November 3
Arnold Schoenberg's
Moses und Aron. Paris Opera, Paris, France. Repeated 11/6 and 9. "As Moses sings in the opening scene, [God] is “unique, eternal, omnipresent, invisible, unrepresentable.” That’s the paradox of Arnold Schönberg’s . . . landmark opera
Moses und Aron . . . in a visually dazzling, thrillingly radical production . . . . If God is unrepresentable, as Schönberg and Moses have it, how to stage this opera, which is essentially a long argument between Moses and Aron about the clash between the purity of an idea — in this case, the revelation of a single God -- and its corruption when it is put into words and images? . . .
Moses und Aron . . . was originally written by Schönberg as an oratorio in the early 1920's and then transformed into an opera from 1930 to 1932 (Born Jewish in 1874 in Vienna, Schönberg converted to Protestantism at 18, but reclaimed his Jewish identity after confronting Nazi anti-Semitism. It seems likely that the composition of “Moses” was part of a personal confrontation with religious thought). . . . The huge chorus (117 people, including 30 children, in this production) must whisper and shout, sing and speak. The effect is complex, dissonant and powerful . . . This “Moses” starts slowly, almost sleepily, with an old-fashioned double tape reel spooling into the hands of Moses as the wonderfully atmospheric opening chords and choral voices begin. . . . An orgy and virgin sacrifices are enacted with stylized violence, given form in dances of knotty intertwining" [Roslyn Sulca, 11/4/15].
November 10
Violinist Leila Josefowicz and Pianist John Novacek, Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Josefowicz took every rhythmic detour in Erkki-Sven Tuur’s
Conversio (1994), which starts stuck in a rut, confused and circling, and seems to get out by remembering how to be silent, despite interruptions by slashing chords. She gave the highways and byways of [John] Adams’s
Road Movies (1995) childlike wonder. The music seemed to wake, disoriented, from a nap at the end of the first movement,
Relaxed Groove, and overdose on sugar in the hyperactive finale,
40 Percent Swing.
Her repertoire of tone was just as broad in the dances of [Manuel da] Falla’s
Suite populaire espagnole, with ethereal halftones in
Nana, caustic aggression in
Polo and a wheezy fug in
Asturiana. If the heavenly light of Messiaen’s
Theme and Variations began a little dim, it blinded by the end. Most affecting of all was the encore, Claus Ogermann’s arrangement of Charlie Chaplin’s
Smile, at first watery, then content [David Allen, The New York Times, 11/11/15].
Arnold Schoenberg’s
The Book of Hanging Gardens (Stefan George) and Alban Berg's
Five Orchestral Songs on Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, performed by Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber. Park Avenue Armory’s Board of Officers Room, New York, NY. "[Gerhaher] said that the cycle is 'like Christmas, 15 times over.' . . . Schoenberg creates an entirely new set of colors for every emotional nuance, likening each stanza to a gift . . . . Schoenberg’s
The Book of Hanging Gardens is situated in a monstrously fertile landscape in which every luscious plant and sinuous animal conspires to heighten the poet’s erotic agony. , , [I]t’s the piano part that charts the topography, and Mr. Huber’s warm and attentive playing brought each to life.
Mr. Huber also stole some of the spotlight in Berg’s
Five Orchestral Songs on Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, in which the poet looks 'beyond the borders of the universe' for consolation. The piano arrangement maintains much of the watercolor delicacy of the original orchestral score, allowing Mr. Gerhaher’s clear, sometimes painfully fragile voice to skirt the border between singing and speaking" [Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times, 11/11/, 2015].
November 13
As
part of a series of attacks across Paris, three gunmen conduct a mass
shooting during a sold-out (1,500) Eagles of Death Metal concert,
killing 89 concertgoers and wounding 200, before two of
the attackers detonate explosive vests, and the third is killed by
police. Bataclan, Paris, France. "[Eagles of Death Metal] from Palm
Desert [CA], mixes driving blues-rock of 1970's vintage with a heavy
dose of humor. For fans of Eagles of Death Metal, the band’s name is
part of its irreverent charm. 'We kind of have a rule with Eagles of
Death Metal that it’s the fun show, and we want everyone to belong'
Jesse Hughes, one of the group’s two leaders, said in a recent interview
with Rolling Stone. But as news spread across social media, fans -- as
well as many more who had probably never heard of the group before --
expressed horror over the scene at . . . Bataclan. . . . The band’s
members were reported safe. . . . The band, formed in 1998, is closely
associated with Queens of the Stone Age, which specializes in the fuzzy
guitar sounds of 1970's metal. Joshua Homme, the leader of Queens of
the Stone Age, is the other primary member of Eagles of Death Metal,
which was on a European tour . . . . Homme, who rarely tours with
Eagles of Death Metal, was not with the group . . . . U2 announced that
it had canceled a concert scheduled in Paris on [November 14]. 'We
watched in disbelief and shock at the unfolding events . . . and our
hearts go out to all the victims and their families across the city
tonight,' the band said in a statement. 'We are devastated at the loss
of life . . . and our thoughts and prayers are with the band and their
fans'" [Ben Sisario, The New York Times, 11/13/15]. "Designed in
1864 by the architect Charles Duval, [Bataclan] refers to [Jacques
Offenbach's]
Ba-Ta-Clan . . . but it is also. . . the expression
'tout le bataclan' (the whole caboodle), the oldest written use of [this
locution] which predates Offenbach in a journal entry of . . .
[November, 11 1761] by [Charles Simon] Favart" [Wikipedia, 11/14/15[.
Yefim Bronfman Plays Sergei Prokofiev
Sonatas Nos. 1-4. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Before the pianist Yefim Bronfman’s concert on Friday evening at Zankel Hall, Clive Gillinson, executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, requested a moment of silence in honor of the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris. Mr. Bronfman has a businesslike demeanor: After a curt nod to the audience he sat down and plunged straight into Prokofiev’s
Sonata No. 1 without a moment of mental preparation or any of the customary fussing with the piano bench. He seemed to channel the rage and grief of multitudes into his magnificently communicative playing in this concert, the first of three this season featuring Prokofiev’s nine piano sonatas in chronological order. Prokofiev eventually deemed his short Piano Sonata No. 1, a student work, 'a naïve and simple little piece,' but there was nothing trivial about Mr. Bronfman’s performance, in which the melody emerged with stately warmth amid the tumultuous chords. In the enigmatic, lyrical
Piano Sonata No. 2, he conveyed the work’s roiling, unstable moods, with a gently seething Andante and a brilliantly articulated Vivace. Prokofiev’s single-movement
Piano Sonata No. 3 also traverses eclectic terrain. With a silky touch, Mr. Bronfman rendered the serene moments starkly against the emotional outbursts elsewhere. The Piano
Sonata No. 4 is equally tense, its dark undercurrents illuminated here with riveting intensity and the bravura finale dazzling for its energy and clarity" [Vivien Schweitzer, 11/16/15].
November 14
Philip Glass's
Appomattox. Kennedy Center, Washington, DC. "Since the first version of
Appomattox was given its premiere in 2007 at the San Francisco Opera, many states have passed laws making it harder to vote, and, in 2013, the Supreme Court effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act. So [Philip] Glass and [librettist Christopher] Hampton significantly revised the opera and made voting rights a central theme. . . . The rethought opera harks back to the days before texts were considered sacrosanct, when composers like Handel, Verdi, and Puccini continued to tinker with and transform their finished works over the years. The new
Appomattox, even though its subject is history, can feel as timely as a Twitter feed, with its explorations of race, police violence, civil rights, and voting rights. And it is joining a long operatic tradition of using historical subjects in ways that resonate with contemporary issues — from the way Verdi’s
Va Pensiero chorus in the biblical epic
Nabucco came to be heard as a nationalist anthem to how his
Don Carlo used Spanish history to weigh in on realpolitik and the church. . . . The original version of [
Appomattox] portrayed the final days of the Civil War, and dramatized Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the village of Appomattox Court House, Va., before flashing forward to brief scenes from Reconstruction and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. While the first act of the new, expanded
Appomattox is still set in the 19th century, the second is now devoted to civil and voting rights. The opera now opens with Frederick Douglass visiting the White House in 1865 and telling Abraham Lincoln he would like to see 'voting rights for all free men of color.' In the second act, a century later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visits the White House to press President Lyndon B. Johnson on the Voting Rights Act. Mounting an opera about voting rights in the nation’s capital is 'so fitting and appropriate,' said Representative John Lewis of Georgia, whose skull was fractured by a state trooper during the 1965 march in Selma, Ala., that became known as Bloody Sunday, and who said he had been surprised to learn that he was a character in the opera. . . . One dramatic thread that has been expanded in the revised opera seems especially timely in the age of the
Black Lives Matter movement: the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, the 26-year-old civil rights marcher whose death in 1965 at the hands of a state trooper led to the historic marches in Selma. . . . [When] Francesca Zambello became the artistic director of Washington National Opera in 2013 and, she recalled, was 'shocked' to discover that the company had never staged an opera by Mr. Glass. She said that she found the idea of mounting
Appomattox appealing, but worried that the original version felt unfinished.'. . . Glass clearly relishes the thought of bringing a political opera to Washington. . . . Given the fast pace of change in the country, Mr. Glass added that he wondered if this version of
Appomattox would be the last. 'I can easily imagine,' he said, 'saying we have to write a new third act'" [Michael Cooper, The New York Times, 11/10/15]. "[11/14/15's presentation was] also called a world premiere. For this year’s 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, Mr. Glass and Mr. Hampton condensed the events of 1865 and wrote a new second act that dramatizes President Lyndon B. Johnson’s passage of that seminal piece of legislation in 1965 against the backdrop of protests. A chilling epilogue, set in a Mississippi jail in 2011, shows the unrepentant murderer of three rights activists spewing hatred and boasting of his crime. . . This
Appomattox . . . is a frustratingly uneven work that presents well-known historical facts on a conveyor belt of forgettable music. . . . The score to this first act features some of the most nondescript music Mr. Glass has written, with a soft, string-heavy orchestration laced here and there with percussion. The language is made up of Mr. Glass’s trademark undulating arpeggios and cloudy modulations but never builds up to the transcendent poetry of his music for the Gandhi opera
Satyagraha. An arrangement of the Civil War song
Tenting on the Old Campground opens the opera on a note of guileless vulnerability that is unrelated to the ensuing three hours of generic music. When the black journalist T. Morris Chester, sung resplendently by Frederick Ballentine, delivers an anguished report on the post-Civil War massacre of black soldiers, the orchestra sounds mildly detached. 'My heart is too full to say more,' Lee, sung with great warmth by David Pittsinger, tells his troops after he has told them of the surrender. . . . Mr. Glass only offers a squiggly line of undulating strings to fill in the blank. The period of Reconstruction is an even bigger blank. Instead, Act II fast-forwards to 1965. The characters of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (the sonorous bass Soloman Howard, who sang Douglass in Act I) and President Johnson (the baritone Tom Fox, doubling as Lincoln) bring forth some of the freshest writing from Mr. Hampton . . . . This new act is altogether brighter and more confident -- entertaining, even, despite the acts of racist violence invoked in upsetting detail. A few rousing and idiomatic orations by Dr. King (written by Mr. Hampton) provide Mr. Glass with the kind of musical dramaturgy lacking in the older material. The reverend’s rising rhetorical cadence and call-and-response with his congregation is a natural fit for opera and Mr. Glass’s music in these scenes is the most successful" [Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, 11/15/15].
November 17
Olga Neuwirth's
In Nacht und Eis, Pierre Boulez's
Dialogue de l’Ombre Double (two versions), George Lewis's
Emergent. Sawdust, New York, NY. "[New York] has not done right lately by Pierre Boulez, who turned 90 in March. The . . . Philharmonic -- of which he was music director from 1971 to 1977, in a tenure now often criticized as recondite in its programming (untrue) and dire in its ticket sales (ditto) -- did nothing to honor the birthday. Nor did our other major cultural institutions. It has taken a series of concerts this week at National Sawdust . . . for Mr. Boulez to be the focus of a sustained tribute here. And it’s a well-plotted tribute that does justice to a composer, conductor, pianist and theorist whose influence looms peerlessly large over the past half-century of music. The four concerts juxtapose Mr. Boulez’s works with those of other artists and, appropriately, center on his
Dialogue de l’Ombre Double (1984), which recurs throughout the week.
Dialogue is, as you can imagine, a conversation, but it’s unexpected: between a clarinetist (here the alert Joshua Rubin) and that musician’s recorded self. Skipping, fluttering, demanding, the score moves with perplexing yet alluring smoothness between live and amplified sound, as the recorded lines slip stealthily around the room, from one speaker to another. Mr. Boulez later created versions of the piece for different instruments, and in 1995 made one for [bassoonist Pascal] Gallois. The bassoon brings a more grounded, earthy quality to the score than the clarinet, especially since Mr. Gallois’s interpretation, while just as virtuosic as Mr. Rubin’s, is less pert and more natural. In Olga Neuwirth’s new version of her
In Nacht und Eis for two bassoons, Rebekah Heller matched Mr. Gallois in inspired naturalness. The music, a genial if passionate partnership, moves from low, oscillating growls to husky floods of notes. George Lewis’s
Emergent surrounded the flutist Claire Chase with electronic echoes of her ferocious yelps, like the ricocheting calls of a flock of excited birds. . . . Eight months late, it’s the birthday gift [Boulez] deserves" [Zachary Woolfe, 11/18/15].
New Juilliard Ensemble in the New York premiere of William Primosch’s
From a Book of Hours, plus Du Yun's
Quatrain (Slow Portraits iii), Michael Zev Gordon’s
Sehnsucht, Elliott Sharp’s
Wannsee Noir, and Gyorgy Kurtag’s
Brefs Messages. Paul Hall, Juilliard School, New York, NY. “'Why so little Rilke-music?' a critic from The New York Times asked over 20 years ago, noting how many composers have kept a respectful distance from this great poet. Among those who have heeded the challenge of setting his texts is the composer James Primosch, who has turned to Rilke’s religious poetry for a number of songs that elegantly combine personal fervor and worldly sophistication. . . . Primosch’s
From a Book of Hours [is] set to devotional texts Rilke first published in 1905. With one evoking 'the calm between two notes' that get along with difficulty, yet 'are reconciled, with trembling, in the dark rest,' it’s the sort of poetry that’s aching to be sung. Alexandra Razskazoff gave a beautiful performance of this captivating work, which benefited as much from her richly faceted, slinky soprano as from the expressive clarity she brought to the German text. Art song requires a singer to lavish as much thoughtfulness and art on diction as on musical phrasing, and Ms. Razskazoff appears to have the makings of a great recitalist. The ensemble, under the assured direction of Joel Sachs, sounded most comfortable in this work, with its late-Romantic language laced with idiosyncratic colorings. In some of the other works, all premieres, there was a certain respectful rigidity in the playing that seemed more concerned with getting it right than making it speak. Du Yun’s
Quatrain (Slow Portraits iii) plunged the listener into a noisy bazaar of sounds and styles, in which Moorish melodies played on the oboe wrestle for attention with Chinese-flavored violin solos, hard-edge percussion and conciliatory strains from guitar and harp. In the end the music seemed to dissolve into thin air like a mirage. Michael Zev Gordon’s Sehnsucht for mixed ensemble opened with the kind of musical gestures one might expect in a work titled
Longing: a flourish that won’t quite let go of its final note; a swelling cello sigh. But what followed was a fascinating play on textures with moments of fit-to-burst tension, pulsating with microtonal heat, that eventually led to a delicate, fragile ending. Jaunty short ensemble phrases and spirited solos, interspersed by flat patches of sustained dissonant chords, characterized Elliott Sharp’s
Wannsee Noir with spotlight-stealing turns by the trumpeter Matthew Mead and cheeky challenges by the clarinetist Shen Liu and the bass clarinetist Kristina Teuschler. A polished performance of [Gyorgy[ Kurtag’s
Brefs Messages (Op. 47) also offered opportunities for individual players to shine in a witty and economically drawn series of portraits that investigated the nature of musical conversation and community" 9Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, 11/18/15].
November 18
Olga Neuwirth's
In Nacht und Eis; Pierre Boulez's
Incises, Dialogue de l'Ombre Double, and
Piano Sonata No. 2; and Elliott Carter's
Two Diversions and
Two Thoughts About Piano. National Sawdust, New York, New York.
Julliard Opera presents Francis Poulenc’s
Les Mamelles de Tiresias (
The Breasts of Tiresias, 1947) and Viktor Ullmann’s
Der Kaiser von Atlantis, Oder der Tod Dankt Ab (T
he Emperor of Atlantis, or Death Abdicates, 1943). Peter Jay Sharp Theater, New York, NY. "Though contrasting in style and mood, are both [the Poulenc and Ullman are] lunatic satirical responses to the carnage of World War II. The zaniness of
Les Mamelles starts to become evident in the title, since Tiresias is the male name adopted by Thérèse when she declares her independence, wanting to make war instead of babies, growing a beard and shedding her breasts (Balloons, the inevitable stand-ins for free-floating breasts, are about all I remember from Seiji Ozawa’s presentation of the opera with the Tanglewood Music Center in 1997). But France needs to repopulate, according to the stated (tongue at least partly in cheek) moral of the opera, which is based on a 1917 surrealist play by Guillaume Apollinaire written in reaction to another devastating war. So Thérèse’s unnamed Husband has to learn how to make babies without her and does so prodigiously in some unexplained manner . . . producing 40,049 of them in one day.
Der Kaiser is an altogether darker affair. Ullmann, who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944, composed it inside the belly of the beast, at the Terezin concentration camp, to a libretto by a fellow inmate, Peter Kien. An allegorical figure, Death, who has been rendered all too obsolete by mass slaughters, squares off against Emperor Überall, pretty much a dead ringer for Hitler, if slightly more rational in the end. Even Kien and Ullmann, it seems, could not imagine the worst. . . . The “Kaiser” production is especially evocative, incorporating the creators’ prison experience into the play, as it were, with a striped-pajama motif in most of the costumes, designed by Paul Carey. That Terezin inmates did not wear stripes matters little in this fanciful context. As announced beforehand, the performance of
Mamelles, set in Paris (or Zanzibar; it is never quite clear), was dedicated to “the spirit of the French people" [James R. Oestreich, 11/19/15].
November 19
Olga Neuwirth's
In Nacht und Eis, Sabrina Schroeder's
Flatspin (stircrazer IV), Franck Bedrossian's
Transmission, Mario Diaz de Leon's
The Soul is the Arena, and Pierre Boulez's
Dialogue de l’ombre double. Sawdust, New York, NY.
November 21
The Opus Project presents
Opus 35: Numbers Up. Selections from Jean Sibelius's
Jubal, Albert Roussel's
Chinese Poems, Alexander Scriabin's
Piano Preludes, Sergei Rachmaninoff's
The Bells, Gustav Holst's
Songs for Voice and Violin, Arnold Schoenberg's
Six Pieces for Male Chorus, Cyril Scott's
Pierrot, Karol Szymanowski's
Violin Concerto No. 1, Ernst Toch's
Cello Concerto, Sergei Prokofiev's
Melodies without Words, Alois Hába's
Mother, Paul Hindemith's
The Serenades, Paul Creston's
Symphony No. 2, Dmitri Shostakovich's
Piano Concerto No. 1, Samuel Barber's
A Hand Of Bridge, Alan Hovhaness's
The Lord's Prayer, Benjamin Britten's
Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Vincent Persichetti's
King Lear, Gyorgy Kurtag's
Holderlin Gesange, George Crumb's
Makrokosmos - Volume II, Robert Muczynski's
Piano Sonata No. 3, Mark Alburger's
Missa California, and Michael Stubblefield's
Six Short Piano Pieces on Twelve-Tone Circles. Diablo Valley College Music Building, Viking Drive, Pleasant Hill, CA.
Luigi Nono's
Polifonica-Monodica-Ritmica, Pierre Boulez's
Éclat and
Le Marteau sans Maitre, and Karlheinz Stockhausen's
Kontra-Punkte. Sawdust, New York, NY.
November 22
New York Youth Symphony in Maurice Ravel's
Mother Goose Suite, George Gershwin's
An American in Paris, and the premiere of Gabriella Smith’s
Lost Coast. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "
Lost Coast . . .
is a 20-minute work featuring solo cello . . . inspired by a five-day backpacking trip the composer took on
the remote Lost Coast Trail in Northern California.
The score is like a landscape in sound, unfolding in a shimmering haze
with earthy string sounds, flecks of woodwinds, swelling brass bursts
and thematic fragments that never quite coalesce into themes. The solo
cello has long, demanding stretches of scratching sounds, slides and
rhythmic bursts hand-tapped on the body of the instrument" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 11/23/15].
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center performs Arnold Schoenberg's
Kammersymphonie No. 1. Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "The highlight was an arresting performance of Schoenberg’s breathless
Kammersymphonie No. 1, performed here in Anton Webern’s ingeniously effective arrangement for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 11/23/15].
November 23
MusicNOW presents Ted Hearne's
Law of Mosaics, Kaija Saariaho's
Petals and Daniel Wohl's
Glitch. Harris Theater for Music and Dance, Chicago, IL. "Kaija
Saariaho's 1988
Petals, for cello and electronics, [was] an otherworldly
soundscape played with literally crunching virtuosity by [Chicago Symphony Orchestra] cellist
Katinka Kleijn.
In his electro-acoustic piece for string quartet,
Glitch (2009), Wohl
makes the pops and clicks of old vinyl records, the skips of scratched
CD's and other accidents of recording playback an integral part of the
piece. The conceit results in a series of increasingly violent
confrontations between acoustical order and electronic distortion,
before looping consonances restore calm.
Hearne's string-orchestra opus
Law of Mosaics (2012) attempts nothing
less than a grand deconstruction of several hundred years of
string-orchestra music, in six movements. The starts and stops that play
hob with linear momentum (the lifeblood of much Baroque string music)
in the opening section give rise to postmodernist mashups of Bach,
Vivaldi, and Mahler later on. It was all done with enormous punch and
precision by an ensemble of CSO string players and guests, under the
firm guidance of conductor Christopher Rountree" [John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, 11/27/15[.
Juilliard String Quartet in Elliott Carter's
String Quartet No. 1. Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "Joel Krosnick, the quartet’s cellist since 1974 and its longest-serving member by far, announced in May that he would leave the group at the end of this season. With no musician remaining on the roster who played with any of the Juilliard’s founding artists, a new era for a hallowed institution awaits. The cello, first grand, then ruminative, plays alone at the start of Elliott Carter’s
Quartet No. 1, written during a period in the Arizona desert in 1950-51. Mr. Krosnick rendered this solo with craggy glory, later plucking with gruff majesty as the violist Roger Tapping unspooled a velvety, elegiac line. The group was endlessly agile in the twists of Carter’s quartet, defined by its myriad, complex shifts of tempo. Lively dances suddenly opened into rhapsodic yearning; a moody dialogue between cello and viola was interrupted by hovering, glassy high tones in the violins (Joseph Lin and Ronald Copes). Sudden floods of spidery runs and bursts of quivering energy were like sparks popping from a fire in a desert night. Now largely characterized by the sleekly intense sound of Mr. Lin, its first violinist since 2011, the ensemble can beef up, too, broadening into the Carter quartet’s passages of sunset richness" [Zachary Woolf, The New York Times, 11/24/15].
November 24
Juilliard Orchestra, conducted by Alan Gilbert, in Alban Berg’s
Three Pieces for Orchestra. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Gilbert and his players conveyed the dramatic conflicts and complexities of the music, especially in the opening Präludium, in which a mass of quivering figures and hazy textures crest into tortuous outbursts, and the final movement, a hurtling . . . deconstruction of the march idiom. The piece culminates with pummeling percussive hammer strokes that surely nod to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. The performance was at once raw and radiant" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 11/25/15].
Music on the Edge. SubCulture, New York, NY. "in [Eric Moe's]
Let Me Tell U About R Specials (2005), live and prerecorded flute lines chatter like customers at a table, trying to talk as a waiter’s sampled monologue interrupts. . . . Burr Van Nostrand’s
Fantasy Manual for Urban Survival (1972), an underappreciated trio for alto flute ([Lindsey] Goodman), cello (Dave Eggar) and prepared piano (Mr. Moe). In six movements, including one that has the flutist and cellist intone a [Friedrich] Hölderlin poem (
Hälfte des Lebens) in Sprechstimme over evocative, wintry tones, Mr. Van Nostrand’s distinctive voice pushes each instrument’s sonic boundaries to the breaking point. The mood is predominantly violent, an allusion to campus violence during the Vietnam War. The composer allows the flute and cello to arrive at havens -- single notes in which their timbres seem to merge -- but these oases don’t last long before carnage intrudes. Yet it’s the sadness of these moments that seems to be the piece’s essence, particularly in three movements marked
Schwangesang (
Swan Song). . . . Roger Zahab contributed two for percussion (Lisa Pegher, tremendous):
A Spunky Twenty-Eight (1998), a fanfare for snare drum and tom-toms, and the alluring
Deceived by Starlight (1996) for vibraphone. [Mathew] Rosenblum’s
Northern Flicker (2012) is a more ambitious percussion work, a pounding showpiece of rhythmic flair. Mr. Moe played a piano dance dedicated to him by Lee Hyla,
One Moe Time (Waltz for Eric), its rhythms distorted by abrasive runs. And Amy Williams’s
First Lines (2006), with the composer at the piano, created satisfying miniatures from the opening lines of several poems.
Shhhh, my grandmother is sleeping, from verse by Marilyn Chin, prompted snores from Ms. Goodman’s flute" [David Allen, 11/25/15].
November 27
Marin Alsop conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in George Gershwin's
Rhapsody in Blue, Samuel Barber's
Second Essay for Orchestra, and Anna Clyne's
Masquerade. Chicago, IL. "Like her famous mentor, Leonard Bernstein, Alsop can be a dervish on the podium when the music is fast, busy, and highly charged. But she is her own musician in terms of considered emotional response and the way she conveys intensity of feeling to her players. . . . [Anna] Clyne's brief Masquerade . . [is] an ideal curtain raiser, the swirling sounds eventually coalescing into a quotation of an old English drinking song, complete with rhythmic hiccups. The conductor's recordings of the complete Barber orchestral works for the Naxos label reveal her as one of the composer's most eloquent champions. Her sensitively shaped, deeply felt reading of Barber's
Second Essay for Orchestra returned to the CSO repertory one of the finest American orchestral scores of the 1940's, and 'brava' to her for that. Alsop got her feel for jazz, and for Gershwin's music in general, early in her career when she operated her own swing band, so the idiomatic ease with which she had the CSO musicians tugging at the jazzy rhythms of Gershwin's
Rhapsody in Blue came as no surprise. . . . Pianist Jon Kimura Parker . . . continued in the same high-energy, jazz piano with his solo encore, the bouncy
Blues Etude by his late, great fellow Canadian, Oscar Peterson" [John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, 11/27/15[.
November 30
Willima Shakespeare's
The Winter's Tale, directed by Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford, music by Patrick Doyle. Garrick Theatre, London, UK. "When it comes to writing music for the plays of William Shakespeare, few living composers can claim as much experience as Patrick Doyle, the two-time Academy Award nominee who has collaborated with Kenneth Branagh on screen adaptations including Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, and Hamlet. Doyle has written music for more than 40 movies, most recently Disney's live action
Cinderella, which was released earlier this year. His latest effort represents a return to his roots on the stage. . . . For
The Winter's Tale, which co-stars Branagh and Judi Dench, Doyle has composed songs and dances as well as thematic music. He said he usually takes his inspiration from the actors' delivery of Shakespeare's verse. . . . In person, Doyle, 62, is friendly and animated. He speaks at an allegro gallop, with a thick Scottish accent that itself is often musical in its tonal variations. Growing up, he studied piano, singing and the tuba, and he graduated from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music. Early in his career, he worked as a music director and actor in the British theater and joined Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company in 1987. Their first collaboration was a stage production of
Twelfth Night. 'It was clear that I was part of this team instantly,' Doyle recalled. 'I could read his mind. I got him. There's a kind of telepathy between us.'
The Winter's Tale is part of Branagh's new company . . . . Doyle is scoring the entire season, which includes Terence Rattigan's
Harlequinade, currently in repertory, and an upcoming staging of
Romeo and Juliet. Working with Branagh, Doyle is often on set with the director and is sometimes required to come up with music on short notice. For
Cinderella, he received a call the day before a big ballroom scene was shot asking for a waltz to be performed on playback as cast members entered the room. 'It was finished by 10 p.m. that night because it had to be ready for the sound department the next morning,' recalled Doyle. For
The Winter's Tale, he had to write most of the score in the first week of rehearsals. . . . The Branagh-Doyle partnership is similar in some ways to the close collaboration between Laurence Olivier and composer William Walton . . . Walton worked with Olivier over three decades and wrote music for his film adaptations of Henry V, Hamlet, and, Richard III. 'Both have tended to work with one particular director, so they build up a kind of relationship with a shorthand and set of expectations, [Notre Dame Shakespeare specialist Peter] Holland said. When writing the opening music for
Much Ado About Nothing, which is heard over Beatrice's line, 'Sigh no more, ladies,' Doyle said he adapted an unused melody from his score for Branagh's 1991 thriller
Dead Again. The reworked tune became a recurring theme throughout the movie. 'You learn by experience,' said Doyle.'You come up with a strong theme. That's part of your technique as a dramatic writer. That's the joy of it'" [David Ng, Los Angeles Times, 11/27/15].
