of Mr. Rosenmans Violin Concerto No. 2 with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Bur Mr. Rosenman often expressed regret that his Hollywood work appeared to have cost him greater recognition in the concert hall. Where younger composers like John Corigliano and Philip Glass have been able to move seamlessly between film and concert music, those of Mr. Rosenman's generation faced largely unbreachable wall. In an interview with The New York Times in 1982, Mr. Rosenman reflected on the difference between those two types of composition: 'With film one is given an a priori construct,' he said. 'It is a very sophisticated version of seeing an array of numbers from 1 to 100, connecting them and winding up with a picture of George Washington. The pot is to fill up space, and the work is dictated by literary considerations. With concert music -- even in opera, the most literary form -- the composer's task is to shape the text into a fundamentally musical work'" [Margalit Fox, The New York Times, 3/6/08].
Violinist Mayuko Kamio in Karol Szymanowski's Fontaine d'Aretuse from Mythes. Zankel Hall, New York, NY.
March 5
Alan Gilbert conducts the New York Philharmonic in Luciano Berio's Folk Songs. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY.
March 6
Gabriela Montero in Alberto Ginastera's Piano Sonata No. 1 and her own improvisatory variations. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. "She turned Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star into a neo-Baroque contrapuntal twister, before segueing into a moody minor section that might have been a Rachmaninoff evocation of Bach, with more biting and pungent harmonies. using Beethoven's Fur Elise as a theme, she wisely steered clear of the Beethoven style in her improvisation, creating music that began like updated Albeniz, then evolved, with a sense of rightness, into something obsessive and jazzy, like John Coltrane's take on My Favorite Things" [Anthony ;:Tommasini, The New York Times, 3/8/08].
March 7
Percussionist Martin Grubinger in Anders Koppel's Marimba Concerto No. 3 and Toccata, Minoru Miki's Marimba Spiritual, Evelyn Glennie's Little Prayer, his own Aus dem Leben einer Trommel, and Iannis Xenakis's Rebonds B. Weill Recital Hall, New York, NY.
March 8
San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra -- conducted by Mark Alburger, John Kendall Bailey, and Martha Stoddard -- in Erling Wold's Mordake Suite No. 2, Michael Cooke's Sun and Moon, Dan Reiter's Toccata and Fugue, Stoddard's A Little Trip to Outer Space, Alexis Alrich's Fragile Forests, Philip Freihofner's The Bell Tree, and Lisa Scola Prosek's Chain Saw. Old First Church, San Francisco, CA.
Brooklyn Philharmonic in John Adams's The Dharma at Big Sur, Bela Bartok's Divertimento, and Toru Takemitsu's Three Film Scores. Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, NY. "Sri Moonshine [is] the second movement of Mr. Adams's West Coast homage" [a reference to Terry Riley's Sri Moonshine Ranch outside of Nevada City, CA - ed.] [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 3/10/08].
Kent Nagano and the Montreal Symphony in Claude Debussy's Martyre de St. Sebastien and Unsuk Chin's Rocana. "Chin had tearfully called earlier to say that her plane was grounded by a blizzard in the Midwest. By intermission, alas, she had only just arrived at Kennedy Airport. . . . [T]he piece is a knockout. It begins with a gnarly, clattering, explosion; call it the Little Bang. Then comes a pattern of background harmonies, always simmering, eerily quiet and pervasive. But throughout the work, jolts of energy keep happening; leaping lines, ominous 12-tonish themes that pierced the tranquil background buzz, outbusts of wailing brasses and metallic strings that come at you like a musical flamethrower. The piece might be described as a response to Ives's Unanswered Question" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 3/10/08].
Soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian and her pianist-husband Seroug Kradjian in Francis Poulenc's Banalities, Jake Heggie's Songs and Sonnets to Ophelia, and Maurice Ravel's Five Popular Greek Melodies. Zankel Hall, New York, NY.
March 9
Garrick Ohlsson in Norman Dello Joio's Piano Sonata and Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 2. Town Hall, New York, NY.
New Amsterdam Singers in Ronald Perera's Why I Wake Early and Matthew Harris's Love Songs and Innocence and Experience. Church of the Holy Trinity, New York, NY.
March 10
Mark Alburger premieres the complete solo version of his L.A. Stories with hats and toys, on a program with poets Kenneth Goldsmith and Denise Newman. Boxcar Theatre, San Francisco, CA.
March 11
Pierre Laurent Aimard's recording of J.S. Bach's Art of Fugue goes to the top of the charts of both Billboard and iTunes, and is featured on the iTunes homepage along with Snoop Dogg and U2.
New York Festival of Song presents William Bolcom's Lucrezia and John Musto's Bastianello. Weill Recital Hall, New York, NY.
Michael Tilson Thomas, The San Francisco Symphony, and Gil Shaham in William Schuman's Violin Concerto. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.
March 12
Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony in Jean Sibelius's Symphony No. 7. Richard Straus's Four Last Songs, and Samuel Barber's Andromache's Farewell. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.
March 13
The New York Times reports on the premiere of Jake Heggie's Last Acts at Houston Grand Opera (Houston, TX). New York, NY.
March 14
Bela Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin Suite, Gustav Holst's The Planets, and Claude Debussy's Three Nocturnes performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.
Deborah Voigt leaves the stage during Act II of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because of a stomach ailment and is replaced by Janice Baird, in her Met debut. Gary Lehman makes his debut, replacing John Mac Master (due to allergies), who had himself been filling in for Ben Heppner (due to a viral infection). Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY.
Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar. Perelman Theater, Philadelphia, PA.
March 18
Counter)induction presents Mauricio Kagel's Atem and Der Schall, Anthony Coleman's Flat Narrative, Douglas Boyce's L'Homme Arme, and Gyorgy Kurtag's Hommage a R. Sch. Merkin Concert Hall, New York, NY.
Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, and guests, in various configurations, in a program including Igor Stravinsky's Duo Concertante and Richard Danielpour's Book of Hours. 92nd Street Y, New York, NY.
Spirit of Uganda. Joyce Theater, New York, NY.
Gary Lehman slides down the raked stage into the prompter's box during Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, stopping the show at the start of Act III, but soldiering on to the work's conclusion after a brief interval. Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY. "Tristan und Isolde has long been a magnet for trouble. Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, the first Tristan, died of a heart attack in Munich in 185, at 29, within weeks of the premiere, leaving he first Isolde -- his wife, Malvina [!} a widow. In 1959, when each of three possible Tristans announced, one after another, that he was too ill to perform at the Met, Rudolf Bing, the opera's legendry general manager, persuaded each to sing one of the three acts. . . . Nor are the mishaps limited to Tristan und Isolde. The soprano Hildegard Behrens got bonked on the head by a foam rubber beam from the Immolation Scene in Wagner's Gotterdammerung at the Met in 1990. Ms. Behrens, playing Brunnhilde, had just finished the last notes of the six-hour opera. She withdrew from the final performance and was replaced by Gudrun Volkert. And after singing the line 'You can only live so long' from a ladder minutes into the Met premiere of Janacek's Makropulos Case in 1996, Richard Versalle fell 10 feet to the stage, having suffered a fatal heart attack at 63. The show was canceled, and Mr. Versaille's replacement, Ronald Naldi, did not climb the ladder in future performances. 'Everybody went into shock,' said Joseph Volpe, then the Met's general manager. 'They thought it was part of the staging.' Asked to recount some of his run-ins with the tenor Luciano Pavarotti and his temperamental throat, as when Pavarotti failed to appear for his farewell performances at the Met, in [Giacomo Puccini's] Tosca in 2002, Mr. Vole said, 'I'm not going there.' There continues to be debate as to whether, during the Met's 2002 production of Prokofiev's
War and Peace, a supernumerary portraying one of Napoleon's defeated soldiers fleeing Moscow (Simon Deonarian) fell or jumped into the pit. Mr. Vole -- who took the stage at the end to tell the audience that 'our retreating French grenadier lost his w in the snowstorm' but was unhurt -- said he jumped for publicity. Mr. Deonarian said he fell. In any case, the incident stopped the orchestra during the final scene for a delay of three minutes. When American Ballet Theater was performing [Prokofiev's]
Romeo and Juliet on the Met Stage in 1998, the front of the Capulet mansion came down form the flies and never stopped. 'The set just kept grinding into the floor,' said Michael M. Kaiser, then the ballet's artistic director. 'No one's ever seen me run so fast as I did backstage.' As for conflagrations, the curtain came down in 2004 during Act II of Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri because of a small fire above the stage that had to be extinguished. The Metropolitan Opera House has also had its brush with murder. In 1981 a Met stagehand, Craig Crimmins, was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for hurling a violinist, Helen Hagnes Mintiks, to her death down an airshaft from the roof of the opera house. Ms. Mintiks had disappeared during an intermission of a Berlin Ballet performance" [Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, 3/20/08]. "Mr. Lehman seldom faltered, even when the Met's stage macheinery seemed out to get him. Act III begins with the wounded Tristan stretched out on a pallet propelled slowly from the back of the stage to the front. Things careered out of control at the end of this trip, sending Mr. Lehman, on his back and head first, crashing into the prompter's box. Stage managers rushed onstage; the curtain went down, but within 10 minutes Mr. Lehman was back singing Tristan's long and strenuous rant to brave effects" [Bernard Holland, The New York Times, 3/20/08].
March 19
Death of actor Paul Scofield, of leukemia, at 86. UK. "[He was a] darkly embittered Salieri in Amadeus" [Benedict Nightingale, The New York Times, 3/21/08].
Brentano String Quartet in Dmitri Shostakovich's
String Quartet No. 15. Weill Recital Hall, New York, NY.
March 20
Pierre Lauent Aimard performs Arnold Schoenberg's
Five Pieces, Op. 23. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.
New Music Champions. Alice Shields's
The River of Memory, Don Byon's
Seven Etudes, Huang Ruo's
Written on the Wind, Steven Burke's
Skin, Michael Lowenstern's
Mash Up, and Joan La Barbara's
ATMOS. Symphony Space, New York, NY. Repeated 3/24, SUNY, Purchase (NY).
Joshua Redman. Village Vanguard, New York, NY.
March 21
Elliott Carter's Oboe Concerto presented by Musicians from Marlboro. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.
March 22
Perlman Music Program, featuring Bela Bartok's String Quartet No. 3. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.
Aretha Franklin. Radio City Music Hall, New York, NY.
March 25
Death of conductor and composer Gerhard Samuel (b. 1925, Bonn, Germany), at 83. Seattle, WA. "Samuel served as music director of both the Oakland Symphony (1959-70) and the San Francisco Ballet (1961-71) and was the first music director of the Cabrillo Music Festival. he also founded and led the Oakland Camber Orchestra and made a few guest appearances with the San Francisco Opera. . . . Over the course of a decade, nearly one-third of the [Oakland] orchestra's repertoire consisted of music by 20th-century composers, and in some seasons nearly every program included at least one premiere. The stylistic range was broad enough to encompass . . . Lutoslawski and Stockhausen and . . . Terry Riley and Henry Brant. . . . Mr. Samuel's taste for contemporary music made him an obvious choice to lead the Cabrillo Festival, the 1961 brainchild of bassoonist-composer Robert Hughes -- who had played under Mr. Samuel in Oakland -- and composer Lou Harrison. . . . Samuel . . . moved to the United States with his family in 1939 to escape the Nazis. he studied conducting and violin at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, NY, then went on to study composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale and conducting with Serge Koussevitzky at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts. After a brief stint conducting musicals on Broadway, he spent 10 years as violinist and associate conductor with the Minneapolis Symphony before coming to Oakland. On leaving Oakland in 1971, he joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic as associate conductor under Zubin Mehta. He joined the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music in 1976 and became musical director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet in 1982. He retired in 1996. Among the rarities that Mr. Samuel recorded were Charles Ives' Universe Symphony . . . and Mahler's re-orchestration of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. His own music, written in a complex, expressionist style, includes several orchestral works, settings of Whitman and Hans Christian Andersen, and two string quartets. At his death he was at work on an operatic treatment of Thomas Mann's novella The Blood of the Walsungs" [Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, 3/29/08].
March 26
An Evening with Stewart Copeland, including the premiere of his Celeste. Savannah Music Festival, GA.
Laurie Anderson's Homeland. Zankel Hall, New York, NY.
Paul Haas and Symphony in Traces, including Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. Angel Orensanz Center, New York, NY.
March 27
The New York Times announces the discovery of a 10-second recording of the folk song Au Clair de la Lune, made on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph (a machine designed to record sounds visually but not to play them back) made by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, which predates by 19 years Thomas Edison's spoken-word recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb (now playable due to technology developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA). New York, NY.
March 28
Augustin Hadelich performs Bela Bartok’s
Sonata for Solo Violin and Bright Sheng's
Night at the Chinese Opera (2006) (with Robert Kulek). Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Bartok’s subtleties were pretty much lost in this big space. . . . Bright Sheng’s . . . filled the room at least. Bright and shiny -- dare I say flashy? -- this collection of florid gestures and doctored Chinese pentatonic melody worked hard to entertain in cheerful show-business fashion" [Bernard Holland, The New York Times, 3/31/08].
Ornette Coleman. Town Hall, New York, NY.
March 29
Making Music: Thomas Adès, his
Five Eliot Landscapes, Chamber Symphony, Living Toys, and
Court Studies. Zankel Hall, New York, NY. "Talking with the moderator Ara Guzelimian about his upbringing, Mr. Adès said he began teaching himself the piano at an early age. In the house was a big box of recordings, all those 'classical great things,' as he put it, with 'odds and ends of folk music,' which he loved for the sounds of the earthy voices and 'twiney instruments.' A fascination with sound inspired the Eliot songs. His grandmother had a cassette recording of Alec Guinness reading Eliot; and though Mr. Adès was mystified by the poetry, he was hooked by the way this great actor spoke the elusive lines. . . . Though the lustrous soprano Valdine Anderson sang with allure, Mr. Adès has set the words in a way that made it impossible for her to sing them with clarity. Comprehension was obviously not a priority. The most striking song was the last,
Cape Ann, a[n] homage to Messiaen that evokes wildly skittish bird calls. In this act of imitation, the young Mr. Adès found his own voice. The
Chamber Symphony, arrestingly played by the top-notch Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Mr. Adès, is the audacious work of a fledgling composer. One could trace the stylistic elements of this episodic 17-minute score, which begins with an elusive evocation of a queasy tango, then segues into a jazzy, frenetic episode featuring a slurpy solo basset horn (an alto clarinet). Mr. Adès creates impressively precise and transparent sonorities, especially during the pensive middle section of timeless and quivering music. The Birmingham players also gave an exciting account of another early work,
Living Toys (1993), an impish score for which Mr. Adès wrote (after the fact) a fictitious scenario about a group of Spanish men questioning a precocious child about his dreams and plans. I was the most intrigued by
Court Studies (2005), scored for violin, cello, clarinet and piano" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 3/31/08].
Franco Zeffireli's production Giacomo Puccini's
La Boheme in its 347th performance, more than any other at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY.
March 30
Gunther Schuller's
Grand Concerto for Percussion and Keyboards performed by the Met Chamber Ensemle, conducted by James Levine. Zankel Hall, New York, NY. "Mr. Schuller’s three-year-old piece crowded Zankel’s limited stage with an encyclopedic collection of percussion instruments. Twelve musicians with barely room to turn around darted from one device to another. Musical works like this are also a theater for the eyes. Musicians dance as well as play them. The
Grand Concerto tinkles, rasps, booms and flutters in every imaginable way. Snare drums rattle; keyboards create mellow, wow-wow vibrato. All this constituted a different kind of harmony and counterpoint, one that had little to do with Mozart’s major-minor harmonies, crossing voices and bar lines. Some of Mr. Schuller’s instruments were unpitched; they made noise, in other words, not melody. Others -- piano, harp, celesta and mallet percussion -- were tuned pretty much the way Mozart would have tuned his music. The Grand Concerto uses both types for the same purpose. Time and color are the elements, and the finesse and delicacy were noteworthy. Despite its potential to overwhelm by sheer numbers, this was music always open to the light. You could look inside it and pick out the play of castanets, maracas, cowbells and water gong, one against another" [Bernard Holland, The New York Times, 4/1/08].
March 31
The New York premiere of
A White House Cantata, a concert adaptation of Leonard Bernstein's
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (libretto by Alan Jay Lerner). Rose Theater, New York, NY. "[In the year of] the 90th anniversary of [Bernstein's] birth . . . there is increasing consensus that this prodigiously gifted musician may have been underrated as a composer during his lifetime. . . . At its 1976 premiere, the show was a colossal failure, closing after seven performances and demoralizing its creators. Those hoping that the Collegiate Chorale’s presentation, directed by the actor Roger Rees, would uncover an overlooked treasure may have been disappointed. The original musical was an ill-conceived venture with a pretentious book offering a historic panorama of the White House occupants, from Washington to Theodore Roosevelt. Woven through this narrative was a pontificating story about slavery.
A White House Cantata is a pared-down, 90-minute version of the musical, and the score has some lively and effective music, including deft evocations of Dixieland, along with metrically fractured waltzes. But from the opening prelude, with its quizzical rumblings in the orchestra, rich with wandering chromatic harmonies and hints of hymn tunes, the music sounds as if it is straining to be serious. When a humming chorus joins it, atop an ominous pedal tone in the orchestra, the effect is hokey. The prologue segues into
Ten Square Miles by the Potomac River, an intentionally crude march during which Washington and delegates from the 13 states have a feisty contrapuntal debate over where to locate the nation’s capital. Though
Take Care of This House, a wistful piece sung by Abigail Adams, may be a touch saccharine, it has won a place in the song-recital repertory. Bernstein certainly had a feeling for dance, as proved by a calypso-driven ensemble during the marriage of Lud and Seena, stand-ins for three generations of black servants in the White House. Still, as a theater composer Bernstein may have been at his best when he had nothing to prove and could use his great skills to get the job done, as in his charming, witty score for
Wonderful Town, which he composed quickly under pressure. In
A White House Cantata you sense his struggle to lift the genre of the musical to some higher musical plane, and the effort comes through. The baritone Dwayne Croft brought a robust voice and dramatic flair to portrayals of all the presidents. The soprano Emily Pulley, singing the first ladies, stopped the show with her tour-de-force
Duet for One, in which she portrays both the incoming first lady, Lucy Hayes, on the Inauguration Day for Rutherford B. Hayes, all aflutter with excitement, and the outgoing one, Julia Grant, full of sniping complaints about her successor" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 4/2/08].
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