21ST-CENTURY MUSIC

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / April 2012

2012-04-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

April 2012

Volume 19, Number 4

Work-in-Progress, 1/23/12

Calendar for April 2012

Chronicle of February 2012

Illustration / Pierre Boulez ("Compose loudly and carry a masterless hammer?" - ed)

Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
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@gmail.com.

Typeset in Times New Roman. Copyright 2012 by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC. This journal is printed on recycled paper. Copyright notice: Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC.

The Journal is also online at 21st-centurymusic.com and 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com

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@gmail.com. Materials for review may be sent to the same address.

INFORMATION FOR ADVERTISERS

Send all inquiries to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Calendar for April 2012

2012-04-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

April 14

Fresh Voices XII: Not Shy and Retiring - Mark Alburger's 55th and Friends. Community Music Center, San Francisco, CA.

April 21

James Freeman conducts Orchestra 2012 in Pierre Boulez's Derive I, Gerald Levinson's Black Magic / White Magic, and a new commissioned work by Thomas Whitman. Ethical Society, Phildelphia, PA. Repeated 4/22, Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore College (PA).

Chronicle of February 2012

2012-04-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

February 15

Goat Hall Productions presents The Kurt Weill Project: Songs from "The Threepenny Opera." Cafe Royale, San Francisco, CA. Repeated 2/20, Stagewerx, San Francisco.

February 26

Composers, Inc. Piedmont Piano Company, Oakland, CA.

21st-CENTURY MUSIC / March 2012

2012-03-01T23:00:00.000-08:00

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

March 2012

Volume 19, Number 3

Work-in-Progress, 1/27/12

Have Cellos, Will Travel / Mark Alburger

Chronicle of January 2012

Recording

Illustration / Cypress String Quartet

Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
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@gmail.com.

Typeset in Times New Roman. Copyright 2012 by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC. This journal is printed on recycled paper. Copyright notice: Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC.

The Journal is also online at 21st-centurymusic.com and 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com

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@gmail.com. Materials for review may be sent to the same address.

INFORMATION FOR ADVERTISERS

Send all inquiries to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Have Cellos, Will Travel / Mark Alburger

2012-03-01T21:00:00.000-08:00

Wagner fans travel all over the world to take in performances of the "Ring Cycle." New-music aficionados would do well to learn the way to Le Petit Trianon, the home of the San Jose Chamber Orchestra, which is doing its part to produce exciting concerts featuring living composers. At the ensemble's January 8 recital, the quick out-numbered the dead by 3 to 2 -- not bad odds for classical music, and those three extant writers were all in the hall to take in much-deserved adulation.

The climax was the dynamic, rhythmic, and bluesy Tiento (Fantasy) by Michael Touchi, a tour-de-force of minimalist and vernacular-tinged energy for eight cellos and string orchestra. Spinning off from Heitor Villa-Lobos's celloistic octet Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 (also heard, and printed without the final titular consonants in the program), Touchi ups the ante by sending his cellists into contrapuntal array and disarray against the standing violins, violas, and bass hovering about. The riffs are relentless and appealing, and coloristic and call-and-response touches made their telling effects under the able baton of founder / music director Barbara Day Turner.

Previous to this, the Villa-Lobos shone forth from soprano Ronit Widman-Levy, in a haunting rendition that captured the essence of this baroque-and-brazilian mix. Like some surrealistic pillowy guitar, the cellos pluck and bow against operatic outpourings and hummings, making the case yet again for this most popular of the composer's works.

Related syncretism was evoked in Elena Ruhr's intriguing and inventive Cloud Atlas, after the novel by David Mitchell, where the beautiful solo cellist par excellence Jennifer Kloetzel (also of the Cypress String Quartet) found herself amidst a mixture of stylistic influences, old-and-new, atonal and neo-tonal-blue, all linked motivically by a perfect fifth, followed by another a half-step higher. By contrast, Anica Gallindo's innocent and sophisticated A Wintery Tale offered a pure, neo-romantic world of gorgeous tone and cinematic splendor.

Introducing each half of the program were seminal works by Johann Sebastian Bach, the first the well-known Cello Suite No. 1, again by the radiant Kloetzel, who took the opening Prelude at a breathtaking speed and articulated each phrase of the clever Minuets with passion and precision, bringing a lithe spirit to the concluding Gigue. Lazlo Varga's cello-quartet transcription of the Bach solo violin Sarabande and Bourree rounded out the program with intelligence and verve.

Chronicle of January 2012

2012-03-01T20:00:00.000-08:00

January 10

Music from Huang Ruo's Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, plus other selections from the composer. Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY. "The composer Huang Ruo has not yet reaped these benefits from the sudden, unexplained cancellation of the Beijing premiere of his first opera, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, but it could happen. Mr. Huang spent four years writing the opera about Sun, a revered figure in Chinese history who helped overthrow the monarchy and became the first president of the Chinese Republic after the 1911 revolution. Mr. Huang prepared two versions: one for Western instruments for Beijing, another for Chinese instruments for Opera Hong Kong. The libretto, by Candace Chong, had received official approval, and Mr. Huang’s colorful, eclectic style is known in China, so he was blindsided when the Beijing production was scrapped at the 11th hour last year. The Hong Kong version had a successful premiere, but Mr. Huang is intent on having his Beijing scoring heard as well. Some of it has been. Last May, New York City Opera included a concert excerpt in its Vox festival. And Mr. Huang conducted several arias and duets in a new chamber arrangement at Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday evening, as part of a program of his recent works. Not surprisingly, the excerpts offer only a vague sense of the work, not least because they are sung in Mandarin and Cantonese. But Mr. Huang has a lyrical gift, and even in the absence of translations or projected titles, the emotional arc of each piece was clear. Laurence Broderick, the tenor who sang the title role, offered an impassioned account of a first-act aria that conveys Sun’s anguish over his people’s suffering. And Fang Tao Jiang, a soprano, ably brought out the drama and intensity in an aria in which Lu Mu-zhen, Sun’s first wife from an arranged marriage, turns up at his wedding to Soong Ching-Ling and serves a divorce decree. Ms. Jiang also gave a strong performance of Ching-Ling’s aria from a scene following her loss of a child. The supporting score is supple and richly textured, even in this pared-down version, and Ensemble FIRE and the Momenta Quartet gave it a warm, graceful reading. They also gave vigorous performances of two typically inventive chamber works by Mr. Huang. In the four-movement Book of the Forgotten (2009), clarinet and viola lines are deftly interwoven. Each instrument slips in and out of the spotlight with music that is alternately haunting, playful and brash, with occasional bent tones and glissandos evoking a Chinese folk style amid the Western melodic flights. Vasko Dukovski gave a lively account of the clarinet writing, and Stephanie Griffin was the eloquent violist. Mr. Huang’s sumptuous String Quartet No. 3 ('Calligraffiti,' 2009), draws similarly on Chinese and Western tunings and influences but is painted on a broader palette and, often, in more somber hues. In a focused, fluid performance by the Momenta Quartet the work’s first two movements were kaleidoscopic and tumultuous, yet the piece was at its most affecting in the quiet finale, with its elegant descending slides and tactile ornamentation" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 1/12/12].

January 13

New York Guitar Festival: Alternative Guitar Festival. Rockwood Music Hall, New York, NY. Through 1/15. "It was a concert that posited instrument as inspiration: the physicality of the instruments was at the heart of the music. Mark Stewart, who leads Paul Simon’s band and is a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, opened the night with pieces for a menagerie of instruments. Playing mandocello, a cello-size mandolin, accompanied by David Cossin on djembe (hand drum), he had a robustly folky melody with a hint of Indian modes. A duo for four-stringed plectrum guitars, with Gyan Riley on the second instrument, also mingled India and Appalachia, gathering speed on the way from an Eastern-tinged drone to brisk banjolike strumming. Mr. Stewart and Mr. Riley also played two varieties of an instrument Mr. Stewart designed, the uboingi: guitar-shaped metal frames suspending a guitar neck on springs. They generated all sorts of plunks, rustles, tinkles, scrapes and clangs, in a piece that ambled through a hushed metallic junkscape of isolated sounds and turned rhythmic as the players traded little high plinks. For a final piece Mr. Stewart did get around to acoustic guitar, accompanied by Mr. Cossin tapping a well-tuned cardboard tube, as he fingerpicked a piece exploring the intricacies of a Cameroonian guitar lick. Joel Harrison, the festival’s curator, performed with Anupam Shobhakar on the sarod, a fretless Indian lute with sympathetic strings, and Todd Isler playing exotic percussion instruments. Mr. Harrison’s instrument was a National steel guitar, and his project with Mr. Shobhakar was a colloquy between two vocabularies full of bending, sliding notes: blues and Indian music. It was a fusion of equals, respecting differences as much as similarities: the liquid microtonal curves of the sarod lines and the twangy urgency of the steel guitar, the disparate modes of each idiom, the separate kinds of percussive acceleration each instrument could summon on the way to a big finish. Ben Monder, playing electric guitar in a duo with Pete Rende on electric piano, devoted his set to two songs by Jimmy Webb. He took his time reaching Wichita Lineman, via an abstract rumination perhaps distantly related to some of the song’s chromatic turns. It moved from contemplation to apocalyptic distortion to a sparse pianissimo before the song itself emerged, with all its odd, plaintive leaps. Up, Up and Away became a somewhat more conventional, harmonically elaborated jazz ballad, although Mr. Monder and Mr. Rende had shifted its meter into 7/4. Pillow Wand, the duo of Nels Cline from Wilco and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, wielded their electric guitars in a noise duet that Mr. Cline introduced as 'the potentially antisocial sound we’re going to make.' It was a considered bombardment from their fingers, implements and effects pedals: not an unmodulated blitz but a mutable, multifarious one. At various times Mr. Cline used a metal bar to strum, scrape and hit his strings; Mr. Moore inserted a drumstick under his strings and slid it up and down the frets for a wrenching glissando. There were sustained drones and frantic ones, sawmill-run-amok buzz assaults and tractor-pull roars, klaxons and feedback squeals, gamelan peals and minimalist ostinatos, calliopelike tootles and earth tremors. It was the kind of music no other instrument could make" [Jon Pareles, The New York Times, 1/15/12].

January 16

The Song Continues: Marilyn Horne's 78th birthday, featuring Francis Poulenc’s Banalités. Weill Recital Hall, New York, NY. "[W]hen the mood was sober, [Elliot Madore] sang with exciting confidence and detail, delivering Poulenc’s elegantly bleak Sanglots with subtlety and concentration" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 1/17/12].

Kamala Sankaram's Miranda. Here Arts Center, New York, NY. Through 1/21. "As a singer Ms. Sankaram is remarkably flexible: she seems as completely at home in a soaring operatic style as she does in the music of Philip Glass, Phil Kline, John Zorn and Anthony Braxton. And as a composer she has an ear for so many styles -- and the magpie instincts to draw on them all -- that her music seems tailor-made for Here’s genre-disdaining audience. Ms. Sankaram’s new opera . . . is a mash-up of so many elements, popular and classical, that you are bound to miss a few on a single hearing. For starters, it’s a murder mystery that satirizes the justice system, reality TV and the glamour industry. Nick Francone’s sets, Jacci Jaye’s costumes and Matt Tennie’s video couch the production in partly retro, partly futuristic steampunk style (a science-fiction conceit that proposes a universe in which modern technologies were invented during the era of steam power). Ms. Sankaram’s score embraces electronica, beefy 1950's pop riffs, Baroque string figuration, lush Romantic texturing, Hindustani classical music, R&B vocals, tango and direct quotations from rock songs (The halting chord progression of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir is prominent at the start and end of the work, and Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust makes a cameo). And the choreography, by Lauren Yalango and Christopher Grant, mashes up elegant classical touches, 1960's dance-floor moves and unclassifiably stylized gestures. Yet for all that, Miranda is strikingly original, mainly because its principal vocal lines, which Ms. Sankaram sings in the title role, are inventively shaped, full of character and emotionally direct and authentic. That is as it should be: though the work is comic on its surface it is woven around the murder of Miranda Wright, a diet-pill heiress, and a trial that is meant to determine whether her killer was her fiancé, Cor Prater; her father, Izzy Wright; or her mother, Anjana Challapattee Wright. In her arias Miranda sorts out her fraught relationships with them all. Granted, the courtroom is a game show (The Whole Truth), presided over by D.A.V.E., a digital judge, with an M.C. as the bailiff and the audience as the jury. Not that the audience members’ (very mixed) response, when asked for their verdict, has any effect: the libretto, which Ms. Sankaram wrote with the show’s director, Rob Reese, is not interactive. In the spirit of the band Alarm Will Sound, the instrumentalists double as the vocal cast. That may explain why Ms. Sankaram gave herself the most challenging and extended music, though Pat Muchmore, the cellist (and Izzy), sings a melodically supple tenor line pleasingly. Drew Fleming, the guitarist (Cor) and Rima Fand, the violinist (Anjana), sing their simpler music ably, and the two reed players, Ed Rosenberg and Jeff Hudgins, take short, amusing vocal turns" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 1/17/12].

January 18

Goat Hall Productions presents The Kurt Weill Project: Songs from The Threepenny Opera. Cafe Royale, San Francisco, CA.

Internet protests, including Wikipedia's 24-hour shutdown of its English-language version and a black banner on Google, quickly cut into Congressional support for anti-web piracy measures as lawmakers abandon and rethink their backing for legislation that pits new media interests against some of the most powerful old-line commercial interests. Washington, DC.

January 19

Philip Glass's Les Enfants Terribles. Fletcher Opera Theater, Progress Energy Center, Raleigh, NC. Through January 21.

Neutral Milk Hotel and Music Tapes. New York, NY. "Sex, devastation, war, death, God, reincarnation, and 'how strange it is to be anything at all' were some of the things Jeff Mangum sang about on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the second album by his band Neutral Milk Hotel, released in 1998. Then he made himself scarce, rarely performing in public until 2010. Meanwhile, the album’s reputation snowballed, particularly among musicians. Mr. Mangum has said the album was inspired by, among other things, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl; one of its singles was Holland, 1945, the place she lived and the year she died in a concentration camp. The recordings revolved around Mr. Mangum’s voice and acoustic guitar, often strummed with the unswerving drive of punk, and sometimes joined by sparse circus-band horns, woozy keyboards or full band. By the time Mr. Mangum made his decisive return last year, headlining the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival and a Town Hall concert, he had the kind of devotees who shout -- as someone did on Thursday night when he opened a three-night stand at the Brooklyn Academy of Music -- 'You’re the reason we make music!' The concerts were announced as his last New York City shows for some time. Mr. Mangum was jovial. 'You guys can yell at me,' he said, drawing fervent responses; he also got singalongs any time he asked for them. When plugging in an instrument made noise, he joked that it was a 'new song, sort of John Cage-inspired.' The hourlong set didn’t include any new material; nearly all of it came from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Mr. Mangum performed most of the concert solo, playing one of four acoustic guitars and singing loud and clear, including some of the album’s horn parts. Nearly every song started at full throttle and stayed there. That kept the music straightforward -- a handful of chords, a steady strum, a folky melody -- to carry Mr. Mangum’s avalanches of imagery. It could grow incantatory, as it did in the tolling ballad Oh Comely. But it also, despite the worshipful crowd, courted monotony. Mr. Mangum’s vocals, unvarying and absolutely steady on pitch when he held a note, could suggest a flesh-and-blood version of Auto-Tune. So it was welcome when members of the opening act, the Music Tapes, occasionally joined Mr. Mangum to add musical saw, horns or percussion; that band is led by Julian Koster, the saw player, who also appeared on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The songs breathed a little and differentiated themselves. And that opened up the yearning and sorrow, the spiritual questions and childhood memories, the mourning and stubborn hope that still draw listeners to Neutral Milk Hotel" [Jon Pareles, The New York Times, 1/20/12].

January 20

Death of Etta James (b. Jamesetta Hawkins, 1/25/38, Los Angeles, CA), of complications related to leukemia, at 73. Riverside Community Hospital, Riverside, CA. "James was not easy to pigeonhole. She is most often referred to as a rhythm and blues singer, and that is how she made her name in the 1950's . . . . She was also comfortable, and convincing, singing pop standards, as she did in 1961 with At Last, which was written in 1941 and originally recorded by Glenn Miller’s orchestra. . . . For all her accomplishments, Ms. James had an up-and-down career, partly because of changing audience tastes but largely because of drug problems. She developed a heroin habit in the 1960's; after she overcame it in the 1970's, she began using cocaine. . . . [James's] mother, Dorothy Hawkins, was 14 at the time [of her birth]; her father was long gone, and Ms. James never knew for sure who he was, although she recalled her mother telling her that he was the celebrated pool player Rudolf Wanderone, better known as Minnesota Fats. She was reared by foster parents and moved to San Francisco with her mother when she was 12.
Though her life had its share of troubles to the end -- her husband and sons were locked in a long-running battle over control of her estate, which was resolved in her husband’s favor only weeks before her death -- Ms. James said she wanted her music to transcend unhappiness rather than reflect it" [Peter Keepnews, 1/20/12].

January 28

Orchestra 2001 performs Pierre Boulez's Anthemes II, Louis Andriessen's Letter from Cathy, and the world premiere of George Crumb's Voices from the Heartland: American Songbook VII, the culmination of the American Songbooks cycle. Trinity Center, Philadelphia, PA. Repeated 1/29, Swarthmore College (PA).

January 31

Dennis Russell Davies conducts the American Composers Orchestra in Philip Glass's 75th Birthday Concert, featuring the U.S. premiere of his Symphony No. 9. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.

Recordings

2012-03-01T19:00:00.000-08:00

Bonnie Barnett Group. In Between Dreams. pfMentum.

Philip Blackburn. Ghostly Psalms. Innova.

Eleanor Hovda. The Eleanor Hovda Collection. Innova. Includes pdf's of scores.

Leos Janacek. Choral Works. Cappella Amsterdam, conducted by Daniel Reuss. Harmonia Mundi. "The selections include a series of 6 Moravian Choruses that Janacek adapted from Dvorak vocal duets; 19 nursery rhymes as gleefully anthropomorphic as his opera The Cunning Little Vixen; dramatic narratives; and a sober, rather abstract elegy written after the death of his 20-year-old daughter. In his setting of the Lord’s Prayer he ingeniously combines harmonium and harp: the profane and the sacred singing at once" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 1/13/12].

Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin. Lost in Kino. Lev Zhurbin, Romashka, Tall Trees. Kapustnik Records. "[T]he violist Lev Zhurbin, who goes by the name Ljova, was fascinated by film and film music as a child. Lately he has become a prolific soundtrack composer, an occupation that appears to dovetail nicely with his interests as a performer of both classical and East European folk music. Lost in Kino brings together two dozen selections from film scores he composed or arranged, mostly for young, independent directors (Francis Ford Coppola being an exception) from 2005 to 2011. Mr. Zhurbin has split the disc, conceptually at least, into two sections, labeled Side A and Side B, like an old LP. Side A is devoted to folk-tinged pieces he contributed to films by Sean Gannet and Roman Khrushch, most notably Mr. Khrushch’s Black Lamb, a Russian comedy about race relations in Moscow. He is backed by Romashka, which he describes as a Gypsy band but which draws on an array of influences, including Russian and Ukrainian music, klezmer, jazz and antique American pop styles. Some of the Black Lamb score has an undercurrent of Kurt Weill’s early cabaret sound, and the short War Then Peace displays almost global inclusiveness. Along with touches of both the vibrant and melancholy strains of klezmer, you hear a hint of more generalized carnival music and what sounds like a Sicilian torch song. The second part of the disc is devoted to darkly meditative works in a more classical idiom, most played by Mr. Zhurbin, overdubbed to sound like an ensemble of violists (with pizzicato figures standing in as subtle percussion). The most beautiful and moving of these are moody, sometimes tense pieces from Lost Bohemia, Josef Astor’s documentary about the evictions of artists from the Carnegie Hall Studios, which were demolished last summer" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 1/6/12].

Dick Wood. Not Far From Here. pfMentum.

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / February 2012

2012-02-01T23:00:00.000-08:00

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

February 2012

Volume 19, Number 2

Work-in-Progress, 1/1/12

Calendar for February 2012

Chronicle of December 2011

Recording / Sebastian Currier - Piano Music

Illustration / Elliott Carter

Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
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@gmail.com.

Typeset in Times New Roman. Copyright 2011 by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC. This journal is printed on recycled paper. Copyright notice: Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC.

The Journal is also online at 21st-centurymusic.com and 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com

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@gmail.com. Materials for review may be sent to the same address.

INFORMATION FOR ADVERTISERS

Send all inquiries to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Calendar for February 2012

2012-02-01T20:00:00.000-08:00

February 3

Focus! Festival: Sounds Re-Imagined: John Cage [b. September 5, 1912] at 100. Joel Sachs leads the New Juilliard Ensemble in a program that includes Seasons (1947), Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1951), and Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958). Juilliard School, New York, NY.

February 12

San Francisco Cabaret Opera presents the Pick-Your-Own-Aria Concert-Party. Julia Morgan Chamber Arts House, Berkeley, CA.

Chronicle of December 2011

2012-02-01T19:00:00.000-08:00

December 8

Birthday tribute to Elliott Carter, featuring the world premieres of String Trio and A Sunbeam's Archicture, and the U.S. premieres of Trije glasbeniki, Retracing III, and Double Trio. 92nd Street Y, New York, NY. "This celebratory event [also] features . . . six solos and duets composed between 1992 and 2009 for Carter's close musical friends. The first of the world premieres, String Trio (2011), spotlights the viola and is dedicated to the evening's performers: violinist Rolf Schulte, violist Richard O'Neill and cellist Fred Sherry. The largest of Carter's newest compositions is A Sunbeam's Architecture (2010) for tenor and chamber orchestra, inspired by the poetry of E.E. Cummings during the period of World War I and incorporating selected texts by the poet, and featuring tenor Nicholas Phan. Of the three U.S. premieres, the first to be performed in the program is a trio for flute, bass clarinet and harp, Trije glasbeniki (2011). The work title is Slovenian for 'three musicians' and is dedicated in part to Virgil Blackwell, who performs it at this performance with Marie Tachouet and Bridget Kibbey. Peter Evans performs the U.S. premiere of Retracing III (2009) for solo trumpet. Both Trije glasbeniki and Retracing III [were] premiered at Slovenia's Slowind Festival in November, which is honoring Carter's life and works. The last of the territorial premieres is Double Trio (2011) which was first performed in October 2011 in celebration of the inaugural concert at the Bourgie Concert Hall at Montréal's Museum of Fine Arts. Double Trio is scored for trumpet, trombone, percussion, piano, violin and cello. Other works on the program at 92nd Street Y include Bariolage (1992) for solo harp; Duettino (2008) for violin and cello; Figment IV (2007) for solo viola; Figment V (2009) for solo marimba; Hiyoku (2001) for two clarinets; and Retracing (2002) for solo bassoon. The musicians performing each of these works comprise several virtuosos and champions of Carter's complex music, including bassoonist Peter Kolkay, clarinetist Charles Niedich, double bassist Donald Palma, and oboist Stephen Taylor. Ryan McAdams will conduct A Sunbeam's Architecture and Double Trio" [Boosey & Hawkes, 11/11].

December 11

103rd birthday of Elliott Carter.

December 12

Axiom in the premiere of Elliott Carter's Three Exloprations (2011), plus Milton Babbitt, and Pierre Boulez's Sur Incises (1998). Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "Carter has written 15 new works since his 100th birthday. . . . Three Explorations [is] a substantial new song cycle, built on stanzas from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. That was the sixth Carter premiere in New York this week. . . . Like many of his works of the last 15 years, Three Explorations is couched in a rugged but inviting harmonic language. Usually it is hard to say exactly how or where Mr. Carter has rounded the edges of what was once a forbidding style, but here it is clear: the vocal line, though chromatic, is supple and shapely, and responsive to Eliot’s involved, introspective text. Occasionally a strain of lyricism takes over, to the point where you would not immediately identify the work as Mr. Carter’s if you walked in while it was in progress. The final bars of the first song, The River, sound as if they were the work of Samuel Barber. Evan Hughes, the baritone soloist, projected the three songs with gracefulness and clarity, and the accompanying ensemble -- clarinets, flutes, trumpets and trombones (three each) -- played with an impressive fluidity under Jeffrey Milarsky‘s baton. The instrumental writing reflects both Mr. Carter’s longstanding interests and his recent stylistic shift more fully. The music is hardly triadic, and its rhythmic interplay can be daunting. Not to suggest that Mr. Carter’s earlier music was superficial, but his writing here is calmer and more deeply probing. Mr. Milarsky opened the program with Milton Babbitt‘s All Set (1957), a score meant to fuse jazz timbres -- the ensemble includes two saxophones, trumpet, trombone, piano, bass, vibraphone and trap set -- with 12-tone techniques. The combination is not as outlandish as it may seem. Composers like Mel Powell and Gunther Schuller worked in both languages, and Mr. Babbitt was known to be interested in jazz and musical theater. But I have rarely heard a performance of All Set that brings the score’s jazz moves as fully into the spotlight as Axiom’s energetic account did. At times you could almost swear that Mr. Babbitt had abandoned his tone rows and written pages of outright swing music. The second half of the program was devoted to Pierre Boulez‘s Sur Incises (1998), for pairs of pianists, harpists and percussionists. Axiom’s players, clearly reveling in its tactile, changeable textures, gave it a precise, shimmering performance" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 12/13/11].

December 15

Iestyn Davies and Kevin Murphy in History Repeating, with works including music of Peter Warlock, Herbert Howells, and Benjamin Britten, plus four folk selectionss. Weill Recital Hall, New York, NY. "[The] traditional songs includ[ed] The Bitter Withy, arranged with gorgeous austerity by Nico Muhly" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 12/16/11].

December 21

Make Music Winter: The Gaits. High Line Park, New York, NY. "Encased in pouches with a small speaker attached to the outside, iPhones dangled from belts and wrists. They emitted dings and chatters as some 60 people began strolling . . . . The sounds slowed or speeded up according to the pace, and they evolved every block or two, sometimes evoking vibraphones or soft electric guitar notes. When a stroller stopped, an electronic organ chord rose up, encouraging the person to move on. Suddenly, at a sculpture featuring sleek bird feeders, a chorus of chirping arose. . . . Modeled after Fête de la Musique, an annual affair in Paris started in 1982, the New York version is in its sixth year. The founder of Make Music New York is Aaron Friedman, a composer and political activist who decided it was time to add a winter solstice edition. In an interview, he said winter has plenty of musical options, including numerous 'Messiahs' and 'Nutcrackers,' which 'can get a bit predictable.' He continued, 'I like those pieces, but giving people the choice of doing something much wackier and fun and artistically significant is something we ought to be doing.' The events included a crowd that rang color-coded bells on command; a medley of holiday songs played by percussionists at 1/120th speed while walking the length of Broadway; a sing-along to the songs of Egypt’s favorite pop singer, Umm Kulthum, down Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens; a continuous performance of the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 on F train platforms; an early-music processional with lanterns through Central Park; and a roving brass-band performance in which players read music projected onto buildings. . . . Mr. Friedman began his organizing career by establishing a group to lobby against car alarms. 'I just hated the noise of New York,' he said. After a brief period in Wisconsin, where he worked on the presidential campaign of John Kerry, he returned. 'I realized I really care about music most of all,' he said. 'I don’t mind noise. I just mind car alarms.' The Gaits was organized by three composition graduate students at Princeton, Lainie Fefferman, Jascha Narveson and Cameron Britt, with the help of an iPhone app expert, Daniel Iglesia, whom Ms. Fefferman called a 'programming ninja.' The High Line gave financial support to the composers, and Make Music New York bought the 50 mini-speakers, which were handed out at the bottom of the High Line near Gansevoort Street. . . . Mr. Iglesia designed an app, The Gaits, that when downloaded, used the iPhone’s tilt sensor to detect motion and GPS function to pinpoint where the user was. The composers divided the High Line into 18 zones. As each was crossed, the sounds changed. The composers came along for the walk, but Ms. Fefferman could not participate. 'That’s the irony,' she said. 'I’m too poor to have an iPhone. But I’m getting one' [The New York Times, 12/22/11].

Make Music Winter: Patrick Grant's Tilted Axes. Rivington Guitaris to St. Mark's Church, New York, NY. "The musicians -- roughly 20, with guitars plugged into miniature, battery-powered Danelectro amplifiers -- had just finished a circuitous 85-minute journey . . . . The procession proved a fascinating barometer of New Yorkers’ tolerance for mild artistic eccentricity. Most people whose paths the ensemble crossed either smiled and stopped to watch, or scarcely glanced at the players, as if a parade of amplified guitarists was something you were likely to see at any time here. A few happenstance listeners clapped to the rhythms of Mr. Grant’s piece -- a series of simple, repeated chord progressions, to which a few players contributed spicy lead lines -- and others joined the parade. No one seemed impatient or put out. And many a cellphone was drawn to document the performance. Mr. Grant and his colleagues -- among them, the guitarists Larry Simon, Angela Babin, Alex Baxter, Cristian Amigo and Nick Didkovsky -- ended the piece inside the church after circling its auditorium a handful of times. They probably could have played for another 85 minutes, but on a signal from Mr. Grant, they produced a final, briskly strummed cathartic chord" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 12/22/11].

Make Music Winter: Chris Peck's ...how time passes... Inwood to Battery Park, New York, NY. "
"The strict patterns actually constituted a three-minute holiday-song medley stretched to a six-hour duration. Working in shifts, two iPod-equipped drummers duplicated rhythms heard through earphones. (Matching a subtle click track amid urban din wasn’t easy, I learned during my own 10-block stint on the snare.) Drum-mounted recorders and cameras captured sights and sounds for a post-march Internet video by Alex Wroten, in which, sped up, the beats would form buzzing melodies. Seen-it-all onlookers took scarce notice of the tiny parade, but toddlers beamed and a group of construction workers broke out singing Little Drummer Boy [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 12/22/11].

December 28

Alan Gilbert conducts the New York Philharmonic in Maurice Ravel's Mother Goose and La Valse, and orchestrations of Franz Schubert songs by Benjamin Britten and Max Reger. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "The clarinet lines that wind through Britten’s scoring of Die Forelle, punctuating the vocal line, is an inspired touch, and if giving the menacing bass figure that animates Erlkönig to the cellos seemed predictable, Reger’s version taps the song’s drama ably. . . . Gilbert and his players gave a finely detailed, painterly account of Ma Mère L’Oye, with a good deal of warm, gracefully turned solo playing within the larger textures, and colorful, vivid percussion work. Mr. Gilbert and company closed the program with a full-power performance of La Valse that captured the shimmering spirit of the ballroom but did not neglect the undercurrent of wistful nostalgia for what was, in Ravel’s time, a vanishing culture" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 12/29/11].

Recording / Sebastian Currier - Piano Music

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Sebastian Currier. Piano Music: Piano Sonata, Departures and Arrivals, Scarlatti Cadences, Brainstorm. Laura Melton, piano. Naxos. "Each of the solo piano works on this recording of music by Sebastian Currier is a feast for performer and listener alike. The American composer writes in a style that is at once accessible and piquant, clearly structured yet full of fantasy. Currier has an uncommon knack for moulding works of vital expressive content. The repertoire spans nearly two decades, revealing Currier’s debts to previous masters but also his distinctive way of rendering material his own. The earliest work, from 1988, is the Piano Sonata, a five-movement score of vibrant design whose rhythmic vivacity and thematic unfoldings are matched by an atmospheric sense of sonority. Currier’s command of counterpoint shows his devotion to Bach. From 2007 is the six-movement Departures and Arrivals, which lives up to its title in the way the thematic images evolve throughout the score. The metamorphoses are subtly achieved, with many cross references and tweaks that add fresh resonance to the original ideas. Scarlatti Cadences and Brainstorm are shorter works from the 1990s, the former a vigorous contemporary spin on the baroque composer’s style and the latter a dynamic study in myriad harmonic worlds. Currier’s piano music requires the services of an artist who can tame formidable technical beasts and bring colourful delineation to a multiplicity of moods and textures. Laura Melton is just such a musician. Her performances are crisply articulate, rich in contrasting hues and attentive to the panoply of significant gestures that make Currier a composer of notable inventiveness and magnetism" [Donald Rosenberg, Gramophone, 11/11]. "The American composer Sebastian Currier was still a student at the Juilliard School when he wrote his Piano Sonata (1988), his only work in the genre. But the score already displays the hallmarks of his later pieces: exuberant energy, boisterous rhythms, emotional intensity and a broad coloristic palette. The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is among the prominent soloists who have championed Mr. Currier’s music recently. The five-movement sonata is featured on a disc of his piano music, performed expressively and with dexterous flair by Laura Melton, who teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The structure, counterpoint and harmony of the sonata allude to Beethoven, Bach and Hindemith; the percussive drive shows the influence of Prokofiev. The mood of each section is aptly reflected by the titles. Jaunty rhythms are layered into a feisty canvas in Bold and Defiant, and slow, murky musings lend a desolate air to Suppressed. Multifarious, the densely textured finale and the longest movement, consists of a theme and variations complete with two fugues. In the booklet notes Mr. Currier writes that even small compositional choices always leave him wondering how a score would have sounded had he made different musical decisions. In Departures and Arrivals (2007) he explores roads not taken, using the same materials to create six alternative versions of the same work. A Tune, A Shift, and A Dialogue begin in a similar vein, then take different turns. In A Transformation, A Dialogue, and A Glimpse, the process is more abstract. In Scarlatti Cadences (1996), Mr. Currier views the Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti through a contemporary prism, interspersing misty textures with sparkling, driven passages. The disc concludes on a fiery note with the witty, relentless Brainstorm (1994)" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 12/22/11].

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / January 2012

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21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

January 2012

Volume 19, Number 1

Greatly Integrated / Mark Alburger

Chronicle of November 2011

Recording

Illustration / Alan Hovhaness

Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
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@gmail.com.

Typeset in Times New Roman. Copyright 2011 by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC. This journal is printed on recycled paper. Copyright notice: Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC.

The Journal is also online at 21st-centurymusic.com and 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com

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@gmail.com. Materials for review may be sent to the same address.

INFORMATION FOR ADVERTISERS

Send all inquiries to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Greatly Integrated / Mark Alburger

2012-01-01T21:00:00.000-08:00

Last year, Joowan Kim's Great Integration played at the intimate Giorgi Gallery in Berkeley. Last night (Sunday, November 13) Kim brought the work, performed once again by his Ensemble Mik Nawooj (his name backwards) to a packed house at Oakland Metro Opera.

What a difference a year makes and does not make. The contrast was the increased size of the audience and hall; the consistency was in the energy and quality.

Billed as a hip-hop opera, the full-evening piece is more like an extended classical/jazz/rap cantata (story sans staging), scored for septet that encompasses both a Pierrot ensemble and jazz trio (with piano as common denominator). The vocal fire on top is provided by two rappers, who blazed their way through the night in a fiery pepper of sixteenth notes, particularly clearly and charismatically by Rico Pabon in the second half.

Great Integration, despite its arch libretto, is an important, innovative work, and the audience responded throughout with whoops and cheers. Here the hip-hop vocalists get a worthy launching pad, with a nuanced instrumental component that goes far beyond two-bar loops -- referencing minimalism, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, and the baroque, among other musics. The punchy ensemble rhythms were bang-on, including the signature subdivision of 3+3+3+3+2+2 articulated over standard 4/4 measures. If the descending bass line I-bVII-bVI (the same used ad infinitum in the last 5 minutes of the Led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven and Pilate's Song in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar) gets an impressive amount of usage, certainly the rhythmic figures above it are ever-arresting. A default full-instrumental build up followed by solo piano shows itself as another norm. Throughout, Kim is not afraid to slim down the music to delicate textures, which somehow make the over-the-top full-vocal declamations that more electrifying.

A thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking entertainment throughout -- shall we say, greatly integrated. Keep your eyes and ears out for Joowan Kim and Ensemble Mik Nawooj

Chronicle of November 2011

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November 1

Incubator presents chamber music of Robert Ashley. St. Mark's Church, New York, NY. "For any composer who also serves as his or her own primary interpreter, the question of legacy eventually arises. What happens when an artist is no longer able or available to perform? Robert Ashley, a veteran composer chiefly known for an extensive series of elaborate multimedia operas, is still writing new pieces at 81. But he has also been involved lately in creating performable editions of his older works, and in a surge of events last week fresh interpreters put their own stamp on Mr. Ashley’s music. First performers associated with the Incubator Arts Project offered three programs devoted to Mr. Ashley’s chamber music, spread across four evenings at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. . . . The Incubator series, in its initial program . . . showed that Mr. Ashley’s chamber music, a small and overlooked part of his output, warrants far more attention. For Andie Springer, a 2010 duet, began with Ms. Springer, the violinist of the title, standing in near darkness, enunciating the work’s full name: For Andie Springer Showing the Form of a Melody, ‘Standing in the Shadows,’ by Robert Ashley. A humble melody gradually coalesced from the vaporous call-and-response of Ms. Springer’s feathery strokes and the guitarist James Moore’s bowed one-note drone. Ringing harmonics evoked funereal bells; when actual bells tolled outside the church near the end, they seemed to fit. The Flux Quartet brought a quiet intensity and focus to in memoriam ... Esteban Gomez, a 1963 graphic score, fashioning an elemental beauty with uninflected notes and swarming overtones. Tract, conceived in 1955 as a Wallace Stevens setting for orchestra and quickly abandoned, was rebooted as a wordless vocalise for the baritone Thomas Buckner with electronic accompaniment by Tom Hamilton in 1992; here Mr. Buckner and Mr. Hamilton offered luminosity and penetrating melancholy" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 11/8/11].

November 4

Michael Morgan conducts the Oakland East Bay Symphony in Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 2 ("The Age of Anxiety”), George Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Duke Ellington’s New World a-Comin’ and Alberto Ginastera's Estancia. Paramount Theater, Oakland, CA. "Morgan said, 'we have a black conductor, a transgendered pianist, and we’re playing Bernstein, Duke and Gershwin. What more could you possibly want?'" [Kevin Berger, The New York Times, 11/3/11].

November 6

Varispeed performs Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives. New York, NY. "For any composer who also serves as his or her own primary interpreter, the question of legacy eventually arises. What happens when an artist is no longer able or available to perform? Robert Ashley, a veteran composer chiefly known for an extensive series of elaborate multimedia operas, is still writing new pieces at 81. But he has also been involved lately in creating performable editions of his older works, and in a surge of events last week fresh interpreters put their own stamp on Mr. Ashley’s music. . . . Varispeed -- a collective comprising members of the ensembles thingNY, Panoply Performance Laboratory and Why Lie? -- transplanted a live version of Mr. Ashley’s video opera Perfect Lives that it had mounted in Brooklyn in June to Greenwich Village, SoHo, and other surrounding neighborhoods. . . . You could argue that no interpretation is required for Perfect Lives. Though its parts were shaped on stage from 1977 to 1983, the work took its final form as a multimedia opera made for television. Contributions from the pianist 'Blue' Gene Tyranny, the video director John Sanborn and the music producer Peter Gordon are integral to the work, which was broadcast by Channel 4 in London in 1984 and is now available on DVD. So the Varispeed production, presented as part of the Performa 11 festival, was less an act of rescuing a work from oblivion than one of repurposing its materials to unleash latent potential, while remaining faithful to its textural integrity and structural rigor. The seven segments of Perfect Lives -- which together obliquely and poetically describe a conceptual Corn Belt bank heist, its participants and its witnesses -- take place at two-hour intervals during a single day. Accordingly, Varispeed presented Perfect Lives in real time, organizing its episodes chronologically and assigning them to different arrangers. A steadily swelling audience attended the ensemble’s trek, which began at 11 a.m. in Washington Square Park with Gelsey Bell’s modest village-band interpretation of The Park. Brian McCorkle, performing in The Bank at 1 p.m. in front of a Citibank in the Village and The Bar at 11 p.m. in a crowded NoHo pub, amplified the lilting cadences of Mr. Ashley’s speech with an intensity that underscored links to (and among) evangelists, rock stars, and carnival barkers. Dave Ruder, playing the preacher of The Church at Trinity Lower East Side Lutheran Parish at 5 p.m., inflated Mr. Ashley’s seductive drawl; a distributed 'hymnal' elicited audience participation. In The Supermarket, staged at 3 p.m., the troupe paced through the aisles at Essex Street Market, delighting some shoppers and perplexing others, as Paul Pinto’s rapid-fire declamation emanated from the public-address system. Texts for The Living Room, staged in a private residence at 9 p.m., were distributed among a narrator, Aliza Simons, and two characters played by Mendi and Keith Obadike. Ms. Simons, an uncanny mimic of Mr. Ashley’s delivery, was also featured in Varispeed’s most haunting deviation, The Backyard, staged at the Performa Hub Schoolyard at 7 p.m. Illuminated by fairy lights and flickering heat lamps, Ms. Simons declaimed dreamily over burbling tabla and keyboard. The voices of nearby chorus members sounded as if from a great distance through hand-held radios distributed among audience members. Now and then, piano and clarinet lines wafted from windows overhead in lonely accord. That Varispeed’s members could express themselves so readily through Mr. Ashley’s work while remaining faithful to it was impressive. . . . [The performance] suggests that the idiosyncratic legacy of this consummate collaborative artist is in sure hands" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 11/8/11].

Nigel Short and Tennebrae. Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York, NY. "The program was an overview of mostly sacred British choral music of the last century, with works by Holst, Vaughan Williams, and Parry at the early end; scores by John Tavener and Richard Rodney Bennett from the 1980s and ’90s holding the middle ground; and expansive settings by Paul Mealor and Joby Talbot, both born in the ’70s, representing recent approaches to choral writing. If harmonic language were the only measure, the distance between the earliest and latest scores was not vast. Intense dissonance has rarely interested choruses (or their audiences), nor has the angularity of contemporary music for solo voice found much success in ensemble music. That is not to say that dissonance has been banished entirely; but composers -- Holst and Vaughan Williams as well as Mr. Mealor and Mr. Talbot -- have tended to use it judiciously to create shimmering, tantalizingly unbalanced textures that invariably resolve into sumptuous consonance that flatters the voice and seduces the ear. The difference between the old and new works was more a matter of scope. Mr. Mealor’s four-movement cycle “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” (2010) uses soaring soprano lines, lushly harmonized rhythmic counterpoint and varied articulation to explore the imagery of the rose as both a secular (mostly amorous but naturalistic as well) and religious symbol. Mr. Talbot’s León and Santiago -- two movements excerpted from the hourlong Path of Miracles (2005) -- dramatizes a religious pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, in Spain, with passages in English, Galician and Latin; juxtapositions of intense serenity and celebratory robustness; and an ecstatic finale that includes a processional by the choir through the church. All that was almost but not quite enough to make a listener forget the appeal of the first half of the program. Its highlights included Holst’s Evening Watch (1924), a dialogue between the weary body and the transcendent soul that was given a strikingly rich-hued reading, as was Mr. Tavener’s Funeral Ikos (1981), a moving, ethereal evocation of the hour of death, physical and spiritual" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 11/8/11].

November 13

Adam Gyorgy plays his Improvisations. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.

November 15

Jon Gillock plays Olivier Messiaen's Méditations sur la Mystère de la Sainte Trinité. Church of the Ascension, New York, NY. Before an audience that packed the church, Mr. Gillock played Messiaen’s Méditations sur la Mystère de la Sainte Trinité, a 90-minute work in nine parts: music of awesome, mystical, eerie and shattering power, and Messiaen’s longest organ composition. Mr. Gillock’s palpable command of this daunting piece came through in every moment, even, I would suspect, to those who did not know of his close association with the composer. When he was not busy being one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, Messiaen was the organist at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Paris, a post he held from 1931 until his death in 1992. For the rededication of the church’s refurbished organ in 1967, a noted theologian gave sermons on the Holy Trinity, with improvised musical responses on the organ played by Messiaen. These improvisations were the beginnings of what would become the Méditations, composed in 1969. The work was published in 1973. And in January 1974 Mr. Gillock gave the New York premiere at the Church of the Ascension, a performance that began a series of performances of the work across America. This was before Mr. Gillock studied with Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory and became a champion of the master’s works. That Mr. Gillock’s program notes were so helpful was not surprising. His book, Performing Messiaen’s Organ Works: 66 Masterclasses, published last year by Indiana University Press, has been acclaimed for its exhaustive scope and insights. He describes the Méditations as a 'veritable religious-opera in sound, theatrical, dramatic and expansive,' that even includes Wagner-style leitmotifs for the 'three principal characters,' as he puts it: God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The first meditation begins with the motif of the Father played in heaving blasts, followed by a repeat of the theme played ominously on the pedals as transfixing chords hover above in Messiaen’s distinctive brand of harmony: thick with notes yet somehow grounded and organic. As the meditations progress, assertive statements of the mingling motifs are sometimes enshrouded in celestial harmonies and regularly interrupted by skittish birdcalls. Quotations from plainchant are answered by alluring chord progressions in which piercing clusters gradually thin out until only a holistic diatonic harmony remains. But these blissful moments are no more spiritual that the gnarly stretches in which the organ growls in aggressively dissonant chords or crazed bursts of runs and riffs. . . . What a privilege to hear Mr. Gillock play this eclectic Messiaen masterwork, which he will be recording at the church this week. During the ovation, he held up his well-worn copy of the score" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 11/16/22].

November 16

American premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies's Kommilitonen! Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Juilliard School, New York, NY. Through November 20. "There are many impressive things about Kommilitonen!, the new opera by Peter Maxwell Davies, with a libretto by David Pountney . . . . Best of all is Mr. Davies’s exhilarating score. Here, for once, is a modern opera that exudes musical modernism. The spirited conductor Anne Manson drew an incisive, colorful performance of this demanding score from the Juilliard Orchestra. Its composer, Peter Maxwell Davies, passes Occupy Wall Street members with placards linking their protests to his opera about unrest. In Europe operas with comparably spiky atonal scores are routine. But there seems to be a widespread assumption among the managers of American companies that the best way to entice audiences to new works is to recruit composers who write musically accessible operas: harmonically bland and cloyingly lyrical, however contemporary the subject matter. Mr. Davies was a major figure in the European avant-garde. Over the years he may have softened the hard edges of his modernist language. But at 77 he still writes bracingly gritty and complex music. Kommilitonen!, which loosely translates from the German as 'fellow students,' is an exploration of political activism and protest movements that entwines three stories based on real people. One concerns the black student James Meredith, who in 1962, in the face of violent opposition, compelled the segregated University of Mississippi to enroll him. Another focuses on two Chinese students caught up in the Cultural Revolution, who were forced to denounce their parents, dedicated schoolteachers. The final story involves a brother and sister in Nazi Germany who joined the White Rose resistance movement but were caught and executed. The opera, a joint project developed by the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Juilliard School, received its premiere in London in March. In his many dramatic works and unconventional operas, Mr. Davies has excelled at putting contemporary-music techniques to arresting theatrical purposes. “Kommilitonen!” opens with a fidgety fanfare. On the surface the music is brash and brassy; the fractured rhythms and pointed harmonies rattle you. The music continues in that vein. In a ruminative aria for James Meredith, the churning orchestra blends pentatonic phrases from a spiritual into subdued, restless atonal harmonies. Above it, Meredith sings in recitativelike lines that hug the words and avoid lyrical effusions. Yet it comes across as a character-defining aria, especially as sung here by Will Liverman, a mellow-voiced and charismatic baritone. The way the opera cuts continually from one group of characters to another lends the work cinematic vibrancy. The story of the young Germans working in the resistance movement centers on Sophie Scholl (Deanna Breiwick, a rich-voiced soprano) and her brother Hans (Alexander Hajek, a robust baritone). In one scene a member of their group acquires a duplicating machine to help with printing leaflets. The young people find it wondrous, an emotion conveyed by Mr. Davies in strangely celestial music. But the moment that got me was a domestic scene, an evening of lieder around the house piano, in which one of the activists, Willi Graf, plays accompaniments in the style of early Schoenberg as others sing. This Willi, Leo Radosavljevic, a bass-baritone, actually played the difficult piano part very well. The story of the Chinese brother and sister, Wu (a gifted mezzo-soprano, Wallis Giunta) and Li (Heather Engebretson, a sweet-voiced soprano), was included, Mr. Pountney explains in a director’s note, to show 'mass manipulations of young people.' For these scenes Mr. Davies evokes Chinese folk music through the onstage playing of a subdued erhu and satirizes official Communist music with bombastic marches. Mr. Pountney directed the stunning production of Zimmermann’s opera Die Soldaten presented by Lincoln Center at the Park Avenue Armory in 2008. This production, with sets and costumes by Robert Innes Hopkins and puppetry by Blind Summit Theater, is a triumph of simplicity and fluid stage maneuvers. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Mr. Pountney said that Kommilitonen! was conceived in 2008, when 'there wasn’t any' student activism. By the time of the premiere earlier this year, protests had broken out worldwide. . . . [A]bout two dozen protesters from the Occupy Wall Street movement stood outside the Juilliard building. I spoke with a couple, who said they were not protesting Juilliard, though there were denunciations of David H. Koch, the billionaire supporter of right-wing causes and of arts institutions. They were there, they said, to continue their campaign on behalf of the 99 percent and show that activism is alive. One protester invoked the last line of the opera: 'There is no quota on freedom'" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 11/17/11].

November 19

Revival of Robert Ashley’s first opera That Morning Thing, with Varispeed. The Kitchen, New York, NY.

The Music Box. New Orleans, LA. "The Music Box, the project of which this tower is a part, is one of those things that requires a hyphen or a compound word to describe; Delaney Martin, its curator, calls it 'a shantytown-sound laboratory.' In more literal terms, it is a collection of tumbledown wooden and metal structures built on the site, and almost entirely from the remains of a late-18th-century Creole cottage that collapsed a couple of years ago here in the historic, bohemian Bywater neighborhood. Each structure houses an instrument, or two or three. In some cases the structures are musical instruments themselves. There is the thatched-roof hut that is home to an elaborate arrangement of Balinese vibraphones, the shack with amplified floorboards, the rusty spiral staircase that is also a foot-operated pipe organ and the little glass house containing what looks like a giant, bell-lined hoop skirt. They are all clustered together on the narrow lot, like the stage set of a fairy tale that takes place in a junkyard. The Music Box, as art installation and orchestra . . . is also a test run for a larger project: a giant, musical house called Dithyrambalina, which will eventually be built on the same spot after The Music Box is dismantled. The big name involved in this is Swoon, the New York installation artist known for, among other things, creating a flotilla of jerry-built boats that floated down the Hudson River and showed up at the Venice Biennale. She designed Dithyrambalina, and her elaborate paper cutout figures adorn the walls of the temporary structures of The Music Box. But the idea for the house came about collaboratively, as Swoon and several of her friends who live here discussed what to do with the collapsing cottage. Jay Pennington, who with Ms. Martin had started an arts organization called New Orleans Airlift, owned the cottage, and lives next to the lot where the house will be built. . . . Ms. Martin decided that the musical house needed a research-and-development phase, a temporary artwork in itself, which became The Music Box. In April she sent an e-mail to people she variously calls 'tinkerers and makers,' 'wonderful eccentric genius types' and 'weirdos,' of whom there is no shortage in this city. She asked each to design and build a shack, and within it an instrument for The Music Box, with the idea that lessons learned in that project could inform the eventual design of the house. She also required that the instrument 'somehow engage the idea of housiness.' Thus there is an organ with a sound that suggests the eerie music of water traveling through pipes, another instrument that evokes the murmur of voices on the other side of a wall, and another that echoes the sound of cars passing by with speakers blasting. There were 23 artists involved in creating the shantytown, including tinkerers local and international, like the Swiss musician Simon Berz, who created an amped-up and reconfigured rocking chair. The inventors of the instruments, in most cases, did not meet the performers who would use them. There is a rotating cast of performers for the concerts, and the range is eclectic. On the Balinese vibraphones on Saturday night was Dickie Landry, a saxophonist who lives in Lafayette, La., and was a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble; up there on the microphone was Nicky Da B, a rapper on the New Orleans Bounce scene; sitting in the canopy of bells was Theris Valvery, a Mardi Gras Indian in full dress. The score consisted of eight rather simple instructions, like Dream Sequence and Evolve Into Noise!!! Conducting was a musician named Quintron, who also contributed a synthesizer that looks like a stand-alone drainpipe and plays one droning chord that changes with exposure to sun, wind and water. Before some 200 spectators -- who sat on wooden bleachers, stood against Mr. Pennington’s house and in some cases sat in the shacks themselves -- Quintron stood, holding several signs on sticks. He held up a yellow square, and somewhere within the rickety town a rhythm began. It started to build, growing, then fading, according to Quintron’s signage. The concert lasted about a half-hour, and ranged from a rattling rhythm to a sheet of noise to an eerie, fading drone, almost like the sound of a storm passing through. Then everyone in the audience got up and explored the little town, walking into and around the shacks. This was a limited chance to look; the town will most likely be dismantled over the winter. It would be hard-pressed to endure the crime and storms that are never far out of mind here, and of course there is that new house to build" [Campbell Robertson, 11/21/11].

Recording

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Alan Hovhaness. American Mystic: Music of Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000), Centennial Collection (Prayer of St. Gregory, Op.62b; The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, Op.308; 4 Bagatelles, Op.30 Nos.1-4; Symphony No.2, Op.132, Mysterious Mountain; String Quartet No.2, Op.147, Gamelan in Sosi Style; String Quartet No.2, Op.147, Spirit Murmur; The Flowering Peach, Op.125; And God Created Great Whales, Op.229, No.1). Delos. "At home one day in 1956 George Avakian, then one of the top executives and producers at Columbia Records, received a telephone call from the classical music composer Alan Hovhaness, who told him, 'There’s a terrific musician from India who is here, and you should meet him.' His friend was so adamant, Mr. Avakian recalled recently, that a few minutes later Hovhaness was knocking on the door, with Ravi Shankar in tow. The consequences of that encounter were many, starting with Mr. Shankar, who at that time had no recording contract in the United States, making a series of American albums, one with liner notes written by Hovhaness. But within a decade Mr. Shankar was also giving sitar lessons to George Harrison and playing at the Monterey Pop Festival -- events that encouraged an entire generation of rock and pop musicians and listeners to look eastward for new inspiration. This year is the centennial of Hovhaness’s birth, and for the occasion Delos Records just released a commemorative CD of some of his most important orchestral and chamber works . . . . Born near Boston to an Armenian father and a Scottish mother, Hovhaness (pronounced ho-VON-iss) gravitated from the very beginning to music outside the European tradition. His first contact with Mr. Shankar came during a United States tour by the Shankar family dance troupe in 1936, but from childhood Hovhaness had been immersed in the work of Komitas Vartabed, an Armenian priest and musicologist of the late 19th century who specialized in the medieval liturgical and folk music of his homeland in the Caucasus. In the world of mainstream American classical music, however, Hovhaness, who died in 2000, was --and remains -- an outlier. At a time when dissonance, serialism and other styles were in vogue and many of his colleagues were writing works meant to be both modern and specifically American, Hovhaness embraced tonality and also showed a fondness for archaic elements like the polyphony of Renaissance music and the counterpoint of Baroque fugues. 'Alan was a composer who was not really interested in being contemporary, and he didn’t look to Western Europe as his only inspiration,' said Dennis Russell Davies, a conductor who has long championed the music of Hovhaness, first as music director of the American Composers Orchestra and the Brooklyn Philharmonic and now at the Bruckner Orchestra in Linz, Austria. 'He wasn’t concerned with trends. He had a vision of what he wanted his music to sound like, and he just responded to that inner voice.' As Hovhaness’s initial fascination with Armenian music expanded, his curiosity led him further and further afield, first to India, where he lived in 1959 and 1960, then Indonesia, and finally to Japan, China, and Korea. Those influences all worked their way into his music. . . . [H]e also wrote pieces he described as ghazals, the name given to a genre of classical sung poetry popular in India and Pakistan. 'To me the hundreds of scales and ragas possible in Eastern musical systems afford both discipline and stimuli for a great expansion of melodic creations,' Hovhaness once said in an interview. 'I am more interested in creating fresh, spontaneous, singing melodic lines than in the factory-made tonal patterns of industrial civilization or the splotches and spots of sound hurled at random on a canvas of imaginary silence.' The two most common complaints against Hovhaness are that his work is 'exotic' and that he was simply too prolific. . . . He wrote more than 400 pieces, among them 67 symphonies . . . . He also complained of 'the tyranny of the piano' in classical music, and, to combat it, wrote pieces featuring Middle Eastern stringed instruments like the oud and kanun, and other compositions mimicking wind instruments like the Armenian duduk and the oboes and flutes used in Japanese gagaku music, one of Hovhaness’s favorite styles. At the time he was experimenting with all of this it may indeed have seemed exotic. But such sources and techniques are now widely used in both popular and classical music. As Mr. Davies noted, Arvo Pärt and Giya Kancheli 'are two composers who in their own way have done a similar thing' by drawing on medieval liturgical music and feeling 'at home using tonality and expressing spirituality.' Hovhaness’s career started promisingly and conventionally enough. When the BBC Symphony Orchestra performed his first symphony, called 'Exile' in recognition of the genocide Armenia had suffered under Turkish rule, Leslie Howard, the conductor of the ensemble, described Hovhaness, then still in his 20s, as a 'young genius.' But at Tanglewood one summer in the early 1940's Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland publicly attacked Hovhaness, with Bernstein going to the piano to play chords mocking his style, which he derided as 'cheap ghetto music.' Hovhaness withdrew to regroup, earning his living as an organist at an Armenian church and destroying many of his scores. But he returned after World War II with an even stronger commitment to writing melodic music that featured nontraditional scales and instrumentation. An innovative 1945 work, a concerto for piano and orchestra called Lousadzak, used elements of aleatory music, with instruments repeating phrases in random, uncoordinated fashion. That technique impressed John Cage and Lou Harrison, two fellow composers who became Hovhaness’s friends and supporters; the growing individuality of his music may also help explain his considerable appeal to jazz musicians over the years. In 1947 the saxophonist Sam Rivers studied orchestration with Hovhaness, who at the time was teaching at a conservatory in Boston, and cites Hovhaness as an important early influence on his development as a musician. 'In a way you could say Hovhaness was the start of free music,' Mr. Rivers said last month, referring to a style practiced by John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and others in the 1960s. 'Jazz didn’t come up in his course, although Armenian and Asian music did. But he always talked of trying to go beyond the limits, of following your own path, not the traditional composers, and challenging the whole structure of music, and that had a big impact on me.' The jazz pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, who played in the quartet of her husband, John, was also known to be an admirer of Hovhaness, and when the guitarist Carlos Santana was in his jazz phase in the late 1970s and early 1980s and occasionally working with her, he recorded a version of the second movement of 'Mysterious Mountain' for his album Oneness. The jazz bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorius recorded and often improvised live on 'Mysterious Mountain,' and Wynton Marsalis has recorded Prayer of St. Gregory. But among current jazz figures influenced by Hovhaness the best-known is probably Keith Jarrett, who recorded Lousadzak in 1989. It was in the early 1970s, when Mr. Avakian was managing Mr. Jarrett, that the pianist seems to have first expressed interest in Hovhaness’s music. Mr. Avakian’s wife, the violinist Anahid Ajemian, who played or recorded many Hovhaness works beginning in the 1940s, gave Mr. Jarrett scores and recordings to study and not long after began detecting the results in the early piano solo albums that made Mr. Jarrett an international star. Mr. Davies was the conductor when Mr. Jarrett recorded Lousadzak, which means something like 'dawn of light' in Armenian. He too sees a strong connection. 'Both Hovhaness and Lou Harrison have been very influential in a direct way on Keith,' in part because 'they have a melodic and harmonic language that is very close to him,' Mr. Davies said. 'When Keith was forming his improvised music, these two composers had already written a lot of that, so he felt at home there, that it was part of his musical language.' Eventually Hovhaness settled in Seattle, which seems appropriate in view of his interest in the civilizations on the other side of the Pacific Rim. . . . 'Hovhaness’s own music may have been too idiosyncratic for others to copy, but his embrace of other cultures has been influential in general,' said Gerard Schwarz, musical director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, which regularly features the Hovhaness repertory. 'He opened that world to other composers, the way they were influenced harmonically by Debussy and rhythmically by Stravinsky. Would they have heard it anyway? Who knows? But certainly Hovhaness was there first'" [Larry Rohter, The New York Times, 11/4/11].

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / December 2011

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21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

December 2011

Volume 18, Number 12

Chronicle of October 2011

Illustration / Mos Def (b. Darrell Terrell Smith)

Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
CORRESPONDENTS

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Chronicle of October 2011

2011-12-01T20:00:00.000-08:00

October 1

Restoration Rocks Festival. Mos Def, in collaboration with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, conducted by Alan Pierson. New York, NY. "Pierson has made an enviable name for himself over the last decade as the artistic director of Alarm Will Sound, a vital, omnivorous 20-member chamber ensemble formed in 2001 by graduate students at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. Working with Alarm Will Sound has earned Mr. Pierson a glowing reputation as an insightful, flexible leader in a vast range of modern music: from John Adams and Harrison Birtwistle to Edgard Varèse and Frank Zappa, with significant sidelong ventures into classic Beatles songs and complex electronica by Aphex Twin. Along the way Mr. Pierson picked up a second engagement as the principal conductor of the Crash Ensemble, a 14-year-old Irish contemporary-classical outfit. Those activities, along with a full schedule of freelance engagements, were more than enough to keep Mr. Pierson occupied. But with a performance on Saturday evening during the Restoration Rocks Music Festival in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, Mr. Pierson enters uncharted territory as the new artistic director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. In the concert, one of two events designated by the orchestra as season previews, Mr. Pierson and members of the orchestra will collaborate with the prominent hip-hop artist Mos Def. More than a surprising detour in Mr. Pierson’s ascendant career path, the concert shows a spark of life for the Brooklyn Philharmonic, an august and hardy institution founded in 1857 and lately fallen on hard times. A groundbreaking ensemble internationally known for its provocative programming, it evaporated in recent years to a trickle of community-oriented chamber-music events. 'The choice to let that happen actually has been good for us,' Mr. Pierson said during a recent interview in his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. 'The institution had time to really wipe the slate clean and reconsider everything, and then come out again with something new, without the burden of attachment to something old,' a distinction that could help the orchestra avoid the kind of negative publicity that has greeted similar notions of reinvention afoot at the New York City Opera. The orchestra retains the benefits of its name and its legacy, he added, 'but we don’t have a thousand subscribers who were on a season last year, wanting to know why it’s something different this year.' What the Brooklyn Philharmonic does not have, at least for now, is a steady home to replace its longtime residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Instead, the ensemble intends to establish enduring bases throughout the borough. In addition to Bedford-Stuyvesant, it will be active in Brighton Beach, where it will present rare Soviet-era Russian cartoon music with its current full complement of 40 musicians in early November, and in downtown Brooklyn, where it will perform at Roulette next March. A peripatetic existence with uncertain returns might terrify most potential artistic directors. For Mr. Pierson, who will continue his associations with Alarm Will Sound and Crash Ensemble, it was an enticement. 'There were two things they had that piqued my interest,' he said of the initial discussions. 'One was the beginning of this really interesting sketch of making the Brooklyn Philharmonic Brooklyn’s orchestra.' Rather than going from neighborhood to neighborhood, hat in hand, the orchestra would insert itself into new communities in organic and meaningful ways, absorbing cultural lessons and cross-pollinating aesthetics and audiences. 'The second thing they had that was great was nothing else,' Mr. Pierson said. 'There was no ‘Here’s our six-concert subscription season, we can’t lose that,’ or ‘We have this great pops program that’s bringing in a lot of money, we don’t want to touch that.’ There was nothing set in stone.' The process of shrugging off the burdens of convention and expectation was under way before Mr. Pierson was hired . . . Pierson’s hand in the season ahead is evident in a number of eclectic programs with historical, cultural and literary ties to the borough. Canonical works by Copland and Bernstein and pieces by rising Brooklyn composers mingle with traditional shape-note singing, jazz and hip-hop, all of it integral to the orchestra’s work, rather than treated as fringe programming. Still, Mr. Pierson said, the chance to conduct mainstream classical repertory like Beethoven’s Third Symphony, which will be parceled out among several concerts, was an opportunity he relished" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 9/30/11].

October 2

Death of Piero [Ernesto] Weiss (b. 1/26/28, Trieste, Italy), of complications of pneumonia, at 83. Baltimore, MD. "[He was] a former concert pianist and recording artist who turned to musicology, becoming an author and co-author of books in the field, including a widely used textbook, and founding the music history department at the Peabody Conservatory . . . . Coming of age in a generation of pianists that included Gary Graffman, Claude Frank, Jacob Lateiner, Leon Fleisher and Seymour Lipkin, all of whom were lifelong friends, Dr. Weiss performed in Europe and America from the age of 16 into his 30's and recorded works by Schubert, Schumann, Debussy, and Ravel. His broadcast performance of Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto from Lewisohn Stadium in Manhattan in 1958 was part of the first FM transmission in stereophonic sound. Mr. Graffman, in his memoir, I Really Should Be Practicing, wrote, 'Piero’s musicological knowledge was far greater than mine, and covered much more than just piano literature.' His scholarly bent eventually won out, leading him away from the concert stage and into an academic career. He enrolled at Columbia University, earning a B.A. in 1950 and a Ph.D. in musicology in 1970. Dr. Weiss was the author of four books, including, with Richard Taruskin, Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, an anthology of source readings that has been adopted as a college textbook throughout the United States and Canada. . . . Dr. Weiss taught at Columbia from 1964 to 1985, when he joined the faculty at the prestigious Peabody Conservatory, part of Johns Hopkins University, where he remained until his death. He also taught performance at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. [He] was born . . . into a Jewish Italian family well known in the worlds of business and the arts. His father, Ottocaro Weiss, was an insurance executive; his mother, the former Ortensia Schmitz, was a violinist and a niece of the novelist Italo Svevo. Mr. Weiss fled Fascist Italy with his family in 1938 and arrived in New York in 1940. As a young man, he studied piano with Isabella Vengerova and Rudolf Serkin, music theory and composition with Karl Weigl, and chamber music with Adolf Busch" [James R. Oestreich, The New York Times, 10/8/11].

October 3

Red Light New Music presents In a Landscape: Music as Map: works “influenced by physical environments, from the arctic to the urban to the volcanic.” New York, NY. "That description was revised in the program book to account for the fact that two, perhaps three, of the four works had nothing at all to do with locations. 'Tonight,' the introductory note read, 'we focus on two types of environments: the psychological and the physical.' In The Night Mare Christopher Cerrone uses an electronic drone and sudden mezzo-piano instrumental thwacks -- actually toneless string and woodwind attacks with no follow through -- to suggest the dark, eerie atmosphere of a dream gone wrong. With that as backdrop he builds gentle but anxiety-drenched themes from delicate, treble piano figures and fills out the texture with a blend of vibraphones and electronic timbres that together create the impression of a distant, wordless chorale. Mr. Cerrone’s scoring is skillful and economical, and he captures the spirit of a nightmare without diving into a sea of cinematic clichés. His piece was the program’s highlight. It was hard to know what to make of Chaya Czernowin’s Love Song. In her program note Ms. Czernowin writes that she wanted to capture the resonances, energy, intensity and loss of control that is part of falling in love. Like Mr. Cerrone, she rejects the predictable imagery: don’t look for the couple running toward each other in slow motion to the strains of Romantic string writing. What Ms. Czernowin offers here -- a brisk, fragmentary stream of pizzicatos, sliding figures, electronic sounds, breathy woodwind bursts -- is scarier than anything in Mr. Cerrone’s nightmare piece. That was the point, presumably, but the romance Ms. Czernowin describes is oddly joyless. The half of the program devoted to physical landscapes opened with The Light Within, a score by the Alaskan composer John Luther Adams. You might have expected this to be the promised arctic piece, but it was inspired by the artist James Turrell’s Meeting, one of his 'skyscape' installations, which Mr. Adams had seen at MoMA P.S.1 in Long Island City, Queens. Much the way Mr. Turrell’s work lets a viewer take in gradually changing characteristics of light over many hours, Mr. Adams’s piece presents what seems on the surface a single, unchanging, densely voiced chord. But this is Minimalism in its classic, hypnotic form: not much seems to happen on the surface, but within the chord, balances and colors shift slowly and inexorably. Whether light qualifies as a physical landscape may be open to debate. But Vincent Raikhel’s Cirques and Moraines, which closed the program, describes a glacier in Switzerland and was created, Mr. Raikhel writes 'through mapping the anatomical characteristics of glaciers onto a sound texture.' The result is a lot like Ms. Czernowin’s piece, but it has the benefit of an assertive solo cello line, played here with energy and a touch of poetry by John Popham. Ted Hearne conducted the ensemble in all four scores" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/7/11].

October 5

The Supreme Court hears argument over weather Congress acted constitutionally in 1994 by resoring copyright protection to foreign works that had once been in the public domain. Washington, DC. "The affected works included films by Alfred Hitchcock and Federico Fellini, books by C. S. Lewis and Virginia Woolf, symphonies by Prokofiev and Stravinsky, and paintings by Picasso. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. posed the general question in the case this way: “One day I can perform Shostakovich. Congress does something. The next day I can’t. Doesn’t that present a serious First Amendment problem?” Then the chief justice, a pioneer in the citation of popular music in legal discourse, asked the question slightly differently, invoking Hendrix, the great rock guitarist, to test the limits of the government’s position. 'What about Jimi Hendrix, right? He has a distinctive rendition of the national anthem, and assuming the national anthem is suddenly entitled to copyright protection that it wasn’t before, he can’t do that, right?' The solicitor general, Donald B. Verrilli Jr., making his debut in the post, said there were good reasons to allow Congress to restore copyright protection to works that had entered the public domain, even at some cost to free expression by performers and others. Responding to the chief justice’s hypothetical question, Mr. Verrilli said that 'maybe Jimi Hendrix could claim fair use.' The 1994 law applies, he said, to foreign works that had not been eligible for copyright protection before the United States joined and implemented an international convention. The terms of the newly copyrighted works, he added, expire on the same day they would have had they been copyrighted since their creation. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said there was nothing unusual in granting copyright protection to works that had once been in the public domain. In 1790, she said, Congress 'took a whole body of public works and gave them copyright protection the day they decided to pass the copyright law.' Anthony T. Falzone, representing the challengers to the law, disputed that as a historical matter saying that 'that was the first copyright act, and Congress established a baseline.; Justice Elena Kagan recused herself from the case, presumably because she worked on it as solicitor general. That raised the possibility of a 4-4 tie that would automatically affirm a decision of the federal appeals court in Denver, which had upheld the law. There is reason to think, Mr. Verrilli told the court, that American authors and artists will be treated better abroad because foreign authors and artists have received expanded copyright protection here. Mr. Falzone questioned that. Congress, he said, 'took speech rights of 250 million Americans and turned them into the private property of foreign authors, all on the bare possibility that might put more money in the pocket of some U.S. authors.' Near the end of his argument in the case, Golan v. Holder, No. 10-545, Mr. Falzone returned to the chief justice’s reference to performers like Hendrix. 'There can’t be any doubt, as I think Chief Justice Roberts got at, that the performance has a huge amount of original expression bound up in it,' Mr. Falzone said. 'It’s the reason it’s different to see King Lear at the Royal Shakespeare Company; it’s the reason it’s different when John Coltrane plays a jazz standard'" [Adam Liptak, The New York Times, 10/5/11].

Anthony Braxton Festival. Roulette, New York, NY. "Braxton, 66, has been a force in the American avant-garde since the 1960s, when he emerged in his native Chicago as a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Within the first decade of his arrival, he was being toasted in some circles as 'the new messiah, the new Charlie Parker-John Coltrane-Ornette Coleman,' as Whitney Balliett put it in The New Yorker. As a composer, conceptualist and saxophonist, Mr. Braxton exemplified the steep intellectualization of one wing of jazz’s avant-garde; his compositions often included notation in the form of pictographs and algebraic formulas, and he wrote pieces not only for jazz ensembles but also for classical orchestras (in one memorable instance, for four of them at once). One piece from 1971, Composition 19 (For 100 Tubas), finally had its premiere five years ago as a rumbling overture to that year’s Bang on a Can Marathon in Lower Manhattan. 'I wanted to have an experience like my role models,' Mr. Braxton said after the rehearsal, at a nearby pub. 'Karlheinz Stockhausen, Charlie Mingus, Iannis Xenakis, Sun Ra, Hildegard von Bingen. The people who were thinking large scale and small scale. I might not have been able to get the money to do what I would have liked to do. But you can still compose it and have the hope that maybe in the future it can be realized.' Mr. Braxton has often suggested that his sprawling output -- and the equally irreducible theoretical discourse surrounding it -- should be understood as a single body of work. To that end, his music has become a bit more accessible recently, thanks to a spate of archival releases. But that hasn’t made things easier for Mr. Braxton. 'This is a somewhat frustrating time cycle for me, in the sense that I rarely work anymore,' he said. 'My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.' Were it not for his tenured post at Wesleyan, where he has taught for more than 20 years, 'maybe I would be driving a taxicab or something,' he said. The Tri-Centric Foundation -- formed in 1994, and revived last year after a decade of inactivity -- has been another bulwark against that fate. It relies on the efforts of former Braxton protégés like Mr. Bynum, the vocalist Kyoko Kitamura and the multi-instrumentalist Matthew Welch, who will all participate in the festival" [Nate Chinen, The New York Times, 10/4/11].

October 6

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center performs trios by Maurice Ravel and Joaquin Turina. Rose Studio, New York, NY. "Turina experienced a eureka moment in 1907 while having a drink with his compatriots Isaac Albéniz and Manuel de Falla in Paris. He later wrote that during that evening he 'realized that music should be an art, and not a diversion for the frivolity of women and the dissipation of men.' Turina (along with Albéniz, de Falla and Enrique Granados) contributed a distinctive voice to Spanish concert music, often incorporating traditional folk songs and dances into works like his Trio No. 1 in D for piano, violin, and cello. It received a stellar performance [in this concer] . . . . The pianist Orion Weiss, the violinist Bella Hristova and the cellist Jakob Koranyi opened the program with an elegant and intense interpretation of the Turina work, which begins with a nostalgic exchange between violin and cello and later makes references to Spanish dances like the Muñeira from Galicia, the Jota from Aragon and the Soleares from Andalucia. All three musicians played with commitment, deftly illuminating the work’s impressionistic hues. . . . Sparks flew when [Koranyi] joined the violinist Jessica Lee and the pianist Inon Barnatan for a passionate rendition of Ravel’s sensuous [T]rio [in A Minor], influenced by the folk music of that composer’s Basque heritage. The playing was in turn soulful and fervid, with the last movement unfolding in a blaze of color" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 10/7/11].

October 11

Carnegie Hall’s 120th anniversary celebration, with Valery Gergiev and the Marinsky Orchestra. New York, NY. "Gergiev and the orchestra finished their weeklong stand in mostly fine style with three movements from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Shostakovich’s First Symphony and . . . Liadov’s Baba-Yaga" [James R. Oestreich, The New York Times, 10/13/11].

October 13

Daniel Bernard Roumain's Symphony for the Dance Floor. Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, NY. "Surrounded by booming electronic dance beats and a corps of hip-hop dancers, Mr. Roumain is game, likable and inoffensive to the core. He makes gestures toward aggression and sexuality, but they -- and this 75-minute work as a whole -- register more as harmless . . . . Symphony is the final installment in a trilogy of large-scale projects that the Brooklyn Academy has commissioned from Mr. Roumain. Part of the Next Wave Festival and directed by D. J. Mendel, it is the peppiest . . . of the three works . . . [including] One Loss Plus (2007) and . . . Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln (2008). Inspired by Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, the new work is 'a celebration of life,' Mr. Roumain writes in his program notes. Like One Loss Plus and Darwin’s Meditation, it has a form that is loosely episodic. There’s a moody opening solo; lively dance breaks in attitudes alternately exuberant and intense; a rap about a couple’s double suicide; a short black-and-white film; some allusions to the phallic properties of the violin; [and] a slide show of urban life . . . . As Donald Rumsfeld once put it, stuff happens. . . . Roumain’s interests are diverse, his taste for collaboration admirable" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 10/14/11].

The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra premieres Cynthia Wong's Memoriam. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "The conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has long demonstrated its mettle in Baroque and classical fare. More recently it has ventured into romantic and contemporary terrain, which is invariably harder to navigate without a conductor. In honor of its 40th anniversary next year Orpheus has commissioned four new pieces through its Project 440, in which 60 emerging composers were nominated and then whittled down to four via public feedback and panel reviews. . . . Wong dedicated the elegiac work to her father, who died of cancer in March, and more broadly to cancer victims and their caregivers. She was also inspired by Rilke and inserted lines from his poetry ('Even his downfall was for him only a pretext for achieving his final birth') in the score. Her piece, with sheer, oscillating textures that were elegantly conveyed, opened with a mournful introduction whose mood evolved into a more lively and humorous middle section. Darting wind fragments and fast, improvised passages over agitated strings eventually subsided into a quiet, yearning conclusion" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 10/16/11].

October 16

Fabio Luisi leads the Met Orchestra in John Harbison's Closer to My Own Life. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Fabio Luisi has been under the opera world’s microscope since last season, when it became clear that the Metropolitan Opera, which had made him its principal guest conductor in 2010, was grooming him to succeed James Levine as its music director. The scrutiny intensified last month, when the latest in a series of injuries and health problems forced Mr. Levine to withdraw from his Met commitments, and the company removed the word 'guest' from Mr. Luisi’s title. Mr. Levine’s workload seems not to faze Mr. Luisi. . . . Levine has transformed this ensemble from a fine pit band into one of the world’s great symphony orchestras, and these concerts have become his nonoperatic signature performances in New York, rivaled only recently (and briefly) by his visits with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. For Mr. Luisi the challenge is to maintain the level Mr. Levine established, while moving his own interpretive personality into the spotlight. . . . Harbison’s style is a blend of neo-Romantic warmth and modernist angularity, and this work, with its retrospective text by Alice Munro (from The View From the Castle Rock) and its fitful string writing, sharply punctuating percussion and chromatic vocal writing, sounded like a sophisticated, slightly acidic update of Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Christine Rice, a mezzo-soprano, was the appealing soloist" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 11/17/11].

October 17

Death of Edgar M[arion] Villchur (b. 5/28/17, New York, NY), at 94. Woodstock, NY. "[He invented] a small loudspeaker that could produce deep, rich bass tones [which] opened the high-fidelity music market in the 1950s to millions of everyday listeners . . . . Audiophiles have hailed Mr. Villchur as a seminal figure in the field. In its 50th-anniversary issue in 2006, Hi-Fi News ranked him No. 1 among the 50 Most Important Audio Pioneers. John Atkinson, the editor of Stereophile magazine, credits him with bringing hi-fi into the home. 'Villchur’s development of what he called the acoustic suspension woofer made it possible for music lovers to buy loudspeakers that were domestically acceptable,' Mr. Atkinson said in a 2009 interview. 'A guy’s wife could accept their presence on the bookshelf in the living room.' Before Mr. Villchur’s invention of the AR-1 loudspeaker in 1954, producing high-fidelity bass tones required speakers large enough to generate the long wavelengths of the deep notes. Some speakers were as large as a refrigerator. In the cabinet, mounted toward the front, would be what hi-fi specialists call the drive unit: a cone-shaped device activated by a magnet and a coil of wire to produce the sound. In the early days of hi-fi, manufacturers were not fully aware of the relationship between the drive unit and the acoustic role played by the cabinet itself, and they sometimes left the rear of the cabinet open. Mr. Villchur realized that if the cabinet were completely sealed, the air trapped inside would act something like a spring that would control the cone’s vibrations, greatly enhancing the drive unit’s low-frequency performance. 'My measurements showed that my little prototype had better bass and less distortion than anything on the market, yet it was one-quarter the size,' Mr. Villchur said in an interview with Stereophile in 2005. 'I thought, 'This has got to be the future of loudspeakers.'' It was. By 1966, according to Stereo Review magazine, Mr. Villchur’s company, Acoustic Research, was the leader in the nation’s speaker market, with a share of just over 32 percent. One of Mr. Villchur’s breakthrough speakers was placed on permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in 1993. Mr. Villchur also made two other advances that greatly improved high-fidelity performance. He developed one of the first dome tweeters, a drive unit that produces high frequencies. Before the tweeter, high frequencies were emitted by the woofer, but with very poor sound quality. Instead of the cone, Mr. Villchur (and other innovators working independently of one another) devised small dome-shaped diaphragms that proved optimal for producing high frequencies. In the early days of the turntable, one of its biggest problems was an effect called rumble: vibrations from the motor and the turntable that were picked up by the needle. Mr. Villchur’s solution was to separate the motor from the turntable and connect the two with a rubber belt, significantly reducing the vibrations. Even though digital sound has largely replaced vinyl and turntables, Mr. Atkinson said, 'Edgar Villchur’s inventions have led to the application of scientific principles that are used in every loudspeaker now on the market.' Edgar Marion Villchur was . . . the only child of Mark and Mariam Villchur, who had immigrated from Russia. His father was editor of a Russian-language newspaper, his mother a biologist. . . . In his basement, [Edgar] Villchur began testing his notion of a sealed-cabinet loudspeaker. One day in spring 1954, speaking to his acoustics class at N.Y.U, he hinted at his idea. One student, Henry Kloss, stayed after class, eager to learn more. Soon, student and teacher were in Mr. Villchur’s 1938 Buick, headed to Woodstock. In Mr. Villchur’s basement workshop, they listened to the copious low-frequency tones on an LP recorded by the renowned organist E. Power Biggs. Mr. Kloss had a loft in Cambridge, Mass., where he was already building mail-order cabinets for Baruch-Lang speakers. It became the first headquarters for Acoustic Research. Mr. Kloss, who died in 2002, is credited with designing the production process for the AR-1 speaker and its successors, the AR-2 and the AR-3, which combined Mr. Villchur’s woofer and tweeter models. Among Mr. Villchur’s duties was promoting the products. In the early 1960s he sponsored “live versus recorded” concerts around the country, including one in a recital room at Carnegie Hall and another at Grand Central Terminal. At the concerts, a string quartet would play a piece of music, then mime it as parts of a recording by the same quartet played through a pair of AR-3 speakers. The listeners were rarely able to detect the switchovers. Mr. Villchur was president of Acoustic Research until 1967. After being bought by a series of manufacturers, the company went out of business in 2004. Its brand name was bought by the Audiovox Corporation" [Dennis Hevesi, The New York Times, 10/18/11].

October 25

The Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Charles Dutoit, in Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "[A] somber, at times ferociously angry work, composed shortly after Stalin’s death yet clearly still under the shadow of his tyranny. The Philadelphia strings captured the slow movements’ dark hues, as well as the unbridled power and sense of the tragic that bursts forth from the fast second movement. The solo playing by the orchestra’s principals was particularly striking here, yet in the end it was the electricity generated by the full ensemble that made this interpretation so vivid" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/26/11].

Amon Tobinin, in one of a set of cubes onstage, performs Isam. Brooklyn Masonic Temple, New York, NY. Repeated October 29, Moogfes, Asheville (NC). "The cube was centrally attached to other cubes, and they were all stacked in a geometrical pattern across the stage. Fast-moving abstract images aligned to the music were projected upon them, both individually and as an entirety, an uneven canvas. . . . Most of the time you couldn’t see Mr. Tobin as he worked in his encasement. But every once in a while a small light turned on inside the cube and there he was, administering his machines, nodding his head, with beard and baseball cap, the man inside the fractal. When Mr. Tobin -- born in Brazil, raised in Britain, now residing in California -- started out in the mid-’90s, he was methodical and obsessive with post-techno electronic rhythm. He went in hard for subdivided, mechanized breakbeats and clear, spacious samples of jazz pianists and bassists from old records; he was informed by the English drum-and-bass movement and for a while kept an indirect relation to it. Since then he’s gradually moved away from the particulars of that music, even down to the sources of each tone. He creates his own sounds now, most of them originating from objects that aren’t instruments. He then manipulates them digitally, often with the help of a Continuum Fingerboard, an electronic instrument that allows you to alter a sound’s pitch or timbre or amplitude. Isam, his new record on Ninja Tune and the basis for the multimedia shows on his current tour, goes further in that direction, and further away from dance music per se. It’s slow and cinematic, full of diving low frequencies and noises that are recognizably human made but seriously altered. (Some of its creaking noises come from a microphone put up to a creaky chair in his studio.) Likewise, machines are anthropomorphized: sounds suggesting machines coming to life or walking or chattering. . . . One of the projected images was a science-fiction space station, but many of the rest were abstractions and patterns, some having to do with machines, pre and post digital age. . . . There were big musical themes in here: sometimes the layers of sonic texture made room for a short, huge and simple melodic motif" [Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, 10/27/11].

October 27

Kurt Masur conducts the New York Philharmonic in Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13 ("Baba Yar"). Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. Repeated 10/29. "The symphony is an odd, unsettling work, built on poetry by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and hardly the kind of score conductors typically make into a signature piece. Its first movement, a setting of the searing poem from which the symphony takes its name, begins as a monument to the estimated 34,000 Ukrainian Jews massacred by the Nazis at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev, in September 1941, but goes on to condemn anti-Semitism in all times and places, not least among the poet’s fellow Russians. The remaining movements, Humor, In the Stores, Fears, and A Career, are caustic critiques of Soviet society (or, more specifically, the toll of totalitarian control on the Russian spirit). Shostakovich’s music alternates between the ethereal and the deliberately crude, with long stretches of clouded, bass-heavy rumbling with light, tactile percussion offset by macabre, full orchestra passages in the sardonic accent that Shostakovich perfected decades earlier. Mr. Masur managed its transitions deftly and drew a performance of sharply focused intensity from the Philharmonic’s strings and woodwinds, with vivid contributions from its brasses in the more extroverted sections. The vocal line, on the surface, can seem more declamatory than melodic, but its shaping is subtle, and [Sergei] Leiferkus, who was in fine voice, has mastered its nuances. After a tepid start the Men of the New York Choral Artists projected the texts robustly as well" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/28/11].

October 30

Martin Helmchen perform's Arnold Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces. Frick Collection, New York, NY. "Helmchen offered characterful readings of these concise, spare morsels, which reflect the composer’s shift toward the 12-tone system and reveal his distaste for the harmonic language and emotional gestures of the Romantic period" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 11/2/11].

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / November 2011

2011-11-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

November 2011

Volume 18, Number 11

Reminiscing in Tempo / Michael McDonagh

Chronicle of September 2011

Comment

Recordings

Illustration / 9/11

Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
CORRESPONDENTS

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Reminiscing in Tempo / Michael McDonagh

2011-11-01T21:00:00.000-07:00

New York was abuzz with 9/11 activity and Fashion Week when I was there the second week of September for a working vacation. There were of course 9/11 musical events all over town, and the media, ever ready to milk a hot story, commemorated and pontificated on the 10th anniversary of "the attacks" -- with special editions crowding the newsstands and shelves of Duane Reade and CVS. The musical events on that overcast day ranged from uptown at Merkin Hall where clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh told me he and his pianist and fellow composer Dinuk Wijeratne played a set as part of a Musicians in Harmony program which celebrated New York's enormous ethnic-cultural diversity, while composer-pianist Jed Distler went it alone at The Jazz Gallery on Hudson, scant blocks from ground zero, where I saw a few cops in navy blue out on the street.

How does one respond to an event of the magnitude and horror of 9/11? Distler's solution was to write 110 for 911 (2003), for speaking pianist and electronics, from the Bob Holman curated collective poem Tower Two, which combined efforts of 110 poets -- the number of stories in the tower -- famous and obscure.

Distler's 911 skillfully theatricalized both moment and mood with a large compendium of styles which underscored, amplified, and sometimes played against the words, from the stark opening, to Holman and Eileen Myles' "In times of crisis, poets lose words. Find some: / soul, soul I say..." to strident passages, with clusters at "love should be put into action" which alternated with nearly motionless lyric ones, and different kinds of vernacular music, including boogie woogie. But there was never a sense of pastiche in the equally wide-ranging music and text, sometimes recorded, but more often spoken or sung by Distler, with hair-trigger timing.

Any piece stands or falls on the inspiration and technique of its performer and Distler's technique combines a thorough grounding in the classical tradition with solid jazz chops, his assaults on the piano sometimes evoked the visceral force of the great and not well enough known Randy Weston. 110 for 911 is an accomplished work, and the small but deeply attentive audience in the gallery's intimate space seemed both entertained and moved. Distler followed it with 2 touching encores – Ellington's exquisite The Single Petal of a Rose and a Bill Evans-like ballad for a new friend. Because maybe as one line in Distler's has it "We are all just walking each other home."

We're vulnerable. That's all.

Chronicle of September 2011

2011-11-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

September 1

Here and Now. Bargemusic, New York, NY. "Yoed Nir, playing unaccompanied on an acoustic cello, opened with Esperanza, an original composition that flowed from a Debussian motif through passages that seemed to connect Led Zeppelin with English pastoralism (not such a stretch) and onward to regal arpeggios and peasant-dance vivacity. He took up a solid-body electric instrument for Twilight Zone, a dreamy sequence of digital loops, echoing gestures and melodic lines reminiscent of a theremin’s spooky wail. Much of what followed adhered to more conventional ideas of modern classical music yet still covered a range that could fill a slim encyclopedia. Rasp, Scours, Gleam, by Elizabeth Adams, evoked in slow motion and at extreme magnification the gesture of pulling a bow across violin strings. Vita Wallace played Ms. Adams’s exacting litany of scrapes, slurs and hisses diligently and potently. Three movements from Marc Mellits’s Fruity Pebbles, played by the cellist Dave Eggar with members of the American Modern Ensemble, wedded post-Minimalist rhythmic dynamism to puckish wit; Lera Auerbach’s Piano Trio, performed by Trio Vela, pursued a more conservative line rooted in Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Two brief, appealing new pieces used the classical canon as raw material for personable recombination: Robert Paterson’s Elegy, played by Mr. Eggar and Arash Amini, another cellist, wistfully adapted material by Bach, while Peri Mauer’s Rhapsodance, vibrantly interpreted by Moran Katz, a clarinetist, and Alexandra Joan, a pianist, set a tart chromatic melody dancing to frisky rhythms akin to Poulenc. Phyllis Chen, a dazzling performer who wrings novel sounds from the humble toy piano, opened the second half of the concert with two original works, Carousels and Taroko Hypnos; both made imaginative use of a hand-cranked music box. In For the Birds, by Wendy Mae Chambers, warbling birdcalls dispersed among audience members answered Ms. Chen’s flits and trills. A final set by Mr. Eggar’s trio, Deoro, dispensed with classical concert conventions. Accompanied by Ariel de la Portilla, a bassist, and Chuck Palmer, a percussionist, Mr. Eggar segued through Leaving Manila, an original piece filled with the wobbles and slurs of traditional Filipino string music; a moody version of Messiaen’s Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus; . . . Bob Marley’s reggae ballad Redemption Song . . . and ended with a reeling reinvention of “Bring Me to Life,” a bombastic emo-metal anthem by the rock band Evanescence. Closing an evening of seemingly exhaustive exploration, Mr. Eggar’s boundless imagination revealed still limitless possibilities" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 9/5/11].

September 6

Soheil Nasseri. Merkin Hall, New York, NY. "Soheil Nasseri’s piano recitals . . . over the last decade have shown him to be a thoughtful, if assertive, interpreter, given to surprises. A Californian of Iranian descent who now splits his time between New York and Berlin, Mr. Nasseri takes a cosmopolitan view of the repertory and has been known to devote concerts mostly to new music by Iranian, Israeli and American composers, music he plays with passion and discernment. . . . Nasseri . . . opened with the premiere of Hormoz Farhat’s Sonata No. 2 (2011). Mr. Farhat, an Iranian composer, wrote to Mr. Nasseri’s strengths: the piece opens with a Lisztian flourish that quickly morphs into a theme with modal touches and graceful decoration that give it a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. East and West flirt throughout the piece. Structurally it is a classic sonata form, and in parts of its slow, expressive central movement, modal melodies give way to passages cast in a mildly angular, modernist style. Mr. Nasseri played the piece with the flexibility and power it seemed to demand" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/7/11].

September 7

Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story performed by the New York Philharmonic. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "When it came time to make a movie of his West Side Story, a busy Leonard Bernstein entrusted the score to Hollywood and his loyal arrangers. But he was less than enchanted with the results. On hearing the overture for the first time on the stereo of the music director, John Green, he burst out, 'Johnny, how the hell could you have done it so badly?,' one of the film’s producers, Walter Mirisch, said. Regardless of his opinion then, the guardians of Bernstein’s musical legacy have painstakingly recreated a written score of the soundtrack to be performed live by an orchestra during a screening of the movie . . . . Through some remarkable audio engineering, the original dialogue and singing of West Side Story will remain, while the Philharmonic plays along. It is like a version of Music Minus One: recordings of solo works without the solo line, to be played along with in your living room. But in this case, think of it as Music Minus 100. 'I wanted to find new ways for people to enjoy Lenny’s music,' said Paul H. Epstein, the senior vice president of the Leonard Bernstein Office, which oversees and perpetuates all things Bernstein. 'I wanted to prepare the new generation for Lenny. I thought this would be a way of reaching them.' The West Side Story production coincides with the issue of a restoration of the original MGM movie by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment on Blu-ray and DVD 50 years after its release in theaters. The film won 10 Oscars. An extraordinary amount of detective work and sound-engineering wizardry went into the realization of the live-orchestra screenings. Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal orchestrated the original Broadway musical in close collaboration with Bernstein. 'He was very much involved,' said Mr. Ramin, 92, who was a childhood friend of Bernstein’s. 'He put his seal of approval on what we had done.' They were assigned to orchestrate the movie score under the guidance of Saul Chaplin, the associate producer. For Broadway, the arrangers wrote for roughly 30 musicians. MGM allowed them an orchestra three times the size. 'It was like giving us a big candy store and saying, 'Eat what you want,'' Mr. Ramin said. What resulted was a lush, large score with six saxophone parts, passages with eight trumpets and others with five pianos added to five xylophones. The movie arrangers created a new overture, doubled the size of the opening dance prologue, moved scenes around and added musical overlays to the two-and-a-half-hour movie. They won an Oscar for best original score. 'The score as a whole was nearly as daring for the film as it had been for the stage,' wrote Misha Berson in her book Something’s Coming, Something Good: West Side Story and the American Imagination (Applause, 2011). No American movie, she added, 'had such an adventurous sound palette.' Bernstein, Ms. Berson wrote, found the sound mix 'overbearing and lacking in texture and subtlety.' Jamie Bernstein, a daughter of the composer’s, said by e-mail that her father 'didn’t love everything' about the arrangement, or the movie, for that matter, but kept tactfully quiet. Mr. Ramin said of Bernstein’s reaction to the movie score: 'He liked some of it, and he didn’t like some of it. Lenny was really a purist at heart.' Mr. Mirisch, 89, who wrote about Bernstein’s reaction in his memoir, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History (Wisconsin Film Studies, 2008), said in an interview, 'I assume if he was like the rest of us, he thought he could have done it better himself.' Fifty years later, those who have reconstructed the movie score defend their own efforts, saying they have gotten closer to Bernstein’s vision. 'Bernstein as a populist would want to have as many people exposed to his music, even with the compromises,' said Garth Edwin Sunderland, the Bernstein Office’s senior music editor and the man who created the new score. 'We’ve pulled it somewhat back from the excess of the film score. We made it closer to his theatrical intentions.' Mr. Sunderland said the theater orchestration formed the backbone of his work. He also used a partial version of Mr. Ramin’s personal score, which was found in Columbia University’s archives, and a reduced version that belonged to Mr. Green. Eleonor Sandresky, a Bernstein office researcher, tracked down the Green materials in the collection of the movie’s co-director, Robert Wise, at the University of Southern California. Some orchestrations had to be reproduced by ear. Passages impractical for onstage orchestras, like a section with five pianos and xylophones, were slimmed down. Mr. Sunderland made the Cool dance music more jagged; it had been smoothed out for the movie, he said. Next the arrangers had to contend with the many tiny cuts and expansions that came with the film editing, so that the live performance would synchronize precisely with the progression of the movie frames. 'That’s just a mind-boggling, complicated process,' Mr. Sunderland said. The final score fills 465 pages and contains 90 minutes of music. 'The music is hard,' said Bing Wang, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s associate concertmaster. 'It’s fast, with a lot of tempo changes. We had to switch gears constantly.' The technical process of stripping away the orchestra from the soundtrack was done in parallel. The job was given to Chace Audio by Deluxe of Burbank, Calif., a sound-engineering company that handled the restoration of the soundtrack for the DVD and Blu-ray release. Because the orchestra, voices and dialogue all existed on the same soundtrack, the task was enormously difficult. The orchestra could not simply be subtracted. It had to be scraped away. Chace brought in Audionamix, a Paris-based audio technology company, which had developed a technique used to extract Edith Piaf’s voice for the movie La Vie en Rose. According to Audionamix’s chief executive officer, Olivier Attia, the technique involves sampling sound waves for instruments and instructing a computer to scrub out their appearances on the soundtrack. 'Think about it as Photoshop for music,' Mr. Attia said. The voices and dialogue remained. Engineers had to restore some sound effects, including dancing step sounds and many of the finger snaps that are so emblematic of the work. The hard part in performance is coordinating the orchestra with the images on the screen, especially difficult in the dance scenes choreographed by Jerome Robbins, the movie’s co-director. . . . The orchestra musicians will wear earpieces that deliver rhythmic clicks to indicate the beat. Mr. Newman will have a monitor in front of him, with a light bar moving across the screen, indicating cues. The orchestra will be amplified, Philharmonic officials said. Meanwhile, the performances in New York this week will have a special resonance. Mr. Mirisch recalled that the production team found a neighborhood of condemned tenements in Manhattan to film the opening dance sequence. 'We had all those streets to ourselves,' Mr. Mirisch said. 'It was a marvelous piece of good luck.' That neighborhood soon became Lincoln Center" [Daniel J. Wakin, The New York Times, 9/7/11].

September 9

Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot opens the San Francisco Opera. War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, CA. "David Hockney’s brightly stylized, Beijing-meets-Whoville production. The gleefully chauvinistic work depicts an icy China overcome by warm, Western force, and closes with the fantasy of a conquered culture celebrating its conquest" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 9/11/11].

September 10

Christopher Theofanidis's Heart of a Soldier (after the book by James B. Stewart) premiered by the San Francisco Opera. War Memorial Theater, San Francisco, CA. "The audience, once in its seats, was asked to stand and sing the national anthem, while a flag was projected on a video scrim in front of a set of the twin towers. Two hours later -- and two hours before the calendar clicked over to Sept. 11 -- the orchestra played what everyone could recognize as portentous music. The stage shook. The sky filled with falling papers. Office workers fell to the floor. The scrim showed smoke. The audience was visibly shaken. At the curtain call a few moments later, many still had tears in their eyes. The great baritone Thomas Hampson, a larger-than-life Rick Rescorla, won our hearts. The standing ovation was the kind every composer and every opera company dreams of for a premiere. Lest no emotional button go unpushed, San Francisco Opera left us with this final image: extras in firefighter costumes, in full regalia, standing proudly in the towers as the cast took its concluding bows. This was no place for critics. Under these circumstances, dare one call Heart of a Soldier -- which was given a convincing and engaging production by Francesca Zambello and a committed performance conducted by Patrick Summers -- a failed opera? It had the external elements of conventional tragic opera -- action, heroism, exotic locales and love scenes. The villains who masterminded and carried out the 9/11 attacks remained unseen, but we know who they are. Hampson chewed the scenery and sang magnificently. The overall narrative was clear as a bell (even if many details and motivations were sketchy), and the opera moved with welcome efficiency. But beyond obviously effective theatricality and memorializing, to say nothing of downright emotional manipulation, there was Theofanidis' obvious score and an obvious libretto by Donna Di Novelli, who produced an operatic précis of the book Heart of a Soldier, which James B. Stewart adapted from his New Yorker profile of Rescorla. Theofanidis has a flair for showy orchestral color, big effects and likably sinuous tunes he elevates into Hollywood style climaxes. He makes a splash, then another, then another. Theofanidis' score suggests Cornwall and Vietnam and Texas (where the composer is from). There are thumping march tunes. The orchestra swells when Rick’s chest swells or Susan’s emotions swell. John Williams is an influence. The vocal writing is effective, not remarkable. Heart of a Soldier doesn't question, but it leaves one wondering. . . . Should writing an opera about courage be, itself, an act of courage?" [Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 9/11/11]. "As the critic Daniel Mendelsohn has noted, the best operas about blameless figures -- like Philip Glass’s Satyagraha or Messiaen’s St. François d’Assise -- tend to work because they abandon traditional dramatic and musical structures in favor of more innovative ones. . . . The score, conducted by Patrick Summers, has taut moments . . . . If there was any fear that an opera involving Sept. 11 might be overly sentimental, it was misplaced. “Heart of a Soldier,” it turns out, is not nearly sentimental enough." [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 9/11/11].

September 11

Wordless Music Orchestra presents Remembering September 11. Temple of Dendur, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. 'The main offering was The Disintegration Loops, dlp 1.1, a 40-minute work by the experimental composer William Basinski, presented here in the premiere of an orchestrated version by Maxim Moston. Musically and metaphorically, it was a powerful piece to reflect on what happened 10 years ago. In the summer and fall of 2001 Mr. Basinski began digitizing an archive of analog tape loops he recorded in the early 1980s, mostly snippets of beautiful American pastoral pieces, as he put it in a program note. But during the recording process, as each loop played over and over on his tape deck, the loops started to disintegrate. Flakes of magnetic material were steadily wiped away, leaving bare spots on the tape and holes in the music, which was literally turning to dust. It turned out that on the morning of Sept. 11 Mr. Basinski was on the roof of his apartment building in Brooklyn, about a mile from the World Trade Center. He and his neighbors witnessed the horrific destruction of the towers, with the disintegrating loops playing all the while in the background. Mr. Basinski fashioned the loops into a four-disc recording released in 2002. Mr. Moston’s orchestrated version of one extended piece from that set had an overwhelming effect on the audience that packed the temple on Sunday, with people seated on chairs, sitting on the floor, leaning against walls and standing in the lobbies just beyond the rope lines at the entrances. This orchestrated version begins with a simple, wistful tune, like some singsong refrain or a gentle chant for a slow march, with the melody carried mostly by the trombone, backed up by winds and strings and a subdued riff on a snare drum. The tune is looped, that is, repeated over and over, creating an obsessive and transfixing effect. Gradually the music develops little blips of silence: certain notes drop out; coordination among the instruments goes out of sync; rhythms hiccup. The changes come slowly but steadily. Eventually there is not much left but hints of the melody, blurry inner harmonies and an increasingly pervasive and elemental pedal tone on the bass and lower strings. Slow disintegration is a natural process in life. The disintegration of the twin towers was the result of a violent act of destruction. But presented in the context of this somber anniversary concert, The Disintegration Loops offered a chance to find some solace in the tragedy, some sense that this loss will also, in time, be folded into the cycle of life. When the assured conductor Ryan McAdams put his arms to his sides at the end of the 40-minute performance, no one in the audience made a sound. Musicians and listeners joined in a spontaneous period of reflection that lasted nearly two minutes. Then Mr. Basinski and Mr. Moston appeared to an ovation. The concert began with three ruminative works for string quartet: Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae (2002); Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes II, for quartet and tape (1993); and Alfred Schnittke’s Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled with Grief (1997), in an arrangement for string quartet by the violinist David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet. The impressive performers (from the Wordless Music Orchestra) were the violinists Keats Dieffenbach and Caroline Shaw, the violist Nadia Sirota and the cellist Clarice Jensen" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 11/12/11].

September 13

New York Chamber Music Festival. Symphony Space, New York, NY. "French music was in the spotlight . . . [in] a concert by the pianists Pascal Rogé and his wife, Ami Rogé; Howard Wall, a French horn player in the New York Philharmonic; and Elmira Darvarova, a former concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the artistic director of the festival. The Rogés walked on- and offstage holding hands. They began the program with an infrequently performed four-hand piano version of La Mer that Debussy wrote a few months before finishing the famous orchestral score, which received its lackluster premiere in 1905. Composers often wrote piano versions of their own (and others’) orchestral works, an easy way to disseminate them to a wider public in the era before recording. La Mer, a masterpiece of swirling colors and vivid seascape evocations seems inseparable from its varied orchestral palette, although Debussy was also a genius at creating pianistic evocations. . . [T]he reduced version, elegantly . . . performed by the Rogés, clearly reveals Debussy’s inventive harmonic and melodic touches. The couple joined forces again for a colorful interpretation of Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole, also written for piano duet before Ravel orchestrated it. His Spanish heritage (his mother was Basque) inspired the four-movement work, which concludes with the lively Feria. Mr. Rogé and Mr. Wall offered a . . . reading of Poulenc’s Elégie for horn and piano, written in 1957 to honor the British horn player Dennis Brain, who died at 36 that year in a car accident" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 9/14/11].

September 14

Steve Schick conducts the American premiere of James Dillon's Nine Rivers, Miller Theater, Columbia University, New York, NY.

Opening of the 23rd season of Sacred Music in a Sacred Space. Ken Tritle conducts the New York premiere of Juraj Filas's Oratio Spei (Prayer of Hope). Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, New York, NY. "[A] grandly scaled requiem . . . [t]echnically, the work is not a response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but it has a connection that makes it a fitting commemoration. Mr. Filas, a Czech composer based in Prague, was commissioned to write the piece in 2000, and when the attacks happened, just as he was completing it, he decided to dedicate the work “to the victims of terrorism,” as he put it in his program note, broadening the purpose to make a more global point. Surely the sense of occasion at the church could be attributed partly to the anticipation of a major new work and partly to the 10th anniversary of the attacks, a few days earlier. But much of it had to do with Mr. Tritle, who announced in July that he was leaving St. Ignatius Loyola, and the series he founded in 1989, to become the music director and organist at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. This was his final performance as director of the superb St. Ignatius choir and orchestra, and it seemed that the 10-minute standing ovation that ended the evening was as much for Mr. Tritle’s work over all as for the score and the richly textured, finely polished, high-energy performance. Mr. Filas writes in a melodic, accessible style, rooted in the traditions of the late 19th century. He also clearly approached his work with a sense of where he wanted it to stand in relation to other beloved requiem settings. The gentler parts of the score -- the Introitus and the Kyrie, the Recordare, the Lacrimosa and the Libera Me, in particular -- have the light textures and easygoing lyricis of Fauré’s Requiem and some of the melodic litheness of Mozart’s. Mr. Filas rejected Brahms’s ecumenical approach; he not only uses the traditional Latin text but also adds a concluding section that revisits the day of judgment and includes a mystical dialogue between Jesus and St. John, and a bright-hued prayer for deliverance. And in the more terrifying parts of this Mass for the Dead -- the vision of the final judgment in the Dies Irae sequence, most notably, but also in parts of the Offertorium -- Mr. Filas followed Mozart’s and Verdi’s leads in supporting choral vehemence with orchestral thunder. He actually outpaces Verdi in his passion for soul-shaking percussion. Mr. Filas put his most attractive music in a sweet, often soaring soprano line, to which Susanna Phillips brought a beautiful, velvety tone and dignified, carefully shaped phrasing. The solo passages for male voices are more pointedly dramatic, often pitting the soloists against dense orchestral and choral scoring. John Tiranno, the tenor, sang pleasingly . . . John Michael Moore, the baritone, summoned . . . consistent power, and sang with a warm, commanding tone in the Tuba Mirum and Confutatis" [Allan Kozinn, The New YorkTimes, 9/15/11].

September 17

Henry V by William Walton (narration by Christopher Plummer) performed by the New York Philharmonic. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY.

September 21

Next Wave Festival. Kronos Quartet presents Awakening: A Musical Meditation on the Anniversary of 9/11. BAM Harvey Theater. "Though performed without an intermission and mostly without pause, the program is arranged as a triptych: its opening section is devoted to Asian music (from Uzbekistan, Iraq, Iran and India), with assertive, avant-garde Western pieces in the central grouping and introspective, consonant scores -- music of reflection and solace -- in the concluding set. Most of the works were composed well before 2001, but direct responses to the attacks by Michael Gordon, Osvaldo Golijov and Gustavo Santaolalla (and, arguably, Terry Riley, whose gently repetitive 2002 “One Earth, One People, One Love” offers a more generalized philosophical reaction) lay at the program’s heart. Typically for Kronos, there is a visual component too. The set, designed by Laurence Neff, is a mess of twisted metal, broken wood and ruined everyday objects (a cabinet, a bathtub, an ironing board, toys). Some of the wreckage, it turned out, was meant for the ensemble to whale on in the percussive sections of Armenia (1983), by the German noise band Einstürzende Neubauten (the name means 'Collapsing New Buildings'), offered here in a vigorous arrangement by Paula Prestini. Most of the dozen works here had an electronic element; in fact, a recording of an oud and a drone were playing as the ensemble took the stage, and the track continued as part of the backdrop of Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky’s Awakening (1993), the tactile, melancholy opening piece. Lev Zhurbin’s arrangement of an outgoing, rhythmically vital Iraqi song, Oh Mother, the Handsome Man Tortures Me and Jacob Garchik’s transcription of an ornate Iranian lullaby let the ensemble flex its multicultural interpretive muscles. But the point was probably to erode cultural borders, and the group succeeded best in the finale of the Asian set, a version of the alap section of Ram Narayan’s Raga Mishra Bhairavi, recast as a passionate viola solo and given an exquisite, moving performance by Hank Dutt. Mr. Gordon’s Sad Park (2005) is built on looped recordings of children’s descriptions of the Sept. 11 attacks as an introduction, but the voices, soon manipulated beyond comprehensibility, become part of the texture, and the music -- slow, eerie and slightly nightmarish in Part 1, rhythmically driven and howling with the intensity of a rock band in Part 4 -- commands the attention more fully, in any case. The collaboration by Mr. Golijov and Mr. Santaolalla, Darkness 9/11 (2002), is a more conventionally mournful score, etched in slow-moving, lustrous chords, and it set the stage for a concluding sequence of works in the same spirit. Particularly striking was a version of Aulis Sallinen’s Winter Was Hard (1969), in which the quartet was joined by the warm-toned, wonderfully unified Brooklyn Youth Chorus" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/22/11].

September 22

Paul McCartney’s first ballet score, Ocean’s Kingdom, performed by the New York Ballet. New York, NY. "McCartney's . . . Ocean's Kingdom is in no way an important addition to the corpus of ballet music, but it deserves a better staging than the one it’s been given by New York City Ballet. Never less than agreeable, it has plenty of color and melody. Curiously, it sounds as if it had been composed in the neo-Romantic era before the Beatles: some of its most expansive tunes have hints of Borodin and Samuel Barber; some of its atmospheres evoke Ravel; and its jolliest passages are on the cusp of Bernstein’s Candide. . . . The highlight . . . was the introductory See the Music ... session, in which the company’s music director, Fayçal Karoui, spoke about the score, playing excerpts to illustrate several different aspects of Mr. McCartney’s composition: the nature of its melodies; the way it transforms a bass figure through orchestral variation into a theme; its creation of intimacy and humor; its rhythmic urgency and heightened suspense; and, finally, its nobility and optimism. . . . Because of Mr. McCartney’s involvement, there was tremendous media excitement about Ocean’s Kingdom. And yet I know of no regular balletgoer who felt any great advance hopes for the work . . . . Ocean’s Kingdom isn’t offensive: it’s just harmless, forgettable, bland, thin and occasionally incompetent. In a note for the program, Mr. McCartney writes that he was already working on 'a piece of music with an underwater theme' when Mr. Martins invited him to consider a ballet. Mr. McCartney then returned to the underwater idea, now with dance in mind. . . . The ballet, planned like a symphony, is in four movements and is about 50 minutes long" [Alastair Macaulay, The New York Times, 9/23/11].

September 24

Pianist-composer Stephen Prutsman and the Afiara String Quartet in Sherlock, Jr., performed to the 1924 Buster Keaton comedy. Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York, NY. "At the peak of the silent-film era movie theaters provided nonstop work for instrumental musicians in America. In most houses just a single pianist would play, usually improvising, and often folding in songs or classical pieces. Some theaters had organs equipped with sound effects to evoke thunderstorms and galloping horses. Large auditoriums brought in whole instrumental ensembles, working from cue sheets provided by the studios with specific titles keyed to moments in the film. . . . [T]he mystique of the silent-film era was recreated (and musically updated) with a screening of Buster Keaton’s 1924 comedy Sherlock, Jr. accompanied by a live performance of a jazzy, eclectic and inventive score for piano and string quartet composed by Stephen Prutsman. Mr. Prutsman played the piano, joined by the Afiara String Quartet, the former graduate resident quartet at the Juilliard School, whose game young members doubled on kazoos, clackers and toy instruments. This was the New York premiere of the 2006 score, and the hall was packed. . . . Sherlock, Jr. is a 45-minute Keaton classic. The sad-sack Keaton plays a lowly film projectionist who secretly yearns to be a private eye and reads How to Be a Detective in every spare moment. His pretty, shy and slow-witted love interest is the Girl (Kathryn McGuire). His rival for her affection is the town swindler, the Sheik (Ward Crane). At the Girl’s house the Sheik takes a pocket watch belonging to her father and frames Keaton as the thief. . . . As a composer Mr. Prutsman has worked with collaborators including the Kronos Quartet, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, folk ensembles and jazz orchestras. His multistyled facility was given full vent in Sherlock, Jr. The music one moment evoked a lilting, lyrical Fauré and the next a jaunty rag. When the villain appeared, there were ominous string tremolos and thumping piano themes. During the dream segment there were strange, slightly off, wrong-note waltzes. The big chase scene was prodded along by a relentless peasant dance. And some effective borrowings included a reference to the love-at-first-sight chords from Strauss’s Rosenkavalier. The Afiara players and Mr. Prutsman received a hearty ovation for their vibrant performance" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/25/11].

September 26

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Opening Gala: Fireworks. Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "Looking around the auditorium, you were confronted with a . . . compelling cause for celebration: . . . offering a program largely comprising unfamiliar works, the society had sold every available seat. The evidence seemed clear: what the cellist David Finckel and the pianist Wu Han, the society’s artistic directors since 2004, have achieved with their hands-on approach to blending standard, unusual and new repertory, played by a mix of familiar and emerging performers, has connected with a large, enthusiastic constituency. Greeting the audience from the stage, the effervescent Ms. Wu practically levitated as she rushed through a litany of coming events: new tour stops in Chicago and Athens, Ga.; new residencies in Germany, South Korea and London. . . . Vivian Fung’s Pizzicato, a 2001 bagatelle filled with allusions to Chinese stringed instruments and Indonesian gamelan rhythms, had an appropriately plucky account by the Escher String Quartet. The flutist Tara Helen O’Connor brought her characteristic authority and lucidity to Henri Dutilleux’s 1943 Sonatine, with supple support from the pianist Alessio Bax" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 9/27/11].

The Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players. Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church, New York, NY. "Felix Weingartner’s Octet (Op. 73), is a piece worth a fuller revival. Weingartner, whose career was based mostly in Vienna, was among the first conductors to record plentifully, and collectors still prize his recordings of the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies. As its opus number suggests, the Octet is a mature work, composed in 1925, when Weingartner was in his early 60s. Granted, the work pays little heed to the experimental approach to harmony that Schoenberg and his students were exploring at the time. But its 36 minutes are packed with richly lyrical themes, sumptuously scored in a late Romantic style, with occasional nods -- well, O.K., full-scale salutes -- to Brahms and Mahler. Yet it also has an original spark, and its challenges for the performers -- an ensemble that mirrors the woodwind, brass and string scoring of Schubert’s Octet -- are ample. Most notably, it has a prominent, perilously chromatic horn line, which Karl Kramer played beautifully here, and its clarinet and bassoon writing is spirited and shapely. Michael Brown was a supportive accompanist and held the spotlight ably in . . . a vital, thoroughly Romantic (here the most prominent influences were Brahms and Dvorak) Piano Quintet that George Szell composed in 1911, when he was about 14" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/27/11].

September 28

Patricia Spencer and the Mannes Orchestra, conducted by David Hayes, in the New York premiere of Elliott Carter's Concerto for Flute and Ensemble. Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "[He complege it] in March 2008, back when he was only 99. The astonishingly prolific Mr. Carter is about 10 weeks shy of 103. Since he turned 100, he has written 14 works. . . . [This is a] rhapsodic and brilliant 14-minute concerto. . . . Mr. Carter’s concerto had its premiere in Jerusalem — by the flutist Emmanuel Pahud and the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Ensemble, conducted by Daniel Barenboim -- in 2008. James Levine gave the American premiere in 2010 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Carter’s composer’s note for the piece reads almost like a mea culpa for not having written a flute concerto earlier. 'I kept putting it off, because I felt that the flute could not produce the sharp attacks that I use so frequently,' he writes. 'But the idea of the beautiful qualities of the different registers of the instrument and the extraordinary agility attracted me more and more.' The work, scored for an ensemble including piano and percussion, was performed here by 22 players. It opens with startling, crisp orchestral chords that prod the flute into scurrying figures, quickly taken up by other instruments. The flute’s skittish riffs and winding lyrical lines sometimes ignite agitated orchestral responses; at other times they are cushioned by subdued, sustained harmonies. Even when the music breaks into a jumpy back-and-forth, the mood is industrious, not aggressive. Mr. Carter’s language has lost none of its piercing, atonal bite. Yet like most of his works from his 90s and later, this score is less densely complex and layered than those from earlier decades. The enhanced clarity is a welcome turn, making it easier to hear Mr. Carter’s scintillating sonorities, myriad instrumental colors and complex rhythmic interplay. About midway through the concerto, as the orchestra remains quite feisty, the flute, as if in its own zone, just keeps playing steady, pensive passages. Eventually the flute prevails, and the piece turns ruminative. But not for long. An extended, scherzolike section full of fantastical flights takes off and builds to a final flourish of every-which-way spiraling figures. Ms. Spencer’s impressive performance had all the 'beautiful qualities' and 'extraordinary agility' Mr. Carter could have asked for. The young players under Mr. Hayes seemed engrossed by the music and in command of it. Mr. Carter stood up from his seat, a little shakily, to salute the players and acknowledge the ovation" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/30/11].

September 29

Trans-Pecos Festival of Music and Love. El Cosmico, Marfa, TX. "Five hundred concertgoers -- most staying in one of a hundred tents, six trailers, four safari tents and four yurts -- three security guards, four sound men and one lighting specialist heard the voice of Led Zeppelin perform onstage. It seemed random and a little surreal, but somehow there was Robert Plant, live in the middle of nowhere. The 'somehow' was a well-timed invitation from Liz Lambert, the Austin hotelier behind El Cosmico, a Marfa campsite 'hotel' built around restored vintage trailers. Mr. Plant’s appearance was supposed to be a surprise, but in the days leading up to the festival -- which, with the tents and the abundance of free-roaming dogs and children, felt more like a 1960s-style gathering -- there was buzz that the singer-songwriter Patty Griffin would not be playing her Thursday night set solo. Instead, she would be introducing a new band featuring her boyfriend, Mr. Plant. The small crowd suggests that the rumor sounded too good to be true, and that for all its attention, Marfa is still a geographically inconvenient place to visit on a whim. What may not have been a terribly well-kept secret still felt unexpected. On a small handmade stage a few hundred feet from U.S. 67, under the name Crown Vic, Mr. Plant and Ms. Griffin shared vocals on Led Zeppelin classics . . . . Plant may always remember the show as Crown Vic’s first gig, but to the people of Marfa a visit from a bona fide rock icon seemed like an important step in Marfa’s slow, but steady, evolution into a viable music town. Sure, it’s still a 'what if,' but what if Marfa had a true calling card beyond Donald Judd’s minimalist boxes? 'Marfa is a small community, but it’s a small community of people that have truly committed themselves to the arts and creativity,' said Ms. Lambert, a West Texas native whose first Marfa project was the renovation of the ’50s-era Thunderbird Hotel. “That extends nicely to music'" [Andy Langer, The New York Times, 10/1/11].

September 30

Premiere of John Corigliano's One Sweet Morning, given by the New York Philharmonic. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "The commission was for a work to commemorate the anniversary of Sept. 11, and it was the orchestra’s second request. Soon after the terrorist attacks the Philharmonic asked him for a first-anniversary tribute to those who had perished. Mr. Corigliano declined, feeling that the shock was too fresh, and the orchestra turned to John Adams, who provided . . . On the Transmigration of Souls. For the 10th anniversary Mr. Corigliano was ready. His new work -- One Sweet Morning, an unsettlingly vivid 28-minute score for mezzo-soprano and orchestra -- will have its premiere . . . with Alan Gilbert conducting and Stephanie Blythe as soloist. Mr. Adams 'did a smart thing,' Mr. Corigliano said during a recent interview in his Upper West Side apartment. 'At that time, so close to the event, a work about it had to be specific, and his was. He dealt with people’s names and used actual recordings, and it was exactly the right thing to do. But now, 10 years later, we have a chance to look back at 9/11 and then look back further, to see how it fits into the drama of all the world’s wars, all the world’s battles, all the world’s horrible mistreatments of people. That decade gives us perspective, which is why this is a different kind of piece. I thought we should be looking at 9/11 now as one of those things that will always be with us. We’ve seen it before. We’ve seen it since.' Mr. Corigliano, 73, has spent his career solving self-imposed compositional puzzles, often by considering essential qualities of the instruments or performers he is writing for. He opened his Oboe Concerto (1975), a work he regards as a watershed in the development of his style, by focusing on the oboe’s role as the instrument the rest of the orchestra tunes to, and ended it with a dance based on the sound of an Arabic oboe. His flute concerto Pied Piper Fantasy (1982) drew on James Galway’s impish charisma. And so on through a catalog now packed with orchestral works (including three symphonies), film scores, chamber music and virtuosic solo pieces. This time -- as in his Symphony No. 1 ('Of Rage and Remembrance') (1988), a memorial to victims of AIDS -- the subject was more emotional. Mr. Corigliano’s main problem was finding a way to achieve the perspective he mentioned. 'I felt that an orchestral piece was absolutely out of the question,' he said. 'We have a movie clip in our minds about 9/11. Everybody knows the movie, and everybody plays it. And there’s no way you can write an orchestral piece, without a text, and not have listeners playing that movie. So I went to the Philharmonic and said that I had to have a text.' Mr. Corigliano, who has been known to reconfigure works in his back catalog with a Handelian efficiency, had already written a piece he thought could be useful. In 2005 he set One Sweet Morning, a poem by E. Y. Harburg -- the lyricist of Over the Rainbow and Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? -- first for voice and piano, then for children’s chorus. 'It says what I would like to say about the hope for peace, and it has a wonderful finality,' said Mr. Corigliano, who made the original setting without a commission. 'I knew that this orchestral work would have to end with it. So the next question was: What precedes it? What am I saying to get to this?' Some research at the 92nd Street Y’s Poetry Center turned up three more texts that answered that question. Czeslaw Milosz’s Song on the End of the World, written in Warsaw in 1944, contrasts the mundane with the apocalyptic; in the context of Mr. Corigliano’s work it stands for what he calls 'the 9/10 world.' Percussion and brass figures lead into a horrific passage from Homer’s “Iliad,” which catalogs the names of Trojan warriors massacred by Patroclus in a desperate battle and tells how each was killed. The Homer gives way to War South of the Great Wall, by the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po: a poem that describes a battle in the hazy distance from the perspective of a woman watching her husband and sons fight beneath a red sun and bright flags, to the pounding of war drums. A brief interlude weaves together the themes of the first three movements and melts into the setting of the Harburg poem. Like many Corigliano works of the last three decades the score is awash in melody and drama and uses techniques from the full spectrum of contemporary musical language, all within an accessible frame. Always a colorful orchestrator, Mr. Corigliano draws here on a wealth of textures that include the eerie timbres of bowed vibraphones, in the Milosz section; a passage in which the brasses climb steadily from the lowest note on a tuba to the highest on a trumpet, with a closing percussion barrage representing the mound of corpses amassed during the Homer excerpt; and Chinese drums accompanying parts of the Li Po. Mr. Corigliano’s stylistically untethered approach has always appealed to audiences and to orchestras keen to find new works that attract subscribers by updating the conventions of Romanticism. Soloists like Mr. Galway, the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the pianist Emanuel Ax, the guitarist Sharon Isbin and the violinist Joshua Bell have embraced Mr. Corigliano’s music too: exuberant quotations from a starry roster of musicians scroll across the top of his Web site. But critics, and composers and performers of a modernist bent, have often been chilly to Mr. Corigliano’s work, seeing its accessibility as a form of pandering and arguing that a style as freewheeling as his is no style at all. Reviewing Mr. Corigliano’s First Symphony for The New York Times in 1992 Edward Rothstein described the work as vulgar. Bernard Holland, in a critic’s notebook in The Times soon after, described that work as 'high dudgeon masquerading as high art' and added that The Ghosts of Versailles, the quirky period-spanning 1991 work Mr. Corigliano wrote for the Metropolitan Opera, offered 'not one bar of truly durable music.' Such attitudes have been changing over the last decade. The pianist Ursula Oppens, whose tastes have always gravitated toward the complexity of Elliott Carter rather than Mr. Corigliano’s neo-Romanticism, has just released Winging It (Cedille Records), a CD of Mr. Corigliano’s solo and two-piano works (with Jerome Lowenthal as the second pianist). 'I think the problem in the past was that there were culture wars,' Ms. Oppens said. 'But the culture wars have stopped. John wisely just wrote his own music, without feeling that he had to join a side. I came to his music late, and mostly through my students. Whenever I’d teach a piece of his, I’d think, ‘This really is fabulous.’ His music is more complex than you might think. When Jerry and I were practicing Chiaroscuro, we both kept stopping to admire the brilliance of what was going on.' Meanwhile a generation of stylistically omnivorous young composers has followed Mr. Corigliano’s lead. Quite a few -- Nico Muhly, Mason Bates, Jefferson Friedman, John Mackey and Avner Dorman among them -- studied under Mr. Corigliano at the Juilliard School, where he has taught since 1991. 'Sure, his music has elements of Romanticism, but that’s but one color on a huge stylistic palette,' Mr. Bates wrote in an e-mail. 'His ear for novel sonorities rivals Ligeti’s or Penderecki’s, and his ability to work everything into a cohesive architecture has no match. He appreciates that as a time-based medium, music can cover a lot of stylistic territory. But many critics hear a few Romantic gestures and stop listening.' Mr. Muhly described Mr. Corigliano’s Clarinet Concerto (1977) and First Symphony as 'constant companions in my formative high-school years' and added that a live performance of the symphony was 'a life-changing experience, because the small musical gestures existed in a very well-constructed, larger architecture.' Like their teacher, these young eclectics have avoided stylistic dogma, and they draw on everything: serialism, Minimalism, pop, electronica, jazz, world music, soaring Romanticism, directness and complexity. Listeners weary of severe modernism and unconvinced by Minimalism -- noncombatants in the culture wars -- have become a reliable audience for them. And critics praise their music for the same things that once brought Mr. Corigliano opprobrium. You might expect Mr. Corigliano to say that this change of spirit was inevitable; that, like Mahler, he knew his time would come. Not so. 'Nothing is inevitable,' he said. 'Yes, the change has surprised me. Do you remember how Bernstein’s Mass was torn to shreds when it was new? But when Marin Alsop conducted it a few years ago, suddenly it was a great, rediscovered piece. Things change. Times change. And I think it has a lot to do with young composers. They want to write music for people. They don’t want to be held back by the fashion of the time. They do anything they want to do . . . . It’s a different world'" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 11/23/11]. "John Corigliano['s] . . . new work, One Sweet Morning, a 30-minute song cycle for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, had its premiere . . . with the magnificent Stephanie Blythe as soloist and Mr. Gilbert conducting a colorful and intense performance in a program that included works by Barber and Dvorak. With a viscerally emotional score One Sweet Morning shifts in mood from ruminative to bellicose, from mystical to wrenching. Mr. Corigliano has long drawn from diverse styles to fashion his musical voice. Those who find the Romantic elements of his music excessive, as I sometimes do, may be put off by this work’s cinematic stretches. But the skill and vision at play are impressive. And Ms. Blythe was in her glory. In that interview Mr. Corigliano said that a decade after the horrific events, 'we have a chance to look back at 9/11 and then to look back further, to see how it fits into the drama of all the world’s wars, all the world’s battles, all the world’s horrible mistreatments of people.' That may sound like a dangerously sweeping agenda for a song cycle. But with his inspired choice of texts Mr. Corigliano found poignantly specific ways to place Sept. 11 in context. The first is 'A Song on the End of the World' by Czeslaw Milosz (translated into English by his son Anthony Milosz), written in Warsaw in 1944, a poem that presents a scene of seeming calm and everyday affairs, with images of a sleepy drunkard at the edge of a lawn, vegetable peddlers in the street, women walking through fields under umbrellas. Even those who expect signs that the end of the world will come amid 'archangels’ trumps,' in the words of the text, do not believe 'it is happening now.' Mr. Corigliano sets the words to music of shimmering tranquillity pierced with unsettling orchestral details. The mezzo-soprano’s first lines ('On the day the world ends/A bee circles a clover,') are sung in subdued, observant tones, enshrouded by glowing, pungent orchestral harmonies that lend nervous perplexity to the contemplative mood. Brass chorales at the end of the song evolve into a gnarly orchestral transition into the second text, 'Patroclus,' an excerpt from Homer’s Iliad (in Robert Fagles’s translation). It relates in graphic detail the brutal individual deaths of Greek soldiers under the command of Patroclus. The music is fitful and dense, with militaristic brass flourishes and driving dotted-note rhythmic riffs. Ms. Blythe, whose penetrating voice can usually cut through any orchestra, was sometimes covered by the blaring orchestral sound here. Still, making the voice just a part of the cataclysm seemed the intention. Another roiling orchestral transition segues into the third text, 'War South of the Great Wall,' by the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po (in David Hinton’s translation), in which the narrator describes looking at her husband and sons in battle from a great distance, where 'convulsions of men seem like armies of ants.' Here the textures thin, and the music, while still raw, achieves the distance and space that Mr. Corigliano was after in the work as a whole. The final section, based on a song for voice and piano that Mr. Corigliano wrote in 2005, gives the work its name . . . The words are by the Tin Pan Alley lyricist E. Y. Harburg. This tender, nostalgic text imagines that 'out of the flags and the bones buried under the clover' peace will come. Here the vocal lines turn almost breezy. Yet the skittish orchestra, especially the piercing strings that almost cling to the voice, suggests otherwise. After the two vocally taxing middle songs Ms. Blythe . . . sang [the final song] with lyrical grace and touching directness. And she seemed deeply moved by the experience of singing this meaningful piece. Mr. Corigliano received a prolonged ovation when he appeared onstage.
Mr. Gilbert preceded Mr. Corigliano’s work with a vibrant performance of Barber’s Essay No. 1 for Orchestra, an eight-minute clear-textured and exuberant score written in 1937 and ’38, when the composer was in his late 20s" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 10/2/11].

Weilerstein Trio. Bargemusic, New York, NY. "The barge hosts well over 200 concerts a year, featuring a fine mix of performers, including the occasional celebrity. Cellist Alisa Weilerstein . . . is a star. She met the works’ challenges with . . . rhythmic swing in Ives’s Piano Trio" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 2/10/11].

Comment

2011-11-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

Item

When the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman was a young man, he led a committee to write a new part of the curriculum for Israeli high schools. The committee worked for a year, and Kahneman asked his colleagues how long they thought the rest of the project would take. Their estimates were around two years. Kahneman then asked the most experienced among them how long such work took other curriculum committees. The gentleman pointed out that roughly 40 percent of the committees never finished their work at all. But what about those that did finish? The gentleman reported that he had never seen a committee finish in less than seven years and never in more than 10. This was bad news. They might fail to finish a task that they thought would be done in three years. At best, the project might consume eight or nine years. Yet this information didn’t affect those on the team at all. They carried on, assuming that though others might fail or dally, surely they wouldn’t. As it turned out, their project took eight years to finish. By the time it was done, the Ministry of Education had lost interest, and the curriculum was never used. In his forthcoming book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” . . . Kahneman calls this the planning fallacy. Most people overrate their own abilities and exaggerate their capacity to shape the future. That’s fine. Optimistic people rise in this world. The problem comes when these optimists don’t look at themselves objectively from the outside. The planning fallacy is failing to think realistically about where you fit in the distribution of people like you. As Kahneman puts it, “People who have information about an individual case rarely feel the need to know the statistics of the class to which the case belongs.”

David Brooks
The New York Times, 9/15/11

Recordings

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Gustavo Dudamel and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra: Bruckner, Sibelius, Nielsen. Deutsche Grammophon. "Gothenburg is Gustavo Dudamel’s other orchestra. His work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela is well documented on recording. But this three CD set of Bruckner, Sibelius and Nielsen symphonies, recorded live, is his first with the Swedish orchestra he has led since 2007. The Gothenburg sound that Dudamel inherited is darker and muskier than we in sunnier climes of L.A. or Caracas are used to. A sense of tradition in Sweden's second city is unmistakable, but so is Dudamel's tweaking said tradition. Sibelius conducted his Second Symphony in Gothenburg. Nielsen conducted his Fourth and Fifth symphonies, also on this set, with the orchestra. Dudamel approaches the scores with a contagious sense of wow, learning odd and wonderful music from musicians in whose DNA it flows. But he also eggs on these Swedes. The strangeness of Nielsen is gripping. Dudamel’s Sibelius sails on wings of celebration and his excitement at the symphony’s end is over the moon (check out the Finale on YouTube)" [Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 9/13/11].

Miles Davis. Live in Europe 1967: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1. Columbia/Legacy. "[I]t captures Davis’s finest working band at its apogee, straining at the limits of post-bop refinement. As the subtitle suggests, some of this material has circulated in bootleg form; the DVD footage, from Germany and Sweden, was featured in one of the recent Legacy doorstoppers. But Live in Europe 1967, as an objet d’art, still feels momentous. The music sounds staggeringly contemporary, pointing toward some crucial attributes of our present jazz era even as it ratifies, more firmly than ever, the singular dynamism of Davis’s 1960s quintet. And as the first release in a series of previously unsanctioned music -- the plan is to put out at least one a year for the next several years -- it answers the question of what we could possibly hope for from a Miles Davis estate that has already exhausted the catalog, more than once and in more than one sense. . . . He was a bandleader whose resourcefulness was matched only by his restlessness. There are more distinct phases in Davis’s career than in most artists of his stature, and a lot of the transitional evolution took place onstage, at the hands of some of the most gifted American musicians of the 20th century. Among them were the members of Davis’s second great quintet: the pianist Herbie Hancock, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the bassist Ron Carter and the drummer Tony Williams. With the exception of Williams, who died in 1997, these are all still major figures in jazz, shapers of the language. (Just so we’re clear: Williams was one of those too.) By the end of 1967 they had been a working unit for more than three years and had recorded four albums, all gleaming with intrigue. Among their cohesive trademarks were a slippery, open-ended approach to harmony and a magically elastic way with rhythm" [Nate Chinen, The New York Times, 9/8/11].

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / October 2011

2011-10-11T23:30:00.000-07:00

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

October 2011

Volume 18, Number 10

Chronicle of August 2011

Book

Recordings

Illustration / John Zorn

Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
CORRESPONDENTS

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Item

2011-10-07T09:06:00.000-07:00

The MacArthur Foundation has never attached the word “genius” to its annual grants to exemplary scientists, scholars, researchers, writers, artists, composers and other creative Americans. The term “genius award” seems to have sprung up in the news media soon after the first grants were given, in 1981, and the nickname has stuck. The program simply provides a fellowship, with recipients (some 20 to 40 each year) receiving $500,000 each, no strings attached, paid in quarterly installments over five years.

Who is a certifiable genius? What exactly does that mean? Though the term is invoked in the arts probably more than in any of the other fields from which the MacArthur Foundation chooses fellows, you could argue that defining genius is a more elusive proposition in the arts than in the sciences. There are accepted protocols to certify that a physicist’s research has broken new ground and has advanced understanding. Not in the arts. So what might the foundation be looking for when it evaluates musical accomplishment and potential?

I raised the question in separate telephone interviews with 2 of the 22 new MacArthur Foundation Fellows announced last month, the only recipients to come from classical music, and both New Yorkers.

One is the cellist Alisa Weilerstein, 29, an exciting and adventurous performer. . . . Weilerstein’s debut recording next year as a Decca artist will present her in Elgar’s Cello Concerto, bracingly paired with Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto (2000), with Daniel Barenboim conducting the Berlin Staatskapelle.

The other fellow from the classical music sphere is Francisco J. Núñez, 46, the founding director of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, which has introduced children from wide-ranging ethnic and economic backgrounds to the joy and discipline of choral singing. Some 1,200 children participate in the group’s programs and tours each year. For the last decade, through the group’s Transient Glory project, Mr. Núñez has commissioned diverse composers, including major figures, to write works for children’s chorus.

There was much to discuss with Mr. Núñez and Ms. Weilerstein, but I could not resist teasing them a bit about their new genius status.

“No, no, I don’t really feel like a genius,” Mr. Núñez said. “But I definitely feel a little taller.” Fair enough. But on its Web site, the understandably proud Young People’s Chorus does have a prominent news item announcing that Mr. Núñez received a “prestigious 2011 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship Award.”

The foundation provides fellows with talking points for frequently asked questions, Ms. Weilerstein said. And sure enough, the question most asked is, “Do you feel like a genius?” One of the suggested answers resonated with Ms. Weilerstein’s opinion that the term actually “limits the scope” of an artist’s achievement.

“Obviously there is natural talent,” she said. “But you accomplish things only by working extremely hard.” The word genius suggests that an artist need only slip into genius mode and out comes the finished product. “Also,” Ms. Weilerstein added, “the award recognizes that our work isn’t done. I’m a perpetual student.”

The foundation, in a news release, states that the fellowships are given in recognition of a recipient’s “originality, self-direction and capacity to contribute importantly to society.” Among the artists in classical music who have received these fellowships in recent years, several common threads emerge.

There are the musicians who cross genres and styles and break down categories; the performers who champion contemporary music; and those artists who excel at communicating with audiences and bringing music to people who have been left out of the cultural loop, especially in poor neighborhoods.

The composer John Zorn, a 2006 fellow, who has drawn from jazz, punk, klezmer, film, cartoon and classical styles, was cited for music “that defies convention and explores the spaces between and among genres.” The dynamic violinist Leila Josefowicz, a 2008 fellow, was hailed for “stretching the mold of the classical violinist in her passionate advocacy of contemporary composers and their work.”

The conductor Marin Alsop, a 2005 fellow, who has been the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra since 2007, was honored for her “masterful technique” and “visionary programming” and her “extraordinary ability to communicate both with her orchestra and audience.” The soprano Dawn Upshaw, a 2007 fellow, was called a “master vocalist” and praised for “breaking down stylistic barriers and forging a new model for a performer who is directly involved in the creation of contemporary music.”

In jazz there is Dafnis Prieto, a percussionist and composer, who was one of this year’s fellows (the only other musician besides Ms. Weilerstein and Mr. Núñez). Like the classical music designees, Mr. Prieto is cited for the breadth of his scope, for melding “modern jazz harmonies, Cuban clave rhythms, other Latin and African influences and funk-inspired arrangements” into works of teeming diversity.

All these artists are highly skilled and deserving. Yet with its emphasis on pushing boundaries, transcending categories and contributing to society, the foundation is implicitly acknowledging that these valuable attributes are easier to discern than, say, who is the finest young cellist, based on technical skills, musical insights and interpretive dynamism, which are subjective calls.

Classical music has for too long (and I think, unfairly) been perceived as a specialized art form. Of course it is crucial for composers and performers to reach out, to connect with music and musicians from other genres. Virtuosity and excellence are not enough.

Still, there is a tendency in classical music to overvalue cross-stylistic and genre-blending work. Composers who draw from and mesh widely diverse styles receive immediate credit for doing something daring, as are performers who present their works. It can be much harder to recognize the boldness of a composer who adheres to a specific style and idiom. In the early years of the program, the MacArthur Foundation made a point of singling out some unapologetically modernist composers who had scant interest in stylistic crossbreeding, like Milton Babbitt, Ralph Shapey and Charles Wuorinen.

But this is more an observation than a complaint. Any fellowship that recognizes the vibrancy of an idealistic musician like Ms. Weilerstein or the important work that Mr. Núñez has been doing far from circles of celebrity deserves a salute from everyone in classical music.

So, what are they going to do with the cash?

Ms. Weilerstein said she was relieved that the first installment would not arrive until January. “I haven’t come up with a solution as of now,” she said. “I’m still in the overwhelmed and shocked phase. It’s a huge amount of money and a huge responsibility.”

She recently performed Dvorak’s Cello Concerto with Ms. Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony. She is impressed, she said, that Ms. Alsop used some of her own fellowship as seed money for ORCHKids, the Baltimore Symphony’s after-school educational program aimed at creating social change through music training for children in Baltimore. “Projects like that totally inspire me,” Ms. Weilerstein said.

About his plans, Mr. Núñez said, “I feel I have a spotlight on me, and I have to do something really incredible.” On the other hand, he added, “I feel I have to continue to do what I’m doing.”

A MacArthur fellowship offers an artist the chance to think big, Mr. Núñez said. But big could easily become overblown. “Do I fake myself out and come up with the next new concept?” he asked. “Or do I just be myself? I believe in myself and my past.”

His tours with the chorus have profoundly affected him, he added. “When I take children to places from Rio to Tokyo, they come back so much bigger,” he said. “I want more of that.”

Born in New York, Mr. Núñez moved with his parents to the Dominican Republic, where his mother, a factory worker, was his first piano teacher. When his father died, he and his mother returned to New York and faced hardship.

“I’m from poverty, a single mother earning $8 an hour,” Mr. Núñez said. “I want to fight poverty through music. I know that sounds romantic, but I’ve seen it happen.” Music, he added, “brought me out of the barrio.”

That is certainly thinking big. And more power to him. But I was equally touched by what the self-effacing Ms. Weilerstein said about making a contribution through her work.

“Hopefully what I do by playing concerts and being the best artist I can be,” she said, “is a contribution to society.”

Anthony Tommasini
The New York Times, 10/3/11

Chronicle of August 2011

2011-10-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

Jon Pareles takes in the sound of gridlock. Holland Tunnel entrance, New York, NY. "A red-white-and-blue sign at the corner of West Broadway and Watts Street in SoHo reads, Don’t Honk -- $350 Penalty. It is, shall we say, not always heeded. This corner is a five-way crossing, where Broome Street forks into Watts, which leads to the Holland Tunnel, and crosses West Broadway, which has two-way traffic. The tunnel entrances themselves run smoothly, if slowly; traffic police officers are there. But the New Jersey exodus has to back up somewhere, and this corner is one of those places. Amid this gridlock is a whole lot of self-expression via car horns and the occasional, ah, verbal admonition. That’s why I was there . . . with a notebook, a digital recorder, a pair of omnidirectional microphones and some of the spirit of John Cage, who showed us how to find music everywhere. Critics for The New York Times have been observing the city’s unintentional artistic experiences this summer, and a rush-hour bottleneck is a smorgasbord of sonic interactions. Besides, I’ve always liked horn sections. As I took in the tone poem of gridlock, there was no doubt that the horns were the main attention getters. They were loud and varied, and they sounded from every direction in a 360-degree panorama. But the larger musical experience was a meditative drone a Minimalist would respect: sustained but subtly varying, punctuated by crescendos of activity and by contrapuntal outbreaks of honking. It was episodic, not narrative. The continuous drone was engine noise, purring and rumbling and revving, sometimes roaring with muffler trouble or the flamboyance of a loud motorcycle. Technically it was something like pink noise: the whoosh of white noise with the lower frequencies boosted. It had an underlying cycle that was suggested but not exactly enforced by the stoplights, which only stopped some people from driving into the intersection and blocking things up. Yet what was bad for traffic flow was good for listening; the more locked the grid was, the more the horns blared. There were quieter sounds, too: the squeak and chirp of suddenly deployed brakes, the rattle of loosely attached auto parts, the repeated cries of a soft-drink vendor, even a few stray sparrows twittering in West Broadway’s sparse foliage. There was sidewalk conversation in a half-dozen languages. There were stray samples of hip-hop, salsa and Top 40 coming from car radios, getting transposed downward by the Doppler effect as they faded away. Every so often there was a rhythm section too: the clack of heels and platform soles against the sidewalk, and, at one point, the clattering respiration of a Thermo King refrigerator truck (Had I been recording a few days later, I could have had a more constant, more industrial beat: the clanks of metal scaffolding being disassembled a block away on Wooster Street, with the steel tubes being heaved onto a pile for their next use, one after another at a steady clip). There was a full bestiary of horns out there, and drivers behind them. Most car horns generate at least two tones, the better to project and draw attention; some are closer than a semitone (two adjacent piano keys) for a biting attack, and some are chordal. A majority, by far, use the cheerful interval of a major third, suggestive of a fanfare, with some nonconformist minor thirds heard now and then. But there were other, more dissonant motifs, like the clogged tone of a Kia horn, a truck’s blast, and my favorite discordant moment: the sickly tone cluster of an apparently ailing Camry horn, with its pitches drooping as the driver sustained it. Sustain it she did; going nowhere, she leaned on it good and long, an exhausted snarl of frustration that did not open up the intersection one bit. The many horn soloists showed individual styles and schools. There were the one-beep wonders, satisfied with a brief hoot or heavier-handed, like the Camry lady. There were the two-timers, equally spacing their double honks or going short then long, be-beeep. There were the Morse code dots and dashers and the heavy repeaters: four, five, nine beeps. Often it seemed that one battery-powered voice would set off a cascade of responses: two notes from here and there and over there in quick succession, major third answered by minor third as if arguing over the key, or like automotive mating calls across the asphalt jungle. Every so often a virtual melody converged from multiple locations. It was far less organized than the electric car-horn organ invented by the composer Wendy Mae Chambers, or as communal as the music for squeeze-bulb horns played by the Ghanaian taxi drivers in La Drivers Union Por Por Group, but the ear pieced together something like a tune or two. There was a performance aspect along with the sounds: a suspenseful vehicular ballet of incremental progress, small spaces immediately exploited, and the sudden relieved acceleration of drivers headed uptown — not to the tunnel -- after they squeezed through the Jersey-bound hordes, sometimes making sharp zigzags into barely adjacent gaps. And at times there were what might as well have been lead vocals: angrily shouted instructions to 'Move to the left! You in the Infiniti!' ('How?' asked a burly passenger after walking back a few cars to the would-be driving coach) and the nervy voices of pedestrians steeling themselves to cross the street through the mass of cars. 'This is where we die,' one young woman announced to another. Under the Don’t Honk sign a woman attempted to wrangle her party -- a companion, a toddler and a stroller not made to fit between bumper-to-bumper bumpers -- across both Watts and Broome. 'I mean,' she said, waving at the growling, honking, unmoving cars, 'this is ridiculous, that people do this.' As she and her group ventured into the mess, the horns might have been saluting her fortitude, or warning her to watch out. Either way, it sounded better than it ever will behind the wheel" [Jon Pareles, The New York Times, 8/11/11].

August 4

Festival of Contemporary Music. Tanglewood Music Center, Lenox, MA. Programs through August 7. "In the world at large -- particularly if you spend much time watching the pop-inspired, genre-hopping goings-on at Bang on a Can, the MATA Festival, Issue Project Room, Galapagos, the Stone and Le Poisson Rouge -- recent shifts have seemed more sudden and cataclysmic. Charles Wuorinen, the composer who directed this year’s festival, which ran from [August 3 through 7] made an effort to bring together the old new music and the new new music in his programming. And he made this very much a festival of the here and now: except for several works by Milton Babbitt, who died this year, the programs were devoted fully to music by living composers. But for reasons that included composers’ goals, performers’ emphases, Mr. Wuorinen’s choices among his colleagues’ works and perhaps the atmosphere at Seiji Ozawa Hall, listeners’ expectations were often thwarted. Generally, that was a good thing: having your preconceptions about, say, Babbitt’s music overturned can be an enlivening experience. That happened on Thursday, when the cellist Fred Sherry gave a reading of Babbitt’s More Melismata (2006) that was so warm and enveloping that the piece sounded almost Bachian. If, by contrast, you are drawn to John Zorn’s music for its often antic melding of jazz, exotic pop and classical elements, you might have been surprised by À Rebours, a complex, angular tribute to Gyorgy Ligeti. Mr. Sherry and a well-trained student ensemble led by Brad Lubman played Mr. Zorn’s involved score with energy and virtuosity . . . . Mr. Lubman also led Signal, his own ensemble, in Tobias Picker’s Sextet No. 2 ('Halle’s Ravine,' 1977), an early essay in a sparkling, thorny style that has given way to more overt lyricism now that Mr. Picker is writing for the opera stage. And though you might have expected Jonathan Dawe’s Horn Trio (1993) to betray its structural DNA -- a 12-tone row borrowed from a Stockhausen work -- Mr. Dawe shaped the music with such vitality and drama that it registered as almost neo-Romantic. That is not to say that the festival’s composers were all represented by works in unaccustomed styles. Brian Ferneyhough’s Terrain (2005) is aggressive and harmonically dense, like much of his other work. But it also has the benefit of a sizzling solo violin line to rescue it from becoming an exercise in dry abstraction. Christopher Otto played that violin part brilliantly . . . with Mr. Lubman and Signal" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 8/9/11].

August 7

Festival of Contemporary Music. Tanglewood Music Center, Lenox, MA. David Fulmer . . . [performed] his Violin Concerto (2010) . . . . Fulmer is both a skilled composer and a violinist with technique to burn. . . . [H]e packed his solo line with difficult twists and played it himself . . . he was equally generous with the unremittingly spiky ensemble writing. Mr. Fulmer’s piece was one of several that used an electronic track, though a fairly subtle one built of conventional instrumental sounds. Eve Beglarian uses more tactile, inventively morphing sounds in Robin Redbreast (2003), an odd but evocative setting of a Stanley Kunitz poem for tenor (Martin Bakari) and piccolo (Henrik Heide). John Chowning’s Voices (2005) wraps a soprano line, sung here with admirable fluidity by Amy Petrongelli, in a cloak of shimmering, otherworldly timbres and processed voice recordings. And David Felder’s electronic sounds magnified the already eerie orchestral scoring in Inner Sky (1994-99), though the main focus was the flute line (more precisely, piccolo, alto, bass and standard flute lines), which Marie Tachouet played with extraordinary agility. . . . [T]wo . . . typical Babbitt works were performed . . . . In “No Longer Very Clear” (1994), a John Ashbery setting . . . the athletic soprano line is treated almost as if it were part of the instrumental ensemble. Adrienne Pardee sang it with an urbane charm, and if she was unable to project the text distinctly, she had it on Babbitt’s authority -- by way of an interview quoted in the program book -- that making the text understandable was not important here. The third Babbitt work was It Takes Twelve to Tango (1984), a short, lively version of the Argentine dance, refracted through a dodecaphonic prism. The pianist Ursula Oppens captured its lilt and understated humor . . . in a recital that also included pointed, energetic accounts of Jason Eckardt’s harmonically brittle Cuts (1996); Bernard Rands’s fragmented but glancingly Debussian Tre Espressioni (1960); Mr. Picker’s rollicking Four Études for Ursula (1996); and Jo Kondo’s High Window (1996), a hypnotic score built on tolling, slowly shifting chords" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 8/9/11].

August 8

Stravinsky Too: International Contemporary Ensemble, led by Pablo Heras-Casado. Kaplan Penthouse and Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, New York, NY. "In 2007 Claire Chase, an accomplished flutist and an ambitious, industrious organizer, spelled out her hopes for the International Contemporary Ensemble, which she founded in 2001 with a group of fellow graduates of the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. 'We want to become the first large-scale, flexible contemporary ensemble in the United States that is as important and indispensable as a city’s symphony orchestras, opera companies and theater companies,' she said in an interview with The New York Times in 2007. Four years and countless memorable events later, Ms. Chase and her colleagues are serving as artists in residence this year at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. The two concerts that the ensemble presented on Monday evening showed that insinuation into the mainstream has come without compromise: a sign of the group’s integrity and evidence of the evolution afoot at Mostly Mozart over the last decade. Both events were part of Stravinsky Too, a festival subseries devoted to Stravinsky’s music. . . . [T]he concert program’s notes attest[ed] to [Stravinsky's] crabby admiration for Mozart’s music . . . . [I]n Stravinsky’s chamber works . . . you could discern echoes of Mozart’s Classical clarity and economy, as well as his ribald humor. In an imaginative stroke the concert opened with a player piano — a Yamaha Disklavier programmed by Cory Smythe, actually -- merrily rattling its mechanized way through Stravinsky’s Study for Pianola. More works followed in seamless sequence, leaping across decades. Two trumpeters in a balcony played the astringent Fanfare for a New Theater (1964); two bassoonists across the hall answered with Lied ohne Worte (1916-18), a gangly duo. Epitaphium, a funerary 12-tone miniature for trio from 1959, eased into Three Pieces for String Quartet, a modestly radical polytonal work from 1914. . . . [T]he ensemble made its way through increasingly larger, more complex pieces, including the puckish Ragtime, built around a cimbalom’s clang, and the suave Neo-Baroque Concerto in E flat ('Dumbarton Oaks'). The climax came in a bracing, exuberant account of the Concerto for Piano and Winds, with the pianist Peter Serkin as the dynamic soloist. . . . Epitaphium returned for a close-up in an after-hours event at the Kaplan Penthouse, held up as a model for a sequence of tributes on the occasion of Stravinsky’s death in 1971, composed by Edison Denisov, Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter and Alfred Schnittke. All were impressive for their earnest economy; the Denisov and Schnittke works moved most with their evocations of fragility and tenuousness. Michael Finnissy’s Untitled Piece to Honour Igor Stravinsky, composed in 1967 and revised in 1971, rose from gauzy microtonal mystery to wiry clamor in its first American performance. John Zorn’s precocious, scuttling Canon for Igor Stravinsky (Ode for a Crayfish), a pithy 1972 homage, received its world premiere in a last-minute addition to the program. Fittingly, Stravinsky had the last word, in an exactingly performed, exuberant account of his ingenious Octet conducted by Mr. Heras-Casado" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 8/9/11].

August 9

Some Like It Hot -- The Music of Marilyn Monroe: Rebecca Kilgore, with the Harry Allen Quartet. Feinstein's, Loews Regency, New York, NY. "In 1920 Irving Berlin wrote After You Get What You Want, one of the best songs ever written about the heart of a fickle playboy, which Monroe sang 34 years later in the movie There’s No Business Like Show Business. 'You’re like a baby,' announces a song that distills the dynamics of the restless erotic chase and its aftermath. 'After you get what you want, you don’t want what you wanted at all.' To hear Rebecca Kilgore sing it as a bouncy jazz number in her wonderful show . . . was to hear a mature woman’s touch affectionately applied to lyrics that could bite, if sung with an accusatory edge. Ms. Kilgore, accompanied by the Harry Allen Quartet (Mr. Allen on tenor saxophone, Rossano Sportiello on piano, Joel Forbes on bass and Chuck Riggs on drums), took the sex-kitten gloss out of songs to which Monroe had half-jokingly applied a flirtatious wink while retaining Monroe’s attitude of playful camaraderie. A pop-jazz singer whose fluent voice conjures sunlight glinting on running water, Ms. Kilgore infuses everything she performs with a sense of lighthearted enjoyment. Her phrasing, like Monroe’s, is naturally curvaceous, although underlined with a stronger current of swing. Instead of striking the pose of a singing pin-up, she conveys the frisky, fun-loving sensibility of a good sport. Delivering ballads like I’m Through With Love and Incurably Romantic, she refrained from moping. Mr. Allen is more than a bandleader. He is Ms. Kilgore’s musical partner in a tribute that is entirely loving and respectful. His saxophone, alternately exuberant and husky, gave the show a steady pulse of sexy good humor, and his solos caught fire. Ms. Kilgore conceded that some of the material, like Jim Scott’s She Acts Like a Woman Should, which Monroe recorded in 1953, was 'a little unliberated,' but resisted applying an ironic edge. Her most poignant story recalled Monroe’s close friendship with Ella Fitzgerald. Dave Frishberg and Alan Broadbent’s little-known song Marilyn Monroe supplied the evening’s epilogue in its evocation of a goddess who was dreaming, along with her audience, of 'a friendly world where a little girl could be real and true.' Who was she? 'She was Hollywood/She was Marilyn Monroe'" [Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 8/11/11].

August 10

39th Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival: Orion String Quartet. St. Francis Auditorium, Santa Fe, NM. "The program . . . offered Lowell Liebermann’s Quartet for Piano and Strings (2010). Now 50, Mr. Liebermann is a prolific composer who has gained popularity for works written in an accessible, neo-Romantic style. This work, a single 18-minute movement, begins with the piano playing a murmuring, repetitive figure and softly chiming chords. The three strings enter, one at a time, with a wistful melody. Mostly pensive, the piece has only one surprise, when the instruments break into whirling, frenzied figurations. The music, though skillfully written, is safe, tame and eager to please. But the pianist Joyce Yang, the violinist Giora Schmidt, the violist Lily Francis and the cellist Felix Fan gave a sensitive performance" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 8/12/11].

Lincoln Center Out of Doors: Todd Reynolds, Sxip Shirey, Adam Matta, Laurie Anderson, and Lou Reed. "[T]his . . . was a double bill of idiosyncratic violinist-composers . . . . Todd Reynolds . . . shar[ed] the stage with Sxip Shirey, a composer and multi-instrumentalist, and Adam Matta, who makes percussion sounds vocally. Laurie Anderson closed the show with “The Real New York,” a work that she wrote in recent weeks. Laurie Anderson closed the show with “The Real New York,” a work that she wrote in recent weeks. Ms. Anderson’s concerts usually present expansive, semitheatrical, multimedia pieces, and you could see the seeds of such a production here, though she was backed by a small ensemble -- Rob Burger on piano and electric keyboards, Eyvind Kang on viola -- with nothing in the way of video, thematic projections or stage movement. Ms. Anderson sometimes played her electric violin, mostly in instrumental interludes, and recited a characteristically amusing -- or was it depressing? -- text laced with tart observations about modern life, particularly though not exclusively in New York. There were timely references to mayhem on Wall Street, riots in London, the earthquake in Japan and the civil lawsuit filed against Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Words or short phrases -- 'hard times' and 'delirium,' which were also titles of discrete sections of the piece -- returned like leitmotifs. And Ms. Anderson looked amused when police or ambulance sirens on Amsterdam Avenue seemed to fit snugly into the musical texture, built mostly around hypnotic beats and repeated short figures. As a lagniappe of sorts, Ms. Anderson’s husband, Lou Reed, joined the ensemble for the closing piece, a short instrumental jam in which Mr. Reed played a tentative, quirkily melodic solo line against the vigorous chordal backdrop provided by Ms. Anderson and company. Mr. Reynolds began with an exploration of looping -- an electronic technique in which phrases are played live, then repeated on recording as accompaniment to new live material -- from his recent CD, “Outerborough,” and a spirited account of Michael Lowenstern’s “Crossroads,” a mashup of the old Robert Johnson recording and bluesy violin figures. But most of Mr. Reynolds’s set was a freewheeling stage party, in which he was joined by a posse of new-music fiddlers and a tuba player, as well as Mr. Shirey and Mr. Matta. Some of the ensemble’s offerings were untitled improvisations. Mr. Shirey played harmonica, a modified guitar (with paper clips on the strings) and a table full of quotidian objects used as percussion; Mr. Matta provided beats; and Mr. Reynolds filled in the spaces. The group closed the set with a high-energy account of Mr. Shirey’s I Live in New York City: as it turned out, a contrastingly upbeat curtain raiser to Ms. Anderson’s piece" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 8/11/11].

August 11

Gian Carlo Menotti’s Last Savage. Santa Fe Opera, Santa Fe, NM. "[When it] had its American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in early 1964, after its introduction at the Opéra Comique in Paris, its poor reception was explained by defenders as a case of bad timing. Just two months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and with the civil-rights movement spawning both courageous demonstrations and brutal crackdowns, audiences were not disposed, it was thought, to an absurd comedy about the perky daughter of an American millionaire who, as a project for an anthropology degree, is determined to find a primitive man, the 'last savage,' and take him to America for studies. The Met production featured a starry cast, including George London, Roberta Peters, Nicolai Gedda and Teresa Stratas, with Thomas Schippers conducting. Though the opening night Met audience cheered, The Last Savage soon fizzled and has never caught on. The Santa Fe Opera has gambled that in this year of Menotti’s centennial the time has come for a fresh look at The Last Savage. A colorful, antic-filled and shamelessly campy production, directed by Ned Canty, opened here [in July]. On [August 14] the audience laughed and cheered Menotti’s inane entertainment. I was glad for the chance to see this curious rarity. The gifted cast, headed by the appealing bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch . . . was uninhibitedly exuberant. George Manahan led a vibrant account of Menotti’s score, which has moments of real invention amid much lightweight filler. Still, I’m not sure there will ever be a right time for this silly opera. . . . [There are] demonstrations of avant-garde art, including a snippet of music in the 'new alien dodecaphonic style,' performed by a string quartet and a severe soprano singing phony German. The contemporary-music wars of the 1960s did a lot of harm, and 12-tone dogma invites kidding. . . . Now that those partisan decades are past and composers are free to write as they choose, Menotti’s music can be heard anew. The long overture has breezy grace, rather like a Broadway take on Gilbert and Sullivan. Some Neo-Classical bits in the manner of jaunty Prokofiev are fun. The ensembles, for the most part, are deftly written and amusing. Now and then Menotti digs down and comes up with pungent, colorfully orchestrated harmonies" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 8/14/11].

39th Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. St. Francis Auditorium, Santa Fe, NM. "A terrific new piece . . . Sean Shepherd’s Quartet for Oboe and Strings, in its premiere performance. And Mr. Shepherd, 32, is from Reno, Nev., which should make Southwesterners here proud. Last year his chamber work These Particular Circumstances received its premiere in the New York Philharmonic’s Contact! series. . . . Shepherd’s engrossing 12-minute work begins with the oboe playing a fidgety, twisting melody, prodded along by plunked sounds and curt chords in the strings. Is the oboe line agitated or playful? The mood is wonderfully ambiguous, as is Mr. Shepherd’s pungent harmonic voice. The oboe maintains its lead role as the piece evolves, spinning out long, restless lines, setting the strings off into a rush of dotted-note-rhythm busyness. When the oboe turns elegiac, the strings play strummed chords, like a quasi-atonal guitar accompaniment. Eventually the strings take charge, for a while anyway. There are episodes of minimalist repetitions and yearning melodic flights before the dotted-note riffs return, in a transfigured state, to end the work." [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 8/12/11].

August 12

Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Santa Fe Opera, Santa Fe, NM. "[A revival of the] haunting, spare 2001 production by the director Daniel Slater. In his company debut the conductor David Robertson drew a searingly beautiful performance from the inspired orchestra and impressive cast. . . . Robertson emphasized the violent contrasts of the music, while drawing out the wondrous subtleties." [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 8/14/11].

Tan Dun conducts the Metropolis Ensemble in his Martial-Arts Trilogy. Damrosch Park, New York, NY. "Tan Dun first attracted attention with skillfully wrought concert works in which ancient Chinese folkloric instruments and techniques mingled in potent collusion with a Western avant-garde vocabulary. But it was as a composer of lavish scores for a series of prominent martial-arts films that Mr. Tan . . . became an international celebrity. His high profile drew an overflow crowd . . . for . . . a splashy multimedia event derived from three popular film scores. . . . [T]he project linked quasi-concerto suites from Mr. Tan’s music for Hero; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and The Banquet into an evening-length sequence, with scenes from the films projected on a screen behind the musicians. Mr. Tan, who conducted, clearly sees the trilogy as more than a greatest-hits medley; in effusive comments from the stage he termed it a cycle and likened it to Wagner’s Ring. If you knew the films, you recognized themes of honor, obligation and forbidden love running throughout the scenes, which were difficult to see at the start of the concert but became sharper as a gorgeous summer night wore on. Even if you couldn’t discern a plot that linked these fleeting visions of lovers and schemers, clashing armies and spectacular flying warriors, you could admire Mr. Tan’s knack for giving each film and scene its own character. His language, a mix of Hollywood grandeur and primal, percussive vitality, was consistent throughout the evening, yet each segment had its own distinct sound. In Hero Concerto the soloist Ryu Goto played two violins -- one tuned down to a violalike sob -- over passages that jolted like Prokofiev and thundered like Basil Poledouris’s potent 1982 score for Conan the Barbarian. The cellist Dane Johansen performed the extensive, ravishing solos in Mr. Tan’s warm, eloquent Crouching Tiger Concerto. In the concluding Banquet Concerto, originally fashioned for Lang Lang, the exciting young pianist Jiayi Sun barreled through Bartok-inflected combat scenes and tenderly caressed rhapsodic swells plainly inspired by Rachmaninoff. The Collegiate Chorale lent the music an epic quality . . . . The Metropolis Ensemble, a talented freelance orchestra, responded with skill and exuberance to Mr. Tan’s thrusting arms and clutching fingers. Now and then his face, captured by a camera on his music stand, filled the screen overhead: like his film music, oversize and imperious yet clearly meant to entertain" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 8/14/11].

August 12

Bard Music Festival: Sibelius and His World. Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY. "At one point here this weekend, the opening minutes of a documentary about Jean Sibelius were screened. The film’s score is the classic, almost unbearably emotional recording Sibelius made when he emerged from retirement to conduct his “Andante Festivo” over the radio in 1939. On screen was newly shot video of a car driving through the forest, then a manuscript -- meant to be Sibelius’s lost Eighth Symphony — burning in a fireplace, its corners curling in the flames. The sequence follows our traditional sense of Sibelius: a crackly recording, the snowy woods of his native Finland, a reclusive composer in a provincial land. Disturbing this fundamentally cozy image and presenting a Sibelius more complex, spiky and international are the goals of this year’s Bard Music Festival . . . . Over the first of the festival’s two weekends his work began to seem less picturesquely melancholy and more nihilistic, with structures that build just to be broken. . . . All the concerts were long and ambitious, and already at the first . . . [could be heard] intensity of the violinist Henning Kraggerud, the soloist in four of Sibelius’s Humoresques, a lively series of concertolike pieces from 1917. Mr. Botstein and the orchestra did emphasize the disturbing aspects of the works. In the second movement of the Third Symphony, a lyrical phrase travels around the orchestra, innocuous enough, but its insistent repetition becomes eerie, especially when the violins pluck over it like spiders" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 8/15/11].

August 13

Bard Music Festival: Sibelius and His World. Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY. "At a panel discussion . . . the musicologist Scott Burnham said that the slashing chords at the end of his Fifth Symphony sound 'as though we were hearing the creation of the universe taken back.' Apart from short, early stints in Berlin and Vienna and some travels later on, Sibelius, who was born in 1865, lived his entire life in Finland, where he became a supercelebrity, his music employed in the nationalistic fervor that led to the country’s independence from Russia in 1917. With well-placed fans like Olin Downes, the powerful music critic of The New York Times, he became one of the most famous composers of the early 20th century, beloved for grand, accessible orchestral works that seemed to hark back to a time before the disconcerting innovations of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. A vague mixture of factors -- pressure from his fans; depression; alcoholism -- slowed and then halted his composing in the mid-1930s. The Eighth Symphony, never finished, disappeared, and he produced next to nothing in his final decades before dying in 1957 at 91. At least in retrospect, his work is permeated by intimations of this 'mysterious lapse into silence,' as the Sibelius scholar Glenda Dawn Goss called it on Saturday. As early as the 1890s, in the first movement of his huge choral symphony, Kullervo, the strings echo a phrase in the brasses, first at full volume. Then the brasses play it again, and the echo is softer. Then it’s plucked. Then it’s just a single note. The world in Sibelius is imposing but constantly on the verge of dissolving away. As always at the Bard festival, there was a mixture of the famous -- Finlandia, Valse Triste, the Third and Fifth Symphonies -- and the less so. Kullervo got a rare hearing, as did some of Sibelius’s gorgeous songs for male chorus, his chamber pieces and works by his teachers and Scandinavian contemporaries. The festival remains, as Steve Smith memorably put it four years ago in The New York Times, 'part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit' . . . Sibelius’s gifts for atmosphere and coloristic range were . . . demonstrated in the selections from his chamber music . . . Playing Kullervo . . . the orchestra . . . was roused to a mighty finale by powerful singing from the Bard Festival Chorale, prepared by James Bagwell. Here, as at the end of the Fifth Symphony, Sibelius pulls us into a kind of slow motion, before folk melodies begin pouring out of the winds over a dirgelike march in the lower strings and brasses. . . The festival . . . attempt[ed] to connect Sibelius to styles he would have encountered when he went to Berlin and Vienna . . . and in the programs juxtaposing him with his fellow Scandinavians, he blew them out of the water; only Grieg held his own" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 8/15/11].

August 14

Bard Music Festival: Sibelius and His World: To the Finland Station: Sibelius and Russia. Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY. "[T]he festival . . . achieved true musical and conceptual coherence in the last program . . . . The connection between Sibelius and the Russian tradition — an influence that went in both directions — is the subject of an excellent essay by Philip Ross Bullock in the book accompanying the festival, Jean Sibelius and His World, from Princeton University Press . . . . Sibelius’s Canzonetta (1911) sounded like an Italian melody lost in northern woods. Arranged in 1963 by Stravinsky, who had been awarded a prize named after Sibelius, it emphasizes the line’s melancholy lilt in an octet of winds, brasses and a single double bass. Sibelius’s songs, performed by the eloquent mezzo-soprano Melis Jaatinen, sounded like extensions of Tchaikovsky’s and Rimsky-Korsakov’s, starker but with the same potent mixture of folksiness and urbanity. And in the middle of Rachmaninoff’s tumultuously virtuosic Suite No. 2 for two pianos, bookended by a Presto waltz movement and a Presto tarantella, there is a soaring Romance. Coming at the close of the weekend, it was a perfectly Sibelian gesture, a hymn in the midst of discord" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 8/15/11].

August 16

Igor Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments performed by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, conducted by Jonathan Nott. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "Mr. Nott arrived at the festival amid considerable expectations. In 2009 he presented two outstanding concertswith his Bamberg orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall, programs that included all three Bartok piano concertos in scintillating performances with the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. I had high hopes on Tuesday for his take on Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments, a score of just 12 minutes written in 1920 and revised in 1947, one of the composer’s most original and wondrously strange works. But the performance was disappointingly sluggish. Perhaps this elusive, challenging score is just not right for these players in this festival context, which involves rehearsing a lot of pieces during a crowded schedule. As its unusual title (“symphonies”) implies, the piece is Stravinsky’s exploration of myriad ways that woodwind and brass instruments can sound together. The score is a daring patchwork of fleeting episodes that variously evoke reedy pastoral music, somber organ chorales, skittish dancing and eerily syncopated chord patterns. But as played here the episodes lacked continuity and forward thrust. Mr. Nott drew some richly textured sounds from the players. Still, the performance was tentative" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 8/17/11].

August 20

Songs of Music Vale Festival. Salem, CT. Through 21. "When the artist and sometime impresario Annie Pugsley hired the flutist Joseph FireCrow to appear at an art show and concert to raise money for a charity that helps Lakota Indians, she invited him to spend a day with her at Music Vale Farm, her property in Salem, Conn., where she will hold the event. . . . [F]or Mr. FireCrow, it was all in a day’s work. A Northern Cheyenne tribesman who knows the gritty realities of reservation life, he dutifully accommodates the powwows, festivals, singular events and quirky requests that constitute the workaday life of an American Indian musician, even one with a Grammy nomination and a Native American Music Award as artist of the year. . . . Powwows and festivals often attract thousands of visitors and scores of American Indian singers and dancers -- most of them far less known than Mr. FireCrow -- who compete for modest pools of prize money. Some of the performers put on displays that play to public stereotypes, but many others offer presentations of such subtlety that the details of their execution are lost on the public. 'It’s like a duck on the water,' said Jerry Rivera, a member of the Red Storm Drum and Dance Troupe, a Staten Island-based group that will be appearing at the Nimham powwow, which will be held at the Putnam County Veterans Memorial Park. 'It looks very graceful along the surface, but when you look down underneath, you see the duck is paddling' vigorously. Mr. Rivera, whose heritage is Navajo, Apache and Southern Cheyenne, pointed to the subtleties of Native chanting. What may seem to the uninitiated to be an undifferentiated sonic stew is actually a structured set of articulated words and vocables -- syllables like 'ya' and 'hey' -- sung in a range that defines the broad geographic area the vocalists come from. Southern-style chanting lingers in the lower registers, while Northern-style chanting employs a kind of falsetto produced deep in the throat. Subtleties of rhythm are also often at play. Far from the simplistic renderings of standard Hollywood fare, the distribution of accents in Native music is a nuanced affair. It is infused with 'honor beats' -- points at which the drums break from the established rhythm -- ranging from slow and few to rapid and many, depending on whether the mallet work is mimicking muskets, machine guns or weapons that repeat at a rate in between those extremes. Typically, the rhythmic patterns are integrated with the vocals and dance moves -- which may vary widely in style and substance, depending on factors like gender, tribe and where the artist falls on the spectrum, from traditional to contemporary -- to form a complex theatrical depiction that furthers a narrative. . . . [W]ar is hardly the only subject favored in Native song; love is another. That is where the flute plays a special role as the instrument of courtship and the vehicle through which many American Indian musicians cross over into the wider contemporary music scene. Flutists, who typically fashion their instruments out of wood or bamboo, are so popular that festival organizers often hire them to perform outside of the competitions. . . . For his part, Mr. FireCrow says he is careful about how he adapts traditional themes for contemporary use. Rather than run afoul of tribal elders, he alerts them to new projects before committing himself to recordings. Once the tracks have been laid down, he is judicious about how he uses them in live performance. . . . 'The message is pretty simple,' Mr. FireCrow he said, 'and it can be done as a solo performer with just flutes and rattles and, of course, your voice'" [Philip Lutz, The New York Times, 8/12/11].

August 18

54th birthday of Tan Dun.

Bargemusic: Doris Stevenson. New York, NY. "Stevenson is a focused, thoughtful player with a strong technique and little in the way of flamboyance. That combination of qualities served her well in her curtain-raiser, two movements -- Night, with its delicate treble tracery, and the heftier but equally attractive Father’s Lullaby — from Allen Shawn’s Childhood Scenes (2002). Mr. Shawn’s Tango (2000), heard at the start of the second half, wrapped the traditional rhythms of the dance in a harmonically tart fabric. David Shohl’s Blue Guitar (2000) evokes the magical guitar in the Wallace Stevens poem The Man With the Blue Guitar, about which Stevens wrote, 'Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar.' Mr. Shohl conveyed that cryptic image imaginatively, using vaguely guitarlike figuration (broken chords and tight counterpoint), but avoiding the instrument’s natural constraints — which note combinations can be reached, for example, or how many notes a chord can have. Did the piece alter reality beyond that? Not so much, but it was an interesting start. Mr. Shohl was on hand to introduce his piece, as was David Kechley, who said he composed Pogled u Buducnost/Pogled u Proslost (Looking Forward/Looking Backward) on a visit to Sarajevo, a city that wants to move forward but also wants the world to remember what happened to it during the wars that broke up Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The work, a seven-movement suite in a mildly dissonant, angular style, captures some of that duality: in the early movements playful sections collapse into anxious, dark writing, and in the later movements the music’s tensions gradually clear, though the innocence of the opening Prologue is not quite mirrored in the Bartokian passagework of the Epilogue. Ms. Stevenson closed her concert with Frederic Rzewski’s monumental De Profundis (1991), an idiosyncratically theatrical setting of Oscar Wilde’s painfully reflective, angry prison correspondence. Mr. Rzewski asks much of a performer here: apart from reciting the text, which is interspersed through a long, dense, changeable score, the pianist must do a bit of text-free vocalizing and gesturing. Ms. Stevenson threw herself into all this gamely, and if her reading lacked the intensity that Lisa Moore and Anthony de Mare bring to the work, it still conveyed the wrenching qualities of Wilde’s text and the passion of Mr. Rzewski’s response to it" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 8/21/11].

August 19

Louis Langrée conducts the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra in Igor Stravinsky's Symphony in C. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. Repeated August 20. "Stravinsky composed the Symphony in C (1938-40) at a difficult time: with the beginning of World War II as a backdrop, he had recently buried, in quick succession, a daughter, his first wife and his mother, and had himself received a diagnosis of tuberculosis. But except for a few portentous, bass-heavy bars at the start of the work’s second and fourth movements, you would never guess from this sunny, rhythmically vital music that anything was amiss in his world. Any doubts about whether Stravinsky wanted the piece to sound as bright and ebullient as the score itself suggests are dispelled by a fascinating tape of him rehearsing the CBC Symphony Orchestra in the work. Though his comments are mostly technical (which bar the players should begin at, which instruments he wants to hear more forcefully), the performance itself says a great deal. Mr. Langrée’s reading on Saturday captured the textural trimness and transparency that Stravinsky seemed to be aiming for, and the nearly 50 years of new-music experience that have elapsed between the recording and the performance is telling: the Mostly Mozart musicians moved through the piece with a breezy ease and far greater precision than the players on the tape" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 8/21/11].

August 20

A Little Night Music: Jenny Lin plays Stravinsky and Mompou. Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, New York, NY. "[A] dazzling, incisive interpretation of the early Four Études (Op. 7, from 1908) and a thrill-filled, virtuosic performance of the final three sections of The Firebird, in Guido Agosti’s composer-approved transcription. The Catalonian composer Federico Mompou’s Segreto, Ms. Lin’s gentle, searching encore, fell entirely outside the program’s theme but was a reminder that her recent recording of Mompou’s piano music is worth searching out" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 8/21/11].

August 22

Taka Kigawa. Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY. "The French pianist Yvonne Loriod, who died last year, is said to have burst into tears when asked to perform Pierre Boulez’s daunting Piano Sonata No. 2 in the early 1950s. It’s hard to imagine that any work could intimidate Ms. Loriod, Messiaen’s wife and a brilliant advocate of new music by her husband and other composers. But Mr. Boulez’s sonata undoubtedly presents fiendish challenges for both performer and listener. The pianist Taka Kigawa, a gifted interpreter of 20th-century and contemporary repertory, offered that four-movement work during a well-attended recital . . . . Many of Mr. Boulez’s later pieces, particularly those for small ensemble, are densely complex but also visceral and colorful. But the second sonata -- with which Mr. Boulez wanted to destroy the traditional sonata form -- represents the composer at his most formidable. The work’s technical difficulties are immediately evident, but the greatest challenge for the performer is to make interpretative sense of its modernist tangents and sustain momentum for the 30-minute duration. . . . Kigawa, who grew up in Japan, said he first heard the [Stockhausen] as a child and 'couldn’t believe my ears.' Stockhausen referred to his Klavierstück series, which originated as a set of four small pieces in 1952, as 'drawings.' The 10th, written in 1961, is a colorful mix of cluster chords, glissandos and dramatic dynamic contrasts. Mr. Kigawa vividly conveyed the kaleidoscopic sonic effects, punctuated throughout by long silences. The program also included Kaija Saariaho’s Prelude and Ballade, which Mr. Kigawa aptly described as 'very atmospheric and powerful.' He offered an elegant performance of this enigmatic piece, in which fragments of melody are interwoven with rumbling figurations in the left hand. The three encores included Ligeti’s Étude No. 2, Open Strings.' Inspired by Scarlatti, Chopin, Schumann and Debussy, Ligeti said his 'own inadequate piano technique' was another impetus to compose a set of virtuosic études. The second in the set, played here with aplomb by Mr. Kigawa, explores the interval of a fifth, beginning lyrically and becoming agitated and dissonant. Mr. Kigawa also offered a colorful rendition of Feux d’artifice (Fireworks), from Debussy’s second book of preludes, and an excerpt from Mr. Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 3" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 8/24/11].

August 25

Olga Kern, Leonard Slatkin, and tthe Los Angeles Philharmonic in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, plus Elliott Carter's 'Holiday' Overture. Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA. "Slatkin and the Philharmonic allowed Kern plenty of room, at the same time firmly supporting and sustaining the inspired ebb and flow of her interpretation. Though Kern may have ebbed and flowed a bit too much in the melodious 18th variation, her fierce concentration and absolute mastery of this daunting score made it work. She blazed through its many difficult passages, articulating them cleanly. She also warmly conveyed its many moments of repose. It was a mischievous account, suiting the composer’s witty inventions, and Kern’s delivery of the finale’s surprisingly quiet coda elicited audible delight from the audience of 7,903. A prolonged standing ovation brought Kern back for a single encore: Rachmaninoff’s Moments musicaux Op.16, No. 4, crisply executed. . . . The concert’s curtain-raiser, the Philharmonic’s first performance of Elliott Carter’s 'Holiday' Overture, written in 1944 to celebrate the Allied liberation of Paris, was terrific. Its brassy Coplandesque exuberance could hardly hide Carter’s own complexly rhythmic voice just starting to emerge. Carter, who will turn 103 in December, still had a lot more to say" [Rick Schultz, Los Angeles Times, 8/26/11].

August 26

George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, with the Boston Symphony. Tanglewood Festival, Lenox, MA. "Both tuneful and bracing, a kind of amalgam of Bizet’s Carmen and Berg’s Wozzeck, Porgy and Bess is at the center of issues that continue to vex us: race, for one thing, and the confusion of genres. Is the work an opera or a musical? Are its characters underdrawn ciphers or larger-than-life archetypes? These questions have been loudly revived by a debate that has broken out over a new production, directed by Diane Paulus in Cambridge, Mass., that is expected to move to Broadway in December. In an article this month in The New York Times Ms. Paulus and her collaborators, including the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, highlighted the weaknesses they saw in the work, particularly what Ms. Parks called 'cardboard cutout characters.' In the process of 'excavating and shaping and modernizing the story,' as Ms. Paulus put it, to sell it as a commercial musical, they planned to create scenes, adjust the dialogue, invent some back stories and interpolate a more hopeful ending. In a stinging, widely read letter to The Times, Stephen Sondheim shot back that 'there is a difference between reinterpretation and wholesale rewriting.' The Tanglewood Porgy -- performed concert style, with no costumes and very limited staging -- wasn’t part of this controversy, but it made clear that the work is not a mistake to be fixed but a challenge to be met. Its characters are indeed broadly drawn, as any opera’s are. Their depths are expressed through Gershwin’s omnivorous, dazzling music rather than solely through the text, and the challenge for performers is a typically operatic one: endowing archetypes with life and individuality. Porgy in particular seems to have a dully consistent saintliness. But . . . the bass-baritone Alfred Walker gave him a wide-eyed edge of loneliness, even despair: tiny moments and inflections that created a rounded portrayal. You were reminded how powerful performances fill out operatic characters, which become more than the sum of their parts. When Sportin’ Life (the vibrant Jermaine Smith) first tempts Bess (the smooth, occasionally vague Laquita Mitchell) with a move to New York, she answers, 'I ain’t come to that yet,' and the line is set with a broken syncopation, over ominous strings and brass stabs, that speaks, far more eloquently than the line itself, to both her fragility and her dignity. This nominally unsympathetic character, a slutty drug addict, instantly becomes human. It’s far more interesting and ultimately rewarding for a performer and a director to search out the fullness of the character in these elusive corners of the score than to dismiss that score as insufficient. What the score also was . . . was incomplete. George Gershwin and his writing partners -- his brother Ira, and DeBose Heyward -- were men of the theater, amenable to cuts and adjustments, and there is no grail-like 'true' text. But while some of the changes early in the work’s history seem to have been made for dramaturgical reasons, many others were made for logistical ones, like sparing the audience a four-hour evening and sparing Porgy yet another strenuous aria (the gloomy 'Buzzard Song') in Act II that he would have had to sing eight times a week. . . . The standard cuts that were made for the original New York production in 1935 were retained . . . and others were added. Porgy is an example of an opera in which shorter does not always feel shorter: the cuts paradoxically make the piece more unwieldy and less organic. Taking out Porgy’s 'Buzzard Song,' for example, removes the first swerve of the plot toward real darkness, sapping urgency from the dramatic arc" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 8/28/11].

August 30

Philip Glass's Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation. Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA. "The transformation was that of the southern hemisphere in the mid '80s. The life is timeless in this essay in spiritual wonder, astounding humanity and miraculous beauty. The film [by Godfrey Reggio] has become an art-circuit classic, occasionally screened with Glass playing the soundtrack live. But Powaqqatsi has probably never looked better, sounded more sumptuous or mattered more than . . . [this performance] at the Hollywood Bowl. It looked so good because of the startlingly vivid projection on a large screen draped over the shell, which helped the Bowl to function like a sacred space on this dark night. Glass’ score sounded new because it was. Two summers ago the Los Angeles Philharmonic commissioned Glass to make an orchestral version of his score to Koyaanisqatsi for the Bowl. [This concert] . . . was the premiere of a newly orchestrated version of the sequel (which was originally released in 1988), once more commissioned by the orchestra, and this time also utilizing the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus along with the Philip Glass Ensemble. The film mattered because it deals with critical issues about how traditional cultures endure in the modern world. At the Bowl, a collective some 7,500 strong gathered outdoors attending to the profane and profound urgencies of a planet and its inhabitants in a ceremony of image and sound. What Powaqqatsi means is a topic for a long conversation. The word is Hopi for the sorcerer in us that consumes the life forces of others in order to further our own life. Reggio’s film consists entirely of images, offered without comment or overt judgment, of cities and villages in Brazil, Egypt, Kenya, Peru, India, Hong Kong, Israel, France, Nepal and Berlin. Glass visited all the locations, many during the shooting with Reggio. The score and film were made together, and the diversity of subject matter is dizzying.
Powaqqatsi begins in an enormous open-pit gold mine in Brazil, where tens of thousands of miners carry heavy sacks of dirt in a choreography of hardship but also of an astonishing collective will. A worker is injured and carried out, Christ-like. The searing vision is unforgettable. Reggio’s camera falls in love in with faces, young and old, of all ethnicities. . . . Tawdry São Paulo skyscrapers, seen from a helicopter’s perspective, are like eerie, fantastic canyons, and at the Bowl we saw them while helicopters militantly flew over our heads. Whew! Glass’ score sews different threads. Always a composer with an attachment for world music (his first Minimalist musings in the '60s were inspired by Ravi Shankar), he made here one of his first large-scale works that tied together a number of musical cultures. Of particular note was the application of African music. The Gambian singer and kora player, Foday Musa Suso, Glass' guide in Africa, collaborated on the soundtrack. The score also features Glass' most extensive and exciting use of percussion up to the time. The original Powaqqatsi score was mainly for Glass’ small keyboard, winds and vocal ensemble, enhanced by strings, brass, percussion and a small Latin American children’s chorus. For the Bowl, the ensemble, with Glass as one of the keyboard players and Michael Riesman expertly conducting, was enhanced by the full orchestra and children’s chorus with a certain amount of caution, lest the larger orchestration take away some of the punch heard on the ensemble’s Powaqqatsi recording. Still, an added sonic scale suited both the grandeur of Reggio’s camera and the venue. The L.A. Children’s chorus made the biggest impression, their massed voices were thrilling from the first moments of the evening when they began the national anthem a cappella. But I did miss Glass' curious arrangement of the national anthem that he made for Koyaanisqatsi at the Bowl in 2009. Ben Youcef sang Suso’s stirring call to prayer. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of this Powaqqatsi presentation was its ability to create a mood at the Bowl. Hollywood, whether it’s the Bowl or the business, doesn’t have a strong record these days in holding an audience’s high-minded attention. Not everyone . . . turned away from picnics to watch the film, refrained from talking or could stop the urge to check cellphones for messages. But for the vast majority, the bigger message was that a large world outside our narrow concerns calls for our undivided attention, and that made this Powaqqatsi uniquely moving and important" [Mark Swed, The New York Times, 8/31/11].

August 31

Goat Hall Productions presents The Kurt Weill Project. Cafe Royale, San Francisco, CA.

Opera Moderne presents A Modern Tryst: George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children, and music of Tobias Picker and Libby Larsen. Galapagos Art Space, New York, NY. " Kristin Sampson . . . [sang] three passionately delivered arias from Tobias Picker’s 1996 opera, Emmeline. . . . The soprano Laura Strickling brought a flexible voice, crystalline diction and warm presence to Libby Larsen’s poignant Songs From Letters (1989), set to selections from notes that the notorious frontierswoman Calamity Jane wrote to her daughter, Jane, but never sent. With spare, angular vocal lines and accompaniment (provided sensitively by the pianist Liza Stepanova), the songs shift with swift effectiveness from anger to tenderness and back again. George Crumb’s gorgeous Ancient Voices of Children, which he set to surreally vivid texts by Federico García Lorca in 1970, was the concert’s highlight. Mr. Crumb arranged fragments of those poems into five songs and two interludes that are something between a Bach cantata and an exotic ritual. The work’s mezzo-soprano (here the focused, elaborately made up Suzanne Chadwick) moves from keening vocalise to ghostly lyricism. . . . The music hypnotically juxtaposes tiny, almost inaudible sensations with grand gestures and huge, shimmering crashes" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 9/1/11].

Book

2011-10-01T19:30:00.000-07:00

Marc Spitz. Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue. Gotham Books. "When Keith Richards’s Life arrived last year, nice things were said about Mr. Richards, whose book said nasty things about Mick Jagger. Mr. Jagger has not struck back with his own side of the story. But Marc Spitz’s Jagger is an eager hagiography that takes aim at Mr. Richards while trumpeting Mr. Jagger’s overlooked fine qualities. Although Mr. Spitz calls himself a neutral party, Jagger is out to settle scores" [Janet Maslin, The New York Times, 8/30/11].

Recordings

2011-10-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

Jefferson Friedman. String Quartets No. 2 and 3. Chiara String Quartet and Matmos. New Amsterdam Records. "Jefferson Friedman is a tough composer to pigeonhole, given his high-energy eclecticism and his penchant for free appropriation of both rock and classical conventions. He has an original, compelling voice as well as ideas that draw you in and make you want to see where he will take them; yet if you listen closely, his basic materials are essentially the same as those that his predecessors have used, only juxtaposed in different, often daring ways. If you think of the two string quartets here, Mr. Friedman’s Second (1999) and Third (2005), as neo-Romantic works, you won’t be wrong, at least most of the time. Both begin with vigorous, hard-driven movements in a tonal if purposefully brash style, and they sound surprisingly conventional until Mr. Friedman veers off toward unusual byways of rhythm or timbre. One odd turn in the Second Quartet is a slow movement that sounds oddly medieval at first, then melts into a lush, Romantic section that gives way in turn to a choralelike chordal section. Near the end of the Third Quartet’s second movement, the players are asked to slide into their notes, creating an odd, spacey effect in dense passages. Yet from within that weird, slippery texture, a set of solid, repeating, consonant chords emerge, bringing the movement to an unusually eerie, slow finale. The Chiara String Quartet has made these works centerpieces of its live repertory in recent seasons, and the vital performances reflect the players’ devotion to Mr. Friedman’s work. In an original touch, New Amsterdam has included two remixes by Matmos, an electronic music group, which took passages from the quartet recordings and reconfigured them imaginatively by weaving in beats, drones and computer timbres, and making them into virtually new works" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 8/25/11].

Tinariwen. Tassili. "In the language of the Tuareg nomads who for centuries have roamed the most remote reaches of the southern Sahara, 'tinariwen' means 'deserts.' But ever since the musical group of that name released its first CD in 2001, its members have recorded not on their home turf but in much the same way that American and European bands do: in the artificial environment of a recording studio, in cities like Paris and Bamako, Mali. With Tassili . . . Tinariwen, whose music is a hard-rocking hybrid of Berber, Arab, Western and black African styles, has sought to return to its beginnings. Named for a spectacular area of canyons and sandstone arches near Algeria’s border with Libya, the CD was rehearsed and recorded out of doors there, in tents and around campfires much like those where the group’s founding members, political exiles then living in refugee settlements, first came together to play. 'We wanted to go back to our origins, to the experience of ishumar,' which means exile or being adrift, explained Eyadou ag Leche, the band’s bass player, speaking in French during an interview in New York in July. 'Those were times when we would sit around a campfire, singing songs and passing around a guitar. Tinariwen was born in that movement, in that atmosphere, so what you hear on Tassil is the feeling of ishumar'" [Larry Rohter, The New York Times, 8/31/11].

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / September 2011

2011-09-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

September 2011

Volume 18, Number 9

Work-in-Progress, 7/31/11

Chronicle of July 2011

Illustration / Amy Winehouse

Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
CORRESPONDENTS

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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@gmail.com. Materials for review may be sent to the same address.

INFORMATION FOR ADVERTISERS

Send all inquiries to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Chronicle of July 2011

2011-09-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

July 23

Death of Amy [Jade] Winehouse (b. 9/14/83, London, UK), at 27. London. "[She was] the British singer who found worldwide fame with a sassy, hip-hop-inflected take on retro soul, yet became a tabloid fixture as her problems with drugs and alcohol led to a strikingly public career collapse. "[A]lmost from the moment she arrived on the international pop scene in early 2007, Ms. Winehouse appeared to flirt with self-destruction. She sang of an alcohol-soaked demimonde in songs like Rehab -- whose refrain, 'They tried to make me go to rehab/I said, ‘No, no, no,’ ' crystallized Ms. Winehouse’s persona -- and before long it seemed to spill over into her personal life and fuel lurid headlines. The interplay between Ms. Winehouse’s life and art made her one of the most fascinating figures in pop music since Kurt Cobain, whose demise in 1994 -- also at age 27 -- was preceded by drug abuse and a frustration with fame as something that could never be escaped. Yet in time, the notoriety from Ms. Winehouse’s various drug arrests, public meltdowns and ruined concerts overshadowed her talent as a musician, and her career never recovered. . . . [A]s the news of Ms. Winehouse’s death spread, many . . . took to Twitter with deep sadness but no surprise. . . . Winehouse’s most recent comeback attempt faltered badly. Last month, she canceled a European tour after a performance in Belgrade on the first night, during which she appeared to be too intoxicated to perform properly" [Ben Sisario, The New York Times, 7/23/11].

Festival of International Laureates. Eduard Schmieder's iPalpiti. Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA. "Schmieder began and ended with pieces by young composers who later rejected the works. The opener was Benjamin Britten’s Young Apollo, an odd but cheerful eight-minute fanfare for piano, string quartet and string orchestra written in 1939. The closer was the two movements of a student string quartet that Rachmaninoff never finished but later in life revived by orchestrating for strings as Romance and Scherzo. The Britten is worth the bother. The 26-year-old composer, a pacifist who had fled England, was newly arrived in the U.S. He wrote the fanfare on commission from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. His inspiration was Keats’ Hyperion, with its 'new dazzling Sun-god, quivering with radiant vitality.' Britten played the brilliant piano part at the premiere in Toronto. But without explanation, he withdrew the piece and it was only revived in 1979, three years after his death. . . . [In this concert,] it quivered with radiant vitality anew. Svetlana Smolina, an outstanding Russian pianist with a luxuriant tone, was the evening’s underused soloist. Her piano was placed behind the orchestra, and she didn’t stand out quite as much as she might have. Still she caught both the flicker of the young Sun-god and also found urgency in the flashy solo part. Smolina was then the harpsichordist in the next piece, a Concerto Grosso for string quartet and string orchestra by Avner Dorman. Written in 2003 when the Israeli composer was 28, this is a piece that Dorman, who has become hot lately, may, himself, think about withdrawing. It is an update of Handel and Vivaldi, something that was already tired a decade or two ago. But the players sawed away with verve and the score went down easily. Different members of the ensemble formed the solo string quartets in the Britten and the Dorman. There wasn’t a weak player to be heard all evening. A controversial arrangement of the slow first movement of Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony by a German composer and conductor, Hans Stadlmair, was the most significant piece on the program. Here, a great dying composer enters new ethereal realms while simultaneously struggling with his deepest despair. The Adagio is one of music’s most profound depictions of the ineffable thin thread that separates life and death. Stadlmair reduced Mahler’s large orchestra to 15 strings, in a version that Gidon Kremer recorded with his Kremerata Baltica a decade ago. Schmieder has raised the ante slightly to 23 strings, which still means that without the weight of a full orchestra, Mahlerian ecstasy and anguish are both moderated. On the other hand, there is something very moving about intimately confronting Mahler’s beatific and tortured last thoughts with only a few strings. Schmieder’s approach was very much in the direction of chamber music. With sweeping and expressive arm gestures, he led an even-handed and slightly otherworldly account of the Adagio, more on the side of Mahler’s angels than his devils. The intonation and balances were beautiful. . . . The Romance and Scherzo proved an unnecessary curiosity, though. The teenager who wrote these two movements was not yet Rachmaninoff, although the intimations of his harmonic fingerprints could be detected. A week earlier in Beverly Hills, Schmieder gave the U.S. premiere of Kareem Roustom’s Three Klezmer Dances for violin, tambourine and strings, and he repeated it in a shortened version as an encore Saturday. No one knows where the Middle East is headed. But here was hope. A composer from Syria has made lovingly fanciful arrangements of Jewish music. The violin soloist, Daniel Turcina -- stepping out from an orchestra made up of Jews, Christians and Muslims from 19 countries -- is Slovakian. He played with improvisatory sounding fire and soul" [Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 7/24/11].

July 24

Summergarden: New Juilliard Ensemble. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. "New Juilliard Ensemble offered a concise overview of contemporary quartet composition that touched on several contrasting approaches: among them the painterly, the emotional, the dramatic and the abstract. In Barefoot Boy! (2004), Jiri Kaderabek captures a peculiarly evocative image from Humility, a poem by the early-20th-century Czech poet Jiri Wolker . . . . Kaderabek’s arsenal includes a slow opening unison figure that sounds vaguely folkloric; then the individual instruments peel off to investigate separate rhythmic and harmonic worlds. The interplay is striking, and toward the end of the score, a variant of the folk theme -- a bit eerier this time -- is restored. The Figure (2007), Judith Lang Zaimont’s quartet, is concerned with the way a musical line -- the 'figure' of the title -- can waft through a work, sometimes varied, sometimes without variation but with different character and coloration. The figure itself, graceful and consonant, is inviting enough to sustain this kind of exploration, and Ms. Zaimont makes the most of it: in relatively quick succession she takes her theme through driven, rhythmically involved, darkly introspective and sweetly lyrical episodes, often weaving textures around it that are more fascinating than the figure itself. Carson Cooman is drawn toward sophisticated pictorialism. The titles of his Four Aphoristic Inventions (2003) -- 'Disparate Conversation,' 'Mountain Climber (Unyielding Peak),' 'Wishing Well,' and 'Guillotine' -- accurately describe the music, but Mr. Cooman avoids predictable effects. “Mountain Climber,” for example, has the cello trying to surmount the harsh, aggressively sawed wall of sound that the other three instruments produce, and though 'Guillotine' ends with the expected sharp cutoff, the music leading to it is fresh and appealing, and the final gesture is more subtle than its predecessor in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Mr. Cooman was also represented by his melancholy Tombeau-Aria (2003) and by Estampie (2008), a vigorous, glancingly neo-medieval violin duet. The expert quartet -- David Fulmer and Rebekah Durham, violinists; Jennifer Chang, violist; and Avery Waite, cellist -- closed the program with a high-energy reading of Louis Andriessen’s bebop-inspired Facing Death (1990). This is an unabashedly jazzy piece, both melodically and rhythmically: death, presumably, is to be faced with a certain swagger and vitality. The players kept that essential quality in focus, even as Mr. Andriessen’s themes ventured into increasingly dense harmonic territory" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 7/25/11].

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / August 2011

2011-08-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

August 2011

Volume 18, Number 8

Chronicle of June 2011

Illustration / Sebastian Currier

Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
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@gmail.com.

Typeset in Times New Roman. Copyright 2011 by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC. This journal is printed on recycled paper. Copyright notice: Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC.

The Journal is also online at 21st-centurymusic.com and 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com

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@gmail.com. Materials for review may be sent to the same address.

INFORMATION FOR ADVERTISERS

Send all inquiries to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Chronicle of June 2011

2011-08-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

June 1

Ryoji Ikeda's The Transfinite. Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY. Through June 11. "Data has no aesthetic properties, and the composer Ryoji Ikeda, making music out of data, goes in hard for aesthetics: so much that he dares you to think his art contains nothing but. His best work makes epiphanies out of simple digital noises: tiny, evenly separated blips of static, soft applications of sub-bass, a bell tone, lots of space; dance rhythms, sometimes, if you want them to be. (They involve much more thought and organization than that, but he doesn’t make you very aware of the creator’s hand.) His CDs seem to describe a physical environment, but it’s better if you hear them in a room where he’s set up the speakers. The Transfinite . . . lasts only 9 minutes 20 seconds before it loops, but it’s dynamic and intense, almost orchestral, without a single melody. On giant screens, including part of the floor, it visualizes the music’s digital cross-breezes into bar codes and binary patterns. The Armory puts the piece in an environment you can walk through, with different sounds pointing in different directions in the hall. It’s dark, and you feel insignificant in the big room amid the big sounds; it seems like a natural world in there, a clearing in the digital forest. You may find yourself reacting to music on a more basic level than usual, going animal: you may want to prowl in circles, feel the cool white floor with your cheek, chase after echoes" [Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, 6/3/11].

June 2

Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Alan Gilbert, in the premiere of Sebastian Currier's Time Machines. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "She was riveting in the premiere of the American composer Sebastian Currier’s Time Machines (2007). Mr. Gilbert, a consistently impressive conductor of contemporary music, drew assured and rapturous playing from the orchestra in Mr. Currier’s demanding 30-minute score, composed in 2007. . . . Currier writes that each of the seven movements of Time Machines explores 'some aspect of the relationship between the perception of music and time.' Of course, you could argue that every musical work is an exploration of time. But this one takes that challenge seriously. In the first movement, 'Fragmented Time,' the violin plays a near-continuous line of buzzing, fitful notes, riffs and chords. The orchestra reacts with nervous harmonic bursts, skittish figures for an intrusive piano and, now and then, a sustained series of chords that seem to want to stop the music cold. In a way, the violin is all that holds the movement together. The subsequent movements explore other elements of time and space. 'Delay Time' is like an eerie prolongation of a reverberating sound. 'Compressed Time,' true to its title, is all wired energy and abrupt phrases, with the violin tossing off a stream of 16th notes that could be some crazed perpetual-motion toccata. Though this work is driven by Mr. Currier’s handling of rhythm and time, the music’s harmonic allure and textural richness were often its most striking qualities. Mr. Currier’s musical language, which draws from tonal and atonal sources, if not pathbreaking, is very personal. With his acute ear and sensitivity to color, whole passages of the piece were rapturously beautiful, especially the mystical final movement, 'Harmonic Time.' Ms. Mutter played magnificently" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 6/3/11].

June 10

Someone Talked! Joan Morris and Robert White, accompanied by William Bolcom. Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY. "[T]he show was a cozy, familial affair well stocked with little anecdotes -- Mr. Bolcom’s memories of his boyhood newspaper route . . . . But the 28 selections, by names like Loesser and Mercer and Berlin, gave a good sense of the range of work during the period, from peppy anthems to melancholy ballads. The audience was told to 'just imagine you’re in a radio station during World War II,' but the mood was really closer to Mr. Schumacher’s observation about Eddie DeLange and Sam H. Stept’s stirring This Is Worth Fighting For, which closed the first half: 'It’s like a Norman Rockwell painting in music.' . . .
Ms. Morris, a wonderful artist who introduced many of Mr. Bolcom’s works, including his masterpiece, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, pointed the texts of her selections with purpose" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 6/12/11].

June 11

Philip Glass. Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY. "Followers of the composer Philip Glass could scarcely miss a turn in recent decades from the hypnotic extended works that earned him the Minimalist label toward the traditional forms and trappings of the classical music mainstream. Interviewing Mr. Glass onstage in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday night, Richard Guérin, the associate director of Mr. Glass’s record label, Orange Mountain Music, noted the development. 'If you told somebody in 1972 that we’d be here listening to your Fifth String Quartet, a lot of people wouldn’t believe it,' Mr. Guérin said. 'They still wouldn’t believe it,' Mr. Glass replied. His response drew laughter from the large, clearly devoted audience on hand to hear the Days and Nights Festival Players, the house band Mr. Glass has assembled for his new summer festival in Carmel Valley, Calif., scheduled for August. Tradition must surely be on Mr. Glass’s mind: with his recently completed Symphony No. 9, which will have its American debut at Carnegie Hall on his 75th birthday next January, he has achieved a fearful symmetry with Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner and Mahler. (Lest you worry about Mr. Glass’s health, know that he mentioned having already finished a 10th Symphony.) His festival will look partly back to the chamber music he admired in his youth, including performances of pieces by Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schoenberg, Bartok and Shostakovich. Mr. Glass’s quartets provide evidence of a mostly graceful transition. The First, from 1965, is like a sliver chipped from one of Morton Feldman’s imposing glaciers; three more quartets, unnumbered, count among his juvenilia. But Mr. Glass’s four mature quartets, Nos. 2 to 5, show him using the surging, shifting rhythms and tumbling arpeggios of his early Minimalist works as building blocks for pieces that hew close to Classical notions of proportion and pacing, along with an almost Romantic emotional acuity. The repetitions remain but seldom linger. In the violinists Maria Bachmann and Tim Fain, the violist David Harding and the cellist Matt Haimovitz, Mr. Glass had performers well versed in his style and keenly aware of what precedents he meant to evoke. If the group did not yet sound like a polished ensemble in its account of Mr. Glass’s genially restless Fifth Quartet, it compensated with deliriously beautiful sound and expressive spirit. (In a sense, this was a premiere: in the interview Mr. Glass said that he had fixed a wrong note present since the work’s inception in 1991.) With the pianist Jon Klibonoff, Ms. Bachmann played Mr. Glass’s Sonata for Violin and Piano with the kind of intensity and ardor normally reserved for Romantic fare, an approach that suited the restless permutations of the outer movements and the limpid central section. Mr. Klibonoff also joined Mr. Fain for the American premiere of Pendulum, a brief, coursing showpiece given a whirlwind account" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 6/19/11].

Book Review

2011-08-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

Balint Andras Varga. Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers. University of Rochester Press, 2011.

Few books seem to merit immediate review. This is one of them. The queries posed by Balint Andras Vara in his Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers are

1. Have you had an experience similar to Witold Lutoslawski's: he heard John Cage's Second Piano Concerto on the radio -- an encounter which changed his musical thinking and ushered in a new creative period, the first result of which was his Jeux Venetians (1960-1961).

2. A composer is surrounded by sounds. Do they influence you and are they in any way of significance to your compositional work?

3. How far can one speak of a personal style and where does self-repetition begin?

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / July 2011

2011-07-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

July 2011

Volume 18, Number 7

Good and Evil with Behzad Ranjbaran

Mythologies / Phillip George

Chronicle of May 2011

Recording

Illustration / Behzad Ranjbaran

Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
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@gmail.com.

Typeset in Times New Roman. Copyright 2011 by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC. This journal is printed on recycled paper. Copyright notice: Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC.

The Journal is also online at 21st-centurymusic.com and 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com

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@gmail.com. Materials for review may be sent to the same address.

INFORMATION FOR ADVERTISERS

Send all inquiries to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Good and Evil with Behzad Ranjbaran

2011-07-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

Behzad Ranjbaran is an Iranian-American composer who teaches at the Julliard School of Music in New York. I caught up with him at the Four Points Sheraton on May 1, 2011, just before a performance of his Mithra, with the Marin Symphony.

ALBURGER: Perhaps you can tell us about Mithra.

RANJBARAN: Tonight's concert features Mithra, which I wrote last year.

ALBURGER: How did you get connected with the Magnum Opus Project?

RANJBARAN: I received a call from Meet the Composer that I had been award one of the grants from Kathryn Gould.

ALBURGER: Just out of the blue.

RANJBARAN: It was a very generous gesture towards promoting new music. I was very happy to accept the offer, which involved performances with three orchestras.

ALBURGER: Oakland as well.

RANJBARAN: And Santa Rosa, which was where the premiere occurred last year. I think this should be a model for the rest of the country: to initiate large works, not just for one orchestra, but several at once. I'm very happy that a number of performances are happening here. Next year the Philadelphia Orchestra is going to bring my Saratoga for the centennial of the San Francisco Symphony.

ALBURGER: Assuming the Philadelphia Orchestra's still in existence, what with the bankruptcy.

RANJBARAN: That is just a phase to reorganize their finances. I assume that will be short term. And also, this summer, Cabrillo Festival will bring my Piano Concerto here. I am discovering the beauty of this area, and seeing what a fertile ground it is for music and art. People love to nurture quality, whether it is music or art or wine. This area reminds me of the city of Shiraz, which has a similar climate. It is famous for, obviously, Shiraz wine, which dates back several thousand years. It was there that the concept of paradise was developed! The San Francisco Bay Area also reminds me of the wine and the paradise! I feel very much at home.

ALBURGER: Are you from Shiraz?

RANJBARAN: I was born in Tehran, but I went to Shiraz in my younger years. I wrote a chamber piece, that is becoming popular, called "Shiraz" Piano Trio.

ALBURGER: Mithraism seems to offer a spin on paradise, too.

RANJBARAN: It does. It is one of the early believe systems, and the more I read, the more fascinated I became. My connection to Mithraism is very personal. In Iran, "mithra" and "mihr" are very interchangeable. "Mihr" is the aspect of Mithraism that represents "love," "affection," and "obligation." When men and women marry, the obligation is called "mihr." If you have affection for someone, this requires obligation. It's a beautiful tradition. And the seventh month of the Iranian calendar is called "mihr," and my older brother was born in that month. Mithraism is a fascinating belief system that was very popular from India all the way to England for an extended period of time, until Christianity took over. The idea of resurrection, the concept of drinking wine and eating bread.

ALBURGER: That good Shiraz wine!

RANJBARAN: So, a lot of these traditions influenced Christianity -- although the Roman concept of Mithraism was very different from the Persian origins of the religion. And Mithrasism was never unified the way Islam or Christianity was. But it influenced Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- a common heritage for all these cultures, all these religions. That, to me, is a message of universality: that we are all connected; that we are all one.

ALBURGER: How does this work out in the music?

RANJBARAN: I tried to explore three aspects of Mithra in the piece, as three sections: interrelated and connected. A continuous piece of music. The first part is very meditative. It features the solo flute, inspired by the Persian ney. I always felt that the bamboo flute is the most universal instrument around the world. From thousands of years ago, it was natural to express one's feeling through the bamboo flute.

ALBURGER: Performed on a metal flute! What kind of accompaniment? Drone?

RANJBARAN: Harp, which, in ancient times, was the instrument that accompanied reciting poets.

ALBURGER: You're buying into ancient music traditions. What about more contemporary Persian influences?

RANJBARAN: All the melodic characters, rhythms, and improvisatory features are inspired by Iranian models, although I never use traditional Persian melodies -- rather more subtle allusions, rather than imitation.

ALBURGER: What about the second section?

RANJBARAN: More aggressive and rhythmic, representing the battle of Mithra in overcoming evil. We have that eternal conflict. Mithra represents the goodness in humans.

ALBURGER: What's the bad side in Mithraism?

RANJBARAN: Mithra overall is all good.

ALBURGER: But is there a personification of evil?

RANJBARAN: We call it "Satan."

ALBURGER: Not a different name?

RANJBARAN: "Shaytan."

ALBURGER: How about that? So close!

RANJBARAN: So the second section is energetic, with rhythmic drive. It is not a battle, but it is grand and vast. It is tense, but never reaches a finale.

ALBURGER: Well, you have another section to go.

RANJBARAN: Two numbers are important in Mithraism: "4" and "7." At the end of this middle section, we hear four strokes, and then seven.

ALBURGER: Both numbers are important in Western traditions, too.

RANJBARAN: Absolutely. Including the seventh month, when my brother was born! And the final second represents "Love." And it is soft and full of lyricism. A picture of how we hope the world will be someday!

Mythologies / Phillip George

2011-07-01T21:00:00.000-07:00

The Veterans Auditorium concessions area was bespangled with various late-60's rock memoribilia, and young people were playing chamber music of W.A. Mozart and Peter Tchaikovsky before the concert, so it was a little hard in this context to see where contemporary art music would fit into the mix. Still the Marin Symphony, under Music Director Alasdair Neale made a game effort on behalf of a relatively new work, on May 1, in their showcasing of Iranian-American composer Behzad Ranjbanan's Mithra (2009).

The c. 15-minute piece, inspired by an early Persian deity, attempts to meld Eastern and Western musical and religious sensibilities into a universal one, and does a pretty good job of it, in three interconnected sections. If the trappings of the opening flute-harp-and-brass music are inspired by Middle-Eastern ensemble practices, the execution is definitely East-Coast Academic American, in a post-romantic language that emphasizes orchestral color and common-practice modernism over any direct allusions to the forthrightness of folk music or the microtonality of the Dastgah modes.

The second section, animated and energetic, alludes to the chaos of battle, and is contrapuntal enough to definitely distance itself from the old American saw of "it's got a good beat, and you can dance to it." The most literal joints in the music are the hammerstrokes of four and seven impulses which usher in the beautiful final section. This is music of rapture and transport, and the orchestra gave the chorale-like East-West apotheosis its due, in solemn, sensual string lines that soared to spiritual heights.

Soaring as well was Zuill Baily's performance of the Antonin Dvorak Cello Concerto. The soloist seemed to personify values of the concession pre-show: here was a young virtuoso playing with all the visceral panache of a rock star -- head bobbing, face-making, and a thoroughly convincing and exciting rendition throughout. The violoncello, perhaps even more than the piano or violin, is well nigh a perfect solo vehicle when the soloist's music is memorized. Rather than the profile of the side view, the performer faces straight out, caressing and gesticulating over the voluptuous lines.

The Symphony No. 1 of Johannes Brahms wrapped up the session, in a workmanlike performance that in part captured the innovation and power of how this music must have been perceived in its premiere. But that was 135 years ago (1876), when presented by a conductor who clearly had confidence in the contemporary, rather than falling back on a program of mostly-older music.

Chronicle of May 2011

2011-07-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

May 13

Spring for Music, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Igor Stravinsky’s Concerto in D , string orchestra arrangements (by Richard Tognetti) of Bela Bartok' folksong settings, and Maria Schneider's Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories (2008, a setting of poems by a revered Brazilian poet translated into English by the poet Mark Strand), the latter conducted by the composer, with Dawn Upshaw. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "The harmonic writing is piercing and precise; the mood ambiguous, at once pensive and restless. The vocal writing deftly blends quasi-conversational phrases with soaring lyricism. . . . The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra often plays without a conductor, as it did here in the Stravinsky" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 5/15/11].

May 14

Spring for Music: The Evolution of the Symphony, in Anton Webern's Symphony and Igor Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, with Kent Nagano and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "[T]he subject of the Montreal program was not really the evolution of the symphony as a genre. Instead it focused on how the word 'symphony' has implied different things over time. In its Greek and Latin origins the word means 'sounding together.' And this program presented various works that explore how sounds combine. . . . Webern’s Symphony (Op. 21), completed in 1928, is like a distillation of the 19th-century symphony pared down to an aphoristic, nine-minute 12-tone piece. Mr. Nagano and the orchestra gave an austerely beautiful account of this seldom-heard score. The intriguing title of Stravinsky’s 10-minute Symphonies of Wind Instruments, music that combines evocations of earthy Russian folk song with funereal chorales, also implies that the composer’s imagination was inspired by the various ways the sounds of woodwind instruments combine" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 5/15/11].

May 15

Fabio Luisi, conducts The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, in Berg's "Lulu" Suite. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "That Mr. Luisi was fully up to this demanding 30-minute work was no surprise to anyone who heard him conduct the complete Lulu at the Met last May, substituting for Mr. Levine. On that occasion Mr. Luisi drew a rhapsodic, uncommonly lithe performance of this daunting score from the Met Orchestra. Berg assembled the “Lulu” Suite in 1934, the year before he died. Not having finished the third and final act of the opera, he was convinced he would never see a production, since the Nazis had come to power and had deemed his atonal music degenerate. So he drew five excerpts from the score, mostly orchestral music, with one central movement, Lulu’s Song, featuring soprano. On Sunday the Met musicians played the Berg with lush sound, impressive clarity and urgency. [Natalie] Dessay . . . brought her luminous, agile and expressive voice to the middle movement, a self-defining moment for Lulu, a shameless femme fatale who blithely goes through a series of smitten men. Here Lulu explains that she has never tried to appear anything other than what men take her to be. Ms. Dessay was riveting. Among other delights, this program offered an exploration of vocalise: wordless music for a voice singing “ah” sounds. Ms. Dessay sang three such pieces, with Rachmaninoff’s hauntingly lyrical Vocalise the best known. Ravel’s Spanish-inflected, seldom-heard Vocalise-Étude en Forme de Habanera was ideal for Ms. Dessay, whose light yet penetrating voice sent the wordless vocal lines soaring. A novelty was the Andante movement from Glière’s Concerto for Coloratura Soprano and Orchestra (1943), a piece I did not even know about. Ms. Dessay brought such lovely nuances and intensity to her singing that actual words would have seemed superfluous" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 5/15/11].

May 20

Bay Area Stage presents Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar. Vallejo, CA.

Revival of Erling Wold's Queer. Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA. Through May 29.

May 22

Thomas Zehetmair in Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s two Sonatas for Solo Violin (1927). Frick Collection, New York, NY. "Zehetmair . . . gave the premieres of these youthful works in 1987, nearly a quarter century after the composer’s death, and he has returned to them often: the Sonata No. 2 was a highlight of his New York recital debut, also at the Frick, in 1989. These are vehement, emotional essays, etched in Bachian rhythms (particularly in their closing fugues) and angular, leaping themes. Each has passages that are meant to sound harsh, offset by moments of warmth and passion. These are pieces that let Mr. Zehetmair play to his strengths: he is as adept at producing a gritty sound as he is a rounded one and often seems more attracted to acerbity than to sweetness. Mostly, he is drawn to drama, and these Hartmann scores offer plenty" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 5/23/11].

May 25

Ana Milosavljevic and Todd Reynolds. The Stone, New York, NY. "For the final two weeks of May the programming at the Stone has been in the hands of Philip Blackburn, the director of the enterprising, polyglot record label Innova. Mr. Blackburn’s idea was to present 24 one-hour concerts by musicians who record for Innova, and . . . he offered, as hours 13 and 14, what he called 'the fiddler’s hoedown from hell': back-to-back recitals by Ana Milosavljevic and Todd Reynolds, violinists for whom amplification and sound processing are integral to music-making. Ms. Milosavljevic’s new album, Reflections, is devoted to works by female composers, as was her recital, though the only overlap was a pair of her own works. She began with an electronically unadorned score, Missy Mazzoli’s meditative Dissolve, O My Heart, composed as a companion piece to the Bach Chaconne and sharing some of its rhythmic impulses. Two pieces by Eve Beglarian set the violin against electronic tracks. In Kaimos the computer sounds are distant and eerie, and if the slow, warm-toned violin line at first sounded merely incidental, it gradually wrested your attention. Ms. Beglarian’s I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long is more assertive: its violin line begins with outgoing bursts and becomes increasingly contrapuntal, thanks to a touch of digital delay. Ms. Milosavljevic’s own agreeably folk-tinged music draws on traditional Serbian and Macedonian themes. In Untitled she uses varied bowing techniques to turn a graceful theme into a showpiece, and in Reflections, in which she was accompanied by the pianist Vicky Chow, a bittersweet theme blossoms into inventive solos for both instruments. Her playing was at its hottest in Zajdi, Zajdi, which she played on the Red Viper, an electric violin with a fretted fingerboard that appears to have encouraged her to borrow timbres and techniques from the rock guitarists’ lexicon. At the late show Mr. Reynolds played a kaleidoscopic set devoted mostly to works from Outerborough, his new double album. Mr. Reynolds’s mastery of electronic processing lets him make the business of creating and regulating sound loops and triggering computer tracks while also adding layers of counterpoint look easier than it is. Those techniques drive Phil Kline’s Needle Pulling Fred, Mr. Reynolds’s opening piece and, in different ways, The End of an Orange, Paula Matthusen’s complicated essay in digital deconstruction and reconstitution. Mr. Reynolds’s set included a few multimedia pieces. David T. Little’s and the sky was still there, an affecting meditation on a female soldier’s personal clash with the military’s former 'don’t ask, don’t tell' policy on homosexuality, has video by Luke DuBois. And Michael Lowenstern’s Crossroads weaves violin improvisations (with a vaguely country-fiddle flavor) and electronic timbres around Robert Johnson’s original recording of that song. Mr. Reynolds had a short break during his own frenetic Centrifuge, which was played by the Lemur GuitarBot, an outlandish robotic guitar. And he offered a bit of old-fashioned, straightforward violin playing too, in Michael Gordon’s rhythmically vital Tree-Oh, where he was joined by the violinists Caleb Burhans and Courtney Orlando" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 5/27/11].

May 26

World Nomads Morocco Festival: Marouan Benabdallah. Zankel Hall, New York, NY. "From the demanding program he played, with nearly two hours of virtuoso works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he seemed determined to make a strong impression. He did. If Mr. Benabdallah did not possess the superabundant technical skills that allow a pianist to toss off a finger-twister like Ravel’s Alborada del Gracioso with the effortlessness of an ideal performance, he played it, and other challenging fare, with resourceful pianism, lyrical instincts and thoughtfulness. . . . As a nod to the festival, Mr. Benabdallah, born to a Moroccan father and a Hungarian mother, played two short works from the 1990s by a Moroccan composer, Nabil Benabdeljalil: Nocturne and Song Without Words, conservative yet charming pieces that combine Chopinesque lyricism with bits of North African harmonies. On his Web site Mr. Benabdallah describes himself as an “heir to the great Hungarian musical tradition.” His mother, a musician, was his first teacher, and he moved to Budapest at 13 to pursue his musical studies. He devoted the first half of his recital to Rachmaninoff’s seldom-heard, 40-minute Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor. Rachmaninoff wrote the piece in 1907, a productive period that also produced his Third Piano Concerto and Second Symphony. In a letter to a friend, quoted in the program notes, Rachmaninoff described the First Sonata as 'wild and interminable,' so long and difficult that 'nobody will ever play it.' Not many pianists do. From start to finish this is an intriguing but baffling sonata. The first movement begins tentatively, with hints of a rhythmic figure in the piano’s low register and a fleeting chorale. Once the main section of the movement takes off, the music becomes a nonstop rhapsodic whirlwind. Passages here and there are beguiling and inventive. But there is little sense of structure or even a coherent musical narrative. The same problems hold true for the ruminative slow movement and the crazed, march-mad finale. Still, I was touched by Mr. Benabdallah’s involvement with the piece. He played with rich colorings and flair, and brought tenderness to the lyrical musings and vigor to the bursts of chords and dizzying passagework. How he managed to memorize music that seems such a succession of arbitrary ideas is beyond me. After intermission he played works by Ravel (selections from Miroirs), Debussy (La Soirée Dans Grenade) and Albéniz (two movements from the Suite Espagnole). In comparison with the Rachmaninoff sonata, even the most elusively Impressionist passages of these pieces sounded utterly lucid. Mr. Benabdallah ended with his own splashy arrangement of Saint-Saëns’s 'Africa' Fantasy, originally for piano and orchestra. As an encore he offered four short, punchy, harmonically brittle pieces from Bartok’s Mikrokosmos, and played them brilliantly, like a confident inheritor of the Hungarian heritage" [Anthony Tommasin, The New York Times, 5/27/11].

May 31

Claire Martin and Richard Rodney Bennett’s Irving Berlin show, A Couple of Swells. Oak Room Algonquin Hotel, New York, NY. "Ms. Martin is a complicated agglomeration of styles. Her smoky, sensual voice echoes Cleo Laine, another British singer who, even in moments of turmoil, maintains a certain loftiness. If Ms. Martin’s scat improvisations were mostly embellishments applied to the ends of phrases, at their most developed (during a performance of Cheek to Cheek) they suggested a singer who has studied Anita O’Day. In other words, Ms. Martin swings moderately. If Mr. Bennett were a less-polite accompanist, she might venture more deeply into improvisation. Mr. Bennett, who specializes in suave pianistic chitchat, supported Ms. Martin with sophisticated noodlings that kept the mood airy and light. He also joined her for several duets . . . and took some raspy solo vocals" [Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 6/1/11].

Innova presents Zeitgist and Prism. The Stone, New York, NY. "[The] space, operated by . . . John Zorn, hosted the final evening of a two-week series produced by Innova, a hardy independent record label established in 1982 by the American Composers Forum in St. Paul. The program included two distinctive quartets that record for Innova: Zeitgeist, a mixed group from the Twin Cities, and the Prism Quartet, a saxophone ensemble based in New York and Philadelphia. Zeitgeist, formed in 1977, is as much an ideal and model as it is a quartet; with none of its founding members remaining, it has maintained an unusual but flexible mix of piano and woodwinds and two percussionists. Well traveled and widely respected, Zeitgeist has concentrated much of its work in Minnesota, where it provides commissions to local composers, offers regular concerts and operates its own performance space, Studio Z. Starting with Lucky Dreams, a bubbly curtain raiser by Anthony Gatto, Zeitgeist offered four pieces drawn from three of its five Innova CDs. Not surprisingly the music reveled in rhythm and texture. Ivo Medek’s Into the Same River, a trio, pitted Pat O’Keefe’s sonorous bass clarinet against a litany of scrapes, thumps and growls produced jointly by the pianist Shannon Wettstein and the percussionist Heather Barringer, mostly inside the piano’s casing. Unorthodox techniques and evocative effects also came into play in the visceral poetry of Eleanor Hovda’s If Tigers Were Clouds ... Then Reverberating, They Would Create All Songs and in Andrew Rindfleish’s sublimely penumbral Night Singing. Here too was a reminder of why we attend concerts: no CD, however well recorded, could adequately capture the fascination of watching the percussionist Patti Cudd’s loose, liquid rolls on vibraphone paired with Ms. Barringer’s firm, rigorous marimba arpeggios. The Prism [Saxophone] Quartet . . . focused on music from a newly released Innova CD, Dedication. Initially envisioned as a collection of 20 one-minute pieces to mark the group’s 20th anniversary in 2004, the project overflowed its boundaries: the CD offers 25 pieces by 23 composers. The concert, around an hour long, included 24 works, mostly complete. Given the intended format, most of the pieces were clever bagatelles based on a single notion: rhythmic intricacy, smooth blend, extended vocabulary and so on. Still, you were repeatedly surprised by just how much personality could be expressed in a few deft strokes, through the lush harmonies of Greg Osby’s “Prism #1 (Refraction)”; the 24-tone giddiness of Frank J. Oteri’s Fair and Balanced; the crabby grandeur of Tim Berne’s Brokelyn; and the jazzy swagger of James Primosch’s Straight Up, to name just four examples from a consistently engaging program" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 6/1/11].

Recording

2011-07-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

Harrison Birtwistle. Night's Black Bird. The Shadow of Night. The Cry of Anubis. Owen Slade, tuba player; Hallé Orchestra, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth. NMC. "No one does deep, dark, elemental brooding quite as profoundly and convincingly as Harrison Birtwistle, the imposing éminence grise of British modernist composers. This most welcome new disc includes three recent examples of his magnificent gloom. In The Shadow of Night, the album’s centerpiece, Mr. Birtwistle reaches across the ages to find common cause with artistic lamentations: Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I and John Dowland’s song In Darkness Let Me Dwell. As if in a disturbing dream, the stark, haunting beauty of Mr. Birtwistle’s inspirations saturates this almost 30-minute work, introduced by Christoph von Dohnanyi and the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall in 2002 and performed by them at Carnegie Hall soon afterward. The music is a gripping procession of half-lighted swirls, plaintive melodic gestures and stark, violent outbursts; light emerges but fleetingly, penetrating now and again through a dense, near-motionless ooze of moaning strings, growling brass and agitated percussion. Night’s Black Bird, commissioned for the Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst to play at the 2004 Lucerne Festival, is meant as a companion piece to The Shadow of Night: a 14-minute distillation of its vocabulary and mood, its title derived from Dowland’s Flow, My Tears. Flecked intermittently with woodwind bird song, the piece is clearer and lighter than its predecessor but hardly less mysterious. The last piece on the CD, The Cry of Anubis, is one of Mr. Birtwistle’s few concertante works. An eruptive creation from 1994, the work casts a tuba soloist -- here Owen Slade -- as the jackal-headed Egyptian god of the title, who had figured prominently in Mr. Birtwistle’s opera The Second Mrs. Kong. Here, and throughout this invaluable disc, the conductor Ryan Wigglesworth and the Hallé Orchestra do honor to Mr. Birtwistle’s craggy eloquence" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 5/25/11].

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / June 2011

2011-06-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

June 2011

Volume 18, Number 6

Dialogues of the Existentialists / Michael McDonagh

Goldilocks and the Three Pieces / Elizabeth Agnew

Divan Rites / Alice Shields

Glass x 2 / Michael McDonagh

Chronicle of April 2011

Book

Illustration / Richard Nixon

Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
CORRESPONDENTS

INFORMATION FOR SUBSCRIBERS

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Dialogues of the Existentialists / Michael McDonagh

2011-06-01T21:00:00.000-07:00

Life is about conflict, and so is opera. And what could be a more dramatic subject than the French Revolution when keeping your head wasn't an abstract issue, but a life and death one. Francis Poulenc's three-act grand opera Dialogues des Carmelites (1953-56) was acclaimed as a masterpiece at its 1957 La Scala premiere, and it's easy to see why. It gets at the heart and soul of its subject through the person of a high strung girl from a rich family, Blanche de la Force, who decides to become a Carmelite nun to escape life, and her internal revolution (or enlightenment) -- from not knowing who she is or what she wants, to full knowledge and decisive action -- is a perfect match for the external one. The inevitable is set in motion.

Why inevitable? Because from the first note to the last the forces of history drive the piece forward, and in Poulenc's very Catholic view God has preordained the outcome. None of this would matter if the music failed to make Georges Bernanos' fine book and its characters come alive, and come alive they do, in an extremely varied yet conversational style not unlike that of the Debussy of Pelleas et Melisande (1893-95, 1901-02). Dialogues is also the biggest installment in Poulenc's series of sacred works -- from the chorus only Litanies a la Vierge Noire (1936), to the chorus with large orchestra Stabat Mater (1950), and Gloria (1959) -- which an expert cast of San Francisco Conservatory Opera Theatre on April 3 at Cowll Theater delivered with power and point.

The role of Blanche, whose mood swings are all over the place (one moment she's impulsive, the next calm, scared to death, childlike, sincere) can't be easy, but soprano Sarah Meltzer, in one of several roles not doubled here, made these aspects fuse: her delivery solid, varied; her technique secure. The role of best friend Sister Constance who's cheerful, but not shallow, was superbly sung by light soprano/soubrette Elise Kennedy -- her clear-as-a-bell tone, diminutive stature and strong stage presence a welcome contrast to Meltzer's and the rest of the cast in this great but largely dark piece.

Its moral center is the convent's Old Prioress Madame de Croissy, whose character embodies the conflict between duty to her nuns, and freedom, which she has never really had. She only has two scenes -- the “entry level interview“ she conducts with Blanche, and the scene of her death. Yet if these don't work you have no opera. But contralto Kristen Choi, who substituted at the last moment for Evgenia Chaverdova, delivered the goods -- resolute, terrified, terrifying, resigned -- her voice in full command.

The rest of the large cast was equally fine, and the Cowell stage , though not large, easily accommodated Peter Crompton's faithful to the period set, which Richard Harrell's direction animated with imagination and grace. Artistic decisions are always complicated, and of course I wondered how Harrell would stage the finale when the nuns go to their death on the scaffold, and his solution made perfect dramatic and emotive sense.

The 43-member Conservatory Orchestra, with a synthesizer sitting in for the piano, gave a vivid, wonderfully nuanced reading of the piece, under conductor Michael Morgan. While each instrumental was choir strong, oboist Elizabeth Nelson's solo arabesque, and Sarah Bonomo's solo, on clarinet were especially striking. Also impressive was the work of timpanist Collin Boltz, and percussionists Jon Lou and Kevin Schlossman, on everything from tenor drum, to chimes, the tempos throughout well judged, though Act 1, Scene 1, could have gone a wee bit faster.

Goldilocks and the Three Pieces / Elizabeth Agnew

2011-06-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time (April 8, 2011) there were three pieces performed by the San Francisco Symphony, conduced by Osmo Vanska -- a great big Ralph Vaughan Williams Symphony No. 2 ("London") (1933), a middle-sized Felix Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (1844), and a little Thomas Larchner Red and Green (2010).

They were performed in a big Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.

And in the evening a big audience, including Goldilocks, came to hear the works.

She heard the Larchner. It was a dark, post-minimalist exercise in textures and timbres, featuring relentless repeating notes that stimulated her libido. But it had little thematic content, and it was rather short (because that's often all symphony orchestras will let a contemporary composer get away with, because they have to play all that older music that everyone has really come to hear, anyway), and the people sitting next to her didn't understand it, and probably didn't like it much.

"How eager I am to hear San Francisco Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik!" said Goldilocks, just before the performance of the Mendelssohn. And the soloist performed marvelously on the 1742 Guarnerius del Gesu "David" violin -- evidently the same instrument by which the music was premiered by its namesake Ferdinand David in 1845. But the piece, through no fault of its own (other than its excellence), is now too familiar. And Goldilocks kept looking around for one of those just-right beds in substitute for her just-right chair. But most of the audience loved it, anyway.

Then after the intermission, when Goldilocks was just getting ready to have a nap, up sprung the Vaughan Williams London Symphony. And it was over the top. And just right. The composer, under-rated in some quarters (oh, say by a certain Berkeley professor whose huge study of Western music does not even mention the composer's name), delivers an engaging and varied large-scale, four-movement work, that continues to hold the attention from moment-to-moment in its rational yet emotive unfolding of ideas, and at the same time forms arcs that chill the spine and turn the heart. Conductor and orchestra made the most of every moment, in a shining performance that was left ringing in the ears, even to the daringly, surprisingly quiet conclusion.

And Goldilocks kept awake and was entertained and ennobled, running from the theatre in joy.

What? You were expecting she'd fall asleep and be awakened by the composers? No way, two of the three being dead anyway, but part of the magic of the arts is how the old-and-past can ever be reinterpreted as new and fresh.

Divan Rites / Alice Shields

2011-06-01T19:30:00.000-07:00

On April 28, 2011 the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, an agency of the Republic of Austria, presented West-Eastern Divan in their chamber concert series. The sold-out concert featured violinist Frank Stadler, pianist Jun Kanno, and oud player and composer Hossam Mahmoud.

This superb concert at the Austrian Cultural Forum was a model of how to present classical works from different world traditions.

The three performers in their ethnic diversity reflect the cross-fertilization of the classical traditions of East and West. Violinist Frank Stadler, of European heritage, lives in Salzburg, is founder of the Stadler Quartet, and leads the Austrian Ensemble for Contemporary Music and the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg. Pianist Jun Kanno, of Japanese heritage, now lives in Paris, and has performed with the Munich Symphony, Chamber Orchestra of Berlin, Japan Philharmonic, Vienna String Quartet, and the Mozart Quartet of Salzburg. Oud player and composer Hossam Mahmoud, of Eqyptian heritage, now lives in Salzburg, and is a performer and composer focused on promoting dialog between music of different cultures. Born in Cairo, Mahmoud studied Middle Eastern music, and then Western composition in Graz and Salzburg. His compositions have been performed at stART2003 in Salzburg, Autumn festival in Paris and the Salzburg Biennale, and his stage works at the opera houses of Cairo and Alexandria.

The venue for this intercultural concert was the tall, thin modern building of the Austrian Cultural Council, a 30,000-square-foot structure of concrete, glass, and steel off 5th Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The slightly elevated performance space, large enough to accomodate a piano quartet, is within 6 feet of the audience in this wood-lined jewel box of a theater.

Slow and meditative, the Hossam Mahmoud's Taq'sim, for solo oud, uses some melodic material from the Arabic classical Maqam patterns. Listening to this unhurried composition, which seems to dwell on the moment that has just past instead of the moment that is to come, it felt as if we had just stepped into a cool, shady courtyard, in which we could think for moment and look inward. We were held by the calm, descending melodic patterns, which seemed as egoless as leaves blown by a gentle breeze across our courtyard. This was satisfying, without accumulation or development or crescendo, simply dwelling in timelessness, unstructured, modest, in-dwelling.

And then the next piece began: we were immersed once again in highly structured time and now piercing dissonances, in the world premiere of Herbert Grassl’s Piece for Piano and Violin. Grassl’s work has muscular, clearly-shaped phrases and interchanges between piano and violin, and intense double-stop dissonances in the violin. Razor-sharp melodic lines and distinct rhythmic gestures culminate in excruciating but strangely pleasureable dissonances, played with impressive precision by Mr. Stadler. Some of the phrases repeated, so that the painful beauty of the dissonances could be enjoyed once more. The work was exciting in its aural exactness and crystalline form, and in an abstracted, distant way, expressed suffering.

Next came Debussy’s Sonata for Piano and Violin, where deeply pleasurable subtleties of fine ensemble playing were exchanged between the instruments, along with dramatic entrances and sharp timing and crescendos. But in its melodic and harmonic twists, the Debussy reflected the growing spiritual tortures of the ensuing century -- spiritual and musical twists that we had also just caught glimpses of in the Mahmoud and Grassl works.

Kanno’s performed Messiaen’s Regard de l’Etoile and Regard de l’Esprit de joie masterfully, presenting with seeming ease the densities, delicacies and enormous landscapes of these massive, virtuosic pieces. The works resonated through the hall with great effect and enjoyment on the part of the audience. Kanno made the keyboard resonate as if an enormous harp, easily strummed.

In Traditional Arabic Piece for Violin and Oud, Mahmoud and Stadler sat, intently leaning forward, the latter preparing to play with the violin lower on his arm in the Middle Eastern fashion. Mahmoud began the Maqam melodies on the oud; Stadler echoed, senza vibrato, in low range. The two often alternated or overlapped, playing descending melodic fragments with occasional ornaments. After the thunder of the Messiaen, we had again stepped into a quiet courtyard, and this time seemed to be listening to a quiet conversation between two people, a conversation in which no change or conclusion was expected or desired. One performer would give a fragment of a melody, descending, and then the other would imitate it. Here there was no desire to use repetition to contain emotion or to create form within a larger work. In this, it seemed repetition was being used between two different players as if it were a way of perhaps not being alone: you could hear someone “say” what you had just said, so you knew somebody was out there. Other people exist, and they sound like you; they are quite like you, and you know it because they play very similar things, not very different from yours.

Kanno came onstage to join Stadler and Mahmoud for the final work, the world premiere of Mahmoud’s Piece for Violin, Piano, and Oud, dedicated to those who lost their lives in Tahrir Square. The mood was quite different than in the previous, traditional composition. Although melodic elements of the Maqam were were still audible, the piece did not dwell in introspective solitude as in the earlier Taq’im, nor was it an imitative dialog in a quiet courtyard. Now, with the piano and violin and oud, it seemed a synthesis. Within a developmental structure, there were bursts of intense feeling and activity, with structured differences between the musical material played by each instrument, and clusters of density contrasting with brief solo lines. There were rises and falls in pitch and intensity, with particularly beautiful moments in which a whirling fast series of notes in the piano would meld with fast patterns in the violin and oud. Neither Western, nor Arabic in sound or structure, this moving work carried us beyond into sorrow and love for those who have perished in the cause of justice and freedom.

This was a concert not to be missed.

Glass x 2 / Michael McDonagh

2011-06-01T18:00:00.001-07:00

We like to think that concert music is something other than sound we hear with others in a room. Of course it is, but music is a physical fact we encounter first hand and try to wrap our minds around later, and the large and attentive audience at Philip Glass's San Francisco Performances program of his solo piano works seemed to know the difference when they gave him a warm welcome even before he'd played a note at his from memorized 8o-minute intermissionless recital at YBCA's Novellus Theater on April 30. Real affection like that for a composer, especially a controversial and popular one like Glass, is rare, and that's just for starters.

Glass has never been a virtuoso pianist -- he once quipped that he writes the hard keyboard parts for his ensemble's music director Michael Riesman -- but he's a thoroughly engaging and utterly sincere one. He began with Six Etudes – # 1, # 2, # 3, # 6 , # 9, #10 -- from his first book of Ten (1994-99), which are deeply personal, listener friendly yet demanding for the player who has to keep a steady pulse while executing Glass's often rapid and rapidly shifting figures in sometimes irregular metres. His approach here was miles away from his 2002 recording of the set for www.orangemountainmusic.com on a Baldwin grand, which he played here on a Hamburg Steinway Model D, with its typically brilliant, hard Germanic sound. Glass has composed a lot since that CD, and the differences in how he hears now were everywhere apparent. # 1, with its fanfare-like opening which reappears in different contexts, sounded more dramatic, but not as smooth, the driving figures of unequal lengths in # 3, looser, almost improvisatory. But the real news here was how the composer's sudden attacks and releases, and frequent yet tasteful rubato -- ritenuti and diminuendi -- made these pieces in the moment fresh. And his pedalling exploited the massing overtones in a logical but non-systematic way, each sound adding sound to sound like rising floors in a house with interconnecting rooms. The pull backs in tempo in #2 like emotion refracted; the low hammered figures in # 10 like the insistent drone of an Indian harmonium, the ascending melismatic one an integral decoration in a complete structure. Glass's Etudes extend the classical tradition of Chopin and Debussy's sets in an entirely individual way, though unlike Debussy he gives no clues to what they're about.

The other pieces here were just as unique. The 1980 series of alternately lyric/static and active/dramatic variations, Third Series Part IV, which Lucinda Childs renamed and choreographed as Mad Rush -- its opening figuration suggests Schubert's song Du bist die Ruh -- were less exploratory than the Etudes, but very affecting, especially in the soft slow parts. It's as much of a stand alone piece as Glass's 1989 Metamorphosis #1-# 5 series which he made from 2 separate scores -- one for for Errol Morris's documentary The Thin Blue Line, and one for two concurrent Dutch and Brazilian theatre versions by different directors of Kafka's story Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) -- we heard #2-#4 -- which encapsulate the isolation of its "hero" Gregor Samsa, who awakens one morning and finds himself turned into a giant cockroach. Its fragile bell-like themes and suspended harmonies, which Glass played with great sensitivity, are a perfect transformation of Samsa's spiritual state into sound, and deeply touching, too.

Dreaming Awake (2006), which Glass wrote and recorded as a limited edition, with a facsimile of his manuscript score, benefit for his Tibetan spiritual teacher Gelek Rinpoche's Ann Arbor, Michigan, retreat center Jewel Heart, is a rapidly changing lyric piece whose warm fluid harmonies draw on the discoveries the composer made in his award-winning score for Stephen Daldry's 2002 film The Hours, which suggest the here and gone feeling of the heart's many facets with consummate grace.

Chronicle of April 2011

2011-06-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

April 1

Durham University law students present Tricky Dick. Durham, NC. "Tricky Dick, a musical written by Duke Law School students and starring a 50-person ensemble of professors, administrators and students, was performed . . . at a sold-out arts center . . . . And now organizers want to make the zany, cabaret-style show an annual tradition" [Robbie Brown, The New York times, 4/3/11].

April 3

San Francisco Conservatory Opera Theatre presents Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, conducted by Michael Morgan. Cowell Theater, Ft Mason Center, San Francisco, CA.

April 5

The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater,” directed by Patricia Birch, with Michael Tilson Thomas, Judy Blazer, and the New York Philharmonic. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "This semistaged program takes the form of a personal memoir in which Mr. Thomas tells the story of his grandparents Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, pioneers in the Yiddish theater, which thrived at the turn of the 20th century on the Lower East Side and on tours to American cities. But along the way the program also provides an inside story of this vibrant people’s art form, with Mr. Thomas as a warm, wry and loving narrator, supported by a cast of four musical theater performers, archival film clips and the Philharmonic, reduced in size and sounding like a Yiddish theater pit band. Since 1998 the Thomashefsky Project has been uncovering and reclaiming the music and arrangements of Yiddish theater works. The arrangements Mr. Thomas conducted, as in a medley from Dos Pintele Yid (A Little Spark of Jewishness), were as close in sound and style to the originals as you are likely to hear. Not content to tell stories and conduct, Mr. Thomas, who last week led a demanding program with the New York Philharmonic, played a snappy piano accompaniment to a Yiddish song, A Coat From Old-Time Stuff, sung by the sassy Judy Blazer, who portrayed Bessie Thomashefsky. In Act II Mr. Thomas stopped the show by singing Who Do You Suppose Married My Sister? Thomashefsky. This 1910 song poked fun at Boris Thomashefsky’s womanizing ways. Mr. Thomas first presented a version of this program in 2005 at Zankel Hall and has been performing and refining it since. What comes through most is his affection for his grandparents, both born in shtetls outside Kiev, who met in Baltimore when young Boris was on tour and Bessie was 14. Boris, who died at 71 in 1939, five years before Mr. Thomas was born, was played here by Shuler Hensley, who brought gusto and a hearty voice to the role. . . . Growing up in Los Angeles, Mr. Thomas knew Bessie as a grandmother in her 80s, and clearly adored her. She regaled her musical grandson with stories of her stardom and performed songs at family gatherings. She began her career as a late adolescent, with trouser roles as her specialty, but evolved into a wisecracking, sassy singer and actress paving the way for later stars like Fanny Brice. . . . Mr. Thomas (whose father, Ted Thomas, changed his family name) speaks with honesty about his grandmother’s decision to separate from her philandering, spendthrift husband. His most moving recollection came when he recalled Bessie, who died in 1962 when he was 17, telling him, 'You are just like me'" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 4/6/11].

April 6

James Levine conducts Alban Berg's Wozzeck. Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY. "Levine made it a priority to conduct Wozzeck, a work he reveres and has performed stunningly over the years, the last time in the 2005-6 season. But I never heard him give a better account of this harrowing, deeply moving opera than this one. Mr. Levine must still be coping with back pain; he did not make it to the stage at the end for bows. Instead he simply waved to the audience from the pit. On the podium, though, sitting in his conductor’s chair with his arms flailing, he seemed inspired. Could the extra urgency and sweep on this occasion, and tempos slightly faster than those I remember from his earlier performances, have been motivated by a determination to prove that he was still a dynamic maestro? Whatever the cause, the results were thrilling. Mr. Levine still drew plenty of depth, spaciousness and glow from the orchestra during the despairing passages of Berg’s gravely beautiful atonal score, first performed in Berlin in 1925. But his work had greater overall shape and more prickly energy on this night than in years past. Played without breaks, “Wozzeck” lasts just 1 hour 40 minutes. The time passed without notice; the score has seldom seemed so compact and inexorable. Mr. Levine was on the podium when the Met’s spare, grim Mark Lamos production -- with sets that are all shapes, shadows and tall slanted walls —--was introduced in 1997. The staging remains effective. The strong cast was headed by the bass-baritone Alan Held as Wozzeck, an oppressed, impoverished soldier. Mr. Held’s full-bodied sound combined with his haggard, pitiful look made his Wozzeck seem especially delusional and dangerous. As Marie, Wozzeck’s common-law wife and the mother of his little boy, the mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier was magnificent. Though her voice may not be glamorous, it is warm, humane and poignantly expressive. Singing the haunting lullaby to her child (the sweet-faced John Albert) Ms. Meier brought suppleness and earthy colorings to Berg’s elusive vocal lines. Yet during Marie’s throes of despair or, when the handsome Drum Major tempted her, desire, Ms. Meier’s voice sliced through the orchestra with burnished power. When Marie confessed her infidelity and Wozzeck was about to slap her, Ms. Meier’s Marie rashly defied him. She would rather have a knife in the belly, she made clear, than let Wozzeck lay a hand on her. Even hobbled by guilt and humiliated by poverty, this Marie was going to maintain her dignity. The Australian tenor Stuart Skelton, in his Met debut, was an imposing, bright-voiced Drum Major. The tenor Russell Thomas brought out the decency of Andres, Wozzeck’s fellow soldier. The tenor Gerhard Siegel was aptly sniveling as the weirdly giddy Captain who berates Wozzeck for his faulty morals. And the booming bass Walter Fink held the stage as the pompous Doctor, who pays Wozzeck to be a subject of quack medical experiments. But inevitably this was Mr. Levine’s night. I will not soon forget the pulsing intensity and surging sound he brought to the orchestral interlude near the end of Act III, after the scene in which Wozzeck, panicked over having killed Marie in a fit, drowns in a pond while trying to hide his knife; or the eerie playfulness Mr. Levine teased from the short final scene, in which neighborhood children curtly tell Marie’s boy that his mother is dead" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 4/12/11].

Chanticleer performs Benjamin Britten's Hymn to St. Cecilia, Sarah Hopkins's Past Life Melodies, Kirke Mechem's Island in Space, Mason Bates's Observer in the Magellanic Cloud, Erica Lloyd's Cells Planets, and songs of Harold Arlen and Kurt Weill. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. "[T]he sensuously droning throat-singing in Sarah Hopkins‘s “Past Life Melodies,” from 1991, had welcome strangeness, and Kirke Mechem‘s Island in Space, from 1990, was lyrical and affecting" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 4/8/11].

Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted by Ivan Fischer, in Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 (“Classical”). Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Some works are derivative by default, with composers subconsciously incorporating various influences into their scores, but Prokofiev deliberately modeled his First Symphony on Haydn. His efforts resulted in far more than mere imitation, meshing traditional elements with 20th-century twists. The Gavotte, for example, blends a lighthearted dance with bold harmonic quirks" [Vivien Schweizter, The New York Times, 4/8/11].

April 8

21c Liederabend. The Kitchen, New York, NY. "'I feel like at a real 19th-century Liederabend there would be more flirtation between the performers and audience,' the singer and pianist Gabriel Kahane . . . . He affected the tremulous tone of a cagey suitor: “What are you doing later tonight?” Mr. Kahane’s brief assignation offered a moment of pop-inspired directness during a long, ambitious evening of contemporary art song and opera, part of a three-night series produced by VisionIntoArt, Beth Morrison Projects and Opera on Tap. Theo Bleckmann reprised selections from Phil Kline’s Zippo Songs in luminous new arrangements, played elegantly by the pianist Timothy Andres and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. A versatile, enchanting artist, Mr. Bleckmann added his own mesmerizing songs and participated in chattering ensembles by Julia Wolfe from the 1999 Bang on a Can opera The Carbon Copy Building. Russell Platt wrangled iconic poetry in Two Whitman Panels with stately decorum and unruly chromatic lines. Matt Marks treated sexual candor both sardonically and tenderly in I [XX], emphasizing the dramatic flair of the soprano Mellissa Hughes. In a resourceful, astonishingly beautiful Wilfred Owen setting by Gregory Spears, Amelia Watkins, a soprano, and Anthony Roth Costanzo, a countertenor, intertwined in languorous flights. Ted Hearne’s Is It Dirty evoked urban roil with jazzy motifs in raucous collision. Paola Prestini’s elaborate Aging Magician, a premiere based on an earnest Jonathan Safran Foer text, forged an enigmatic détente among Rinde Eckert’s potent delivery, Mr. Kahane’s soulful singing, moist narration by Melvin van Peebles, a clattering musical-junk sculpture by Mark Stewart and more" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 4/8/11].

April 14

Sarah Connolly sings Ivor Gurney's By a Bierside and Sleep, Benjamin Britten's Charm of Lullabies, Richard Rodney Bennett's History of the Dansant, and music of Herbert Howells, accompanied by pianist Malcolm Martineau. New York, NY. "Connolly brought sincerity and purity of tone to British songs: Britten’s “Charm of Lullabies,” whose occasional longueurs she overcame with variety, and two of Herbert Howells’s gently old-fashioned airs. She captured the brainy nostalgia of Richard Rodney Bennett’s surreally retro “History of the Thé Dansant,” but best of all were the Gurney [selections] . . . performed with moving nobility" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 4/15/11].

Yuri Temirkanov conducts the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra in Anotoli Liadov's Kikimora and Dmitri Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "In the bizarre Russian fairy tale depicted here, Kikimora is a witch raised from infancy by a magician, who regales her with stories while rocking her in a crystal cradle. At 7, the witch is still the size of a thimble, yet already plotting evil for the world. The sound of the murmuring low brass chords that began this performance seemed not to be coming from the stage but seeping up through the floorboards under the seats. After an atmospheric episode, the piece broke into a spiraling dance, sometimes crazed, sometimes delicate with gossamer textures. Why this 1909 tone poem is not as popular as Dukas’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” I cannot imagine. . . . The brilliant young American cellist Alisa Weilerstein, whom I had not heard since 2009 when she took part in Classical Music Day at the White House, was the compelling soloist in a first-rate performance of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1. Again, playing with incisive rhythm and crisp articulation is not this orchestra’s strong suit. But between Ms. Weilerstein’s impassioned, intelligent playing and the richness and color of the ensemble, this was an organic and arresting account of a great work, one of dozens of major 20th-century scores written for Mstislav Rostropovich" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 4/15/11].

April 16

Violinist Gil Shaham and his sister, the pianist Orli Shaham, in a concert of Jewish music. 92nd Street Y, New York, NY. "Avner Dorman decided not to create a piece with traditional Jewish melodies. Instead, Mr. Dorman -- an Israeli composer whose influences run the gamut from Bach and Bartok to the jazz guitarist John McLaughlin -- explored Jewish traditions from around the world, including Central Asian wedding songs and North African cantillations. He meshed those idioms with other traditions like Macedonian dances and Georgian folk rhythms to create the electric Niggunim for piano and violin. The work . . . [was] given a dynamic performance by the Shaham siblings. Niggun is a Hebrew word meaning soulful melody; the music often has repetitive and improvisatory elements. Mr. Dorman’s piece opened with a haunting, slightly dissonant Adagio, whose eerie melody was etched out by Mr. Shaham in a high register. In the third-movement Adagio the piano took over, slowly teasing out a similarly haunting tune in the upper register. Mr. Shaham plunged into the virtuosic thickets of the Scherzo with aplomb, revealing its improvisatory melodies with flair. The concluding Presto unfolded in a kaleidoscopic blaze, a frenzy of jazzy rhythms and explosive energy. The Shahams were equally convincing with more traditional Jewish music, including a Hebrew Lullaby, Hebrew Melody and Hebrew Dance by Joseph Achron. They also offered beautifully wrought interpretations of Bloch’s Baal Shem and George Perlman’s Ghetto Sketches, written as a composition for his students. (Perlman was also represented by his agitated Dance of the Rebbitzen from his Suite Hébraïque.) And Mr. Shaham’s lush tone did full justice to the suite from John Williams’s score for the film Schindler’s List" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 4/17/11].

April 17

Chicago Symphony, conducted by Riccardo Muti, Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "One measure of Mr. Muti’s triumph [was from the beginning] . . . to his final downbeat on the plangent chord that closed Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony . . . worries about the state of American orchestras and those who lead them disappeared. Mr. Muti, lithe and energetic (the Shostakovich included a balletic leap or two, both feet off the podium), drew such a glorious sound from his players, and interpreted the music with such insight and clarity, that a listener had to be fully in the moment. . . . There was room to quibble about Mr. Muti’s reading of the Shostakovich. Whenever a tempo was slower than Allegro, Mr. Muti lingered over it, replacing its tartness with an unwarranted beauty. Those touches created a striking contrast with the fast, loud and intensely bitter sections that invariably followed, but Shostakovich’s slow music should not be defanged. That said, the Shostakovich brought the best out of the orchestra. The strings were lush, the woodwind playing was beautifully chiseled, and the brasses had the kind of spectacular power and precision that made the section legendary during the Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti eras. All that made it easy to forgive a touch of interpretive oddness" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 4/18/11].

April 23

Models and Paradigms, a tribute concert for Gunther Schuller, celebrating his 85th birthday (November, 2010). Weill Recital Hall, New York, NY. "The program featured just four works, two by Mr. Schuller and two by Mohammed Fairouz, a talented composer 60 years his junior. Though Mr. Schuller composes according to the strict rules of 12-tone technique, his work manages to sound freer and more varied than the forbidding image many people still have of serial music would suggest. In his Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano (1999), the pianist Katie Reimer began with slow arpeggiated phrases over a lilting saxophone line, played with sweet intensity by Michael Couper, before shifting to a jumpier, more aggressive jazz-flavored finale. The 14 short movements of the quintet Paradigm Exchanges (1991) were the perfect symbol of Mr. Schuller’s inventiveness, moving restlessly from solos to duets to full-group passages and back. The players captured the work’s controlled energy in moments like a sweeping and bristling solo from the violinist Tema Watstein, a rich duet for cello (the warm-toned Michael Katz) and clarinet (Vasko Dukovski), a meditative piano solo from Ms. Reimer and an impassioned duet for violin and flute (Magdalena Angelova). Mr. Fairouz’s work is not 12-tone, but he experiments with dissonance and microtonality to expressive effect. Mr. Schuller’s main influence on him is his eclecticism, his sense of genres and styles as collapsible and combinable. Four Critical Models (2009) uses the violin (Rayoung Ahn) for its penetrating tone and the saxophone (Mr. Couper) for its insinuating smoothness in a spiky opening; a slow, haunting second movement; and a pensive finale. Inspired by writings about music and Orientalism, the piece features a brilliantly handled third-movement indictment of stereotypically 'Arab' music. (Think of snake charmers.) Every time a clichéd riff emerged, it would quickly disintegrate, exhausted and uncertain. That piece followed Mr. Fairouz’s warmly sympathetic 2010 setting of the Borges poem The Poet Declares His Renown for baritone (the excellent Mischa Bouvier) and string quartet, with Ms. Watstein and Mr. Katz joined by the violinist Michelle Ross and the violist Mary Sang-Hyun Yong. Mr. Fairouz’s music is not really like Mr. Schuller’s at all. That the program was still cohesive speaks to the capaciousness of Mr. Schuller’s style and interests. He has, as Mr. Fairouz said in an onstage discussion, big ears" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 4/24/11].

April 24

Death of Joan Peyser (b. Joan Goldstein, 6/12/30, New York, NY), at 80, after heart surgery. New York, NY. "[She was] a prolific writer about classical music and the author of biographies of Pierre Boulez, Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin, died on Sunday in Manhattan. . . . [Her] whose interviews with contemporary European and American composers, published mostly in The New York Times between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, helped clarify what those musicians considered most important about their work. Articles she contributed to The Times and other publications were collected in The Music of My Time, a 1995 compilation that traced contemporary music from Schoenberg to Charles Wuorinen and Todd Machover, with pieces about Maria Callas, the Beatles and the New York Philharmonic along the way. As a biographer, Ms. Peyser tended to focus on the personal lives and inner motivations of her subjects, an emphasis that attracted considerable controversy in musical circles. Her Bernstein: A Biography (1987), in particular, was criticized for its emphasis on Bernstein’s bisexuality and the dark side of his personality, rather than on his music. The conductor Leon Botstein, who reviewed it for The Times, characterized the book as 'a kind of psychobiography' and wrote that Ms. Peyser had 'fallen prey to the lure of publicity and the temptation to substitute superficial personal revelations for analytic argument and coherence.' Ms. Peyser was undaunted by such criticism. In her introduction to a paperback edition in 1998, she wrote: 'The response was a small price for me to pay for the pleasure of fitting together the intricate pieces of this particular jigsaw puzzle. In the end, when each of the pieces is placed where it belongs, it forms with the others the picture of a man virtually everyone recognizes as Bernstein.' While the debates about her Bernstein book were still raging, Ms. Peyser began work on The Memory of All That: The Life of George Gershwin (1993). Using letters, recollections of Gershwin’s associates and family, and his brother Ira’s lyrics -- which Ms. Peyser described as a veiled biography of the composer -- she created a portrait of Gershwin as insensitive, narcissistic and disappointed with his lack of acceptance in the world of serious music. She also explored rumors of an unacknowledged son. Here again, the music was not the point of the book. 'I don’t go into encyclopedic detail about the songs and shows,' Ms. Peyser told The New York Times in 1993. 'That information is available in other books. I think of this as the first biography of Gershwin. The rest are chronicles of what he did and whom he met.' . . . [B]efore she was 10 her father changed her surname and her brother’s (but not his own) to Gilbert, to shield them from anti-Semitism. She began her musical studies, as a pianist, when she was 5, and played a recital at Town Hall when she was 13. As a student at the High School of Music and Art, she also studied the viola and took courses in music theory and orchestration. She gave up music briefly in her mid-teens, but returned to it in college. She attended Smith College from 1947 to 1949, then transferred to Barnard College to complete her bachelor’s degree in music. She earned a master’s degree at Columbia, where she studied with Paul Henry Lang, in 1956. In 1949 she married Herbert S. Peyser, a medical student who became a psychiatrist. Though their marriage ended in divorce in the early 1970s, Ms. Peyser acknowledged that their discussions about psychology informed her own understanding of motivation, a crucial underpinning of her work as a biographer. They had three children -- [Monica] Parks and Tony Peyser of New York City and Dr. Kami Seligman of Scarsdale, N.Y. -- all of whom survive her, as does her brother, Robert Gilbert of Lancaster, Pa., and the jazz historian Frank Driggs, her partner since 1990. Ms. Peyser began writing about music in the 1950s, and submitted articles about music to Opera News and other publications while still a student. In 1966, the Delacorte Press offered her a contract to write The New Music: The Sense Behind the Sound, published in 1970. Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma followed in 1976; in 1999, she combined The New Music and Boulez and republished them as a single volume, To Boulez and Beyond: Music in Europe Since ‘The Rite of Spring.’ Ms. Peyser was the editor of The Musical Quarterly from 1977 to 1984, and of The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations (1986), a compilation of essays tracing the orchestra from the 15th century to the present. Among the many prizes she won were six Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in writing on music from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Speaking about her Gershwin biography in 1993, Ms. Peyser described an approach, as well as a conclusion, that could have applied equally to her Bernstein book. 'What I’ve written,' she said, 'is an interpretation of a life that was much sadder than anyone dreamed' [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 4/25/11].

April 30

Philip Glass, solo piano, performs Mad Rush, Wichita Sutra Vortex (including the voice of libretist Allen Ginzberg), and music from Etudes, Glassworks, The Thin Blue Line, and The Screens. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA.