21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / October 2013

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

October 2013

Volume 20, Number 10


Oliver Knussen / Phillip George

Coming Unstuck at Cabrillo / Michael McDonagh

Opus 8 / Carol Marie Reynolds

Calendar for October 2013

Chronicle of August 2013


Writers

Illustration /Taka Kigawa, Le Poisson Rouge (August 26, 1013)



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
Carol Marie Reynolds
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
CORRESPONDENTS


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

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Coming Unstuck at Cabrillo / Michael McDonagh

Anniversaries are always welcome occasions, and the Santa Cruz-based Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music celebrated its 51st year with a typically varied series of programs of which I alas only caught one on August 10, at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.  Festivals are mix and match affairs, and the program paired pieces by two "emerging" composers -- Enrico Chapela (b. 1974 ) and Andrew Norman (b. 1979 ) -- with the latest symphony by Philip Glass, led by Brad Lubman, who along with Carolyn Kuan, served as co-music director for Marin Alsop.

Hearing divergent voices in the same room is both a challenge and a pleasure though it was hard to know at first encounter what Norman and Chapela had up their sleeves.  Were they full-[grown artists or just up and coming ones?  Norman more or less got off the hook with Unstuck (2008) which he said was about his writer's block, or "how can I stitch bits and pieces into a coherent whole"?  It's a tried and true modernist ploy which in the hands of someone like Poulenc, who was accused of being a pasticheur, can sound both surprising and new. but in Norman's was a mostly stop-and-go effort which wanted at once to be a serious endeavor and a romp.  Rambunctious Ives-like material shared the stage with what sounded like send ups of jazz and rock, plus seco or espressivo writing a la Mahler or the New Viennese School.  The dial kept turning but to little avail, though Unstuck worked perfectly well as a curtain raiser which Lubman and company rendered with vigor and point .

Mexican composer Enrico Chapela's electric cello concerto Magnetar (2011), which he wrote for Berlin-based Johannes Moser who premiered it with the LA Philharmonic and played it here, is a horse of a different color, but not quite.  It observes the Baroque-Classical three movement fast-slow-fast with cadenzas, but mostly failed to put new wine into these old bottles.  Chapela's remarks from the stage made me fear that his idea of barely-glimpsed star phenomena was better than his realization could ever hope to be.  Still the interplay between the canned Moser cello which was hooked up to a patch and was all silhouette with its guts out -- is this post-modern life in a nutshell? -- and his live accomplices kept one awake, though it felt like five movements instead of three.  And it didn't help that Chapela found time to diss from the stage yet seemed to glancingly quote three of the best cello concertos in the Western canon: Haydn, Dvorak, and Elgar.  It was brash, bold, and frequently loud, and the massed overtones clotted on the verge of pain.  Philip Glass's Symphony No. 10 (2012) aced the night, not because he's a famous composer, but because simplicity has been the biggest casualty in the modernist wars.

Glass's music however is rarely simple yet always clear, and great composers from Monteverdi to Verdi have written clearly and succinctly, even Brahms and Beethoven, and you could call the latter's Symphony No. 5 minimalist because it's reduced to its bare elemental essentials.  The Glass 10 is equally succinct and its five movements go inevitably from its first to last note.  His trademark syncopations are here, plus his 3+ 2 or 3 and 2 combinations which function as lead or inner voices often disguised.  The music advances logically and with point, its textures growing generally more complex with each successive movement, though there's nothing as extreme as the piercing piccolo tritones in the third and final movement of the composer's massive and more densely scored Symphony No. 9 (2012).  It's virtuosic, superbly orchestrated , and its densities and rhythms both cross and contrary surprise and even startle the ear.  Lubman and his overworked band observed the letter but not the spirit of the work, and his percussion and string sections sometimes seemed to "spell" their parts instead of embedding them into the musical sentence.  It was amusing to hear the audience applaud after movement one, and erupt in cheers after a nanosecond pause at the end, as they did at the Tenth's UK London Proms premiere this summer in a tighter and more convincing reading by Nicholas Collon and his Aurora Symphony.

Opus 8 / Carol Marie Reynolds

The Opus Project presents Opus 8 (August 31) was a concert of parts and wholes, mostly of the 8th numbered selections of 20th- and 21st-Century composers.  On the whole, the event was well-planned and co-ordinated, and quite well done.

The storefront Berkeley Arts Festival, however, leaves much to be desired, being in a rather dangerous area, with difficult parking, and uncomfortable, claustraphobic seating, much of which was rather too close to the orchestra.

With all these drawbacks, the orchestra still managed to sound sensational.  By no means was this music easy to perform, but these excellent musicians, who come together to rehearse just one day before the performance, did a tremendous job.

Sopranos Sarita Cannon, Megan Cullen, and Letitia C. Page projected their parts well, but were still overpowered by the orchestra at times.  Their diction could have been somewhat clearer, since texts were at times difficult to understand.

Although Cannon's voice was beautiful as always, it was challenging to follow the English lyrics of the supposedly comic number, Harry Bernstein's Mary Had a Little Lamp."  Despite a questionable rhythmic flow and not terribly-engaging melodic line, Cannon succeeded nonetheless in selling the piece.

Bela Bartok's Romanian Folk Dance: I, presented in video form, proved over-long and taxing.  By contrast, however, three selections from Igor Stravinsky's Firebird were quite arresting in a stupendous performance by The Opus Project Orchestra.

Darius Milhaud's Suite for Piano: I was performed by virtuoso Elizabeth Lee, who incredibly learned the piece overnight.  She played gracefullly this intricate work, in a refined manner.

The Paul Hindemith Phantasiestuck from Three Pieces for Cello and Piano began with a lovely melodious sound, then moved into very dissonant territory.  Again Lee contributed her talented playing to the great mellow sounds of Elizabeth Morrison's cello.

The introductory section of Kurt Weil's String Quartet No. 1 came accross nicely, despite a language which seems to suggest performers at odds with one another.  On the other hand, the beginning of Dmitri Kabalevsky's own essay in this genre contains enough sweetness to ameliorate the occasional clangor, in a lovely melodic adventure..

The keyboard seems to carry all the dissonance in Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 1 in C Minor, with very sweet sounds coming from violin and cello.  Written in 1923, the music seems to mirror the madness of the era, with enthralling passages towards its conclusion.

The March from Mark Alburger's The Twelve Fingers was stimulating and most enjoyable, as an updated rival to John Philip Sousa's classic endeavors.  Works by Jan Pusina, Michael Kimbell, and Stardust seemed to merit further thought.

The biggest surprise was the program's conclusion with an unbelievable explosion of musicianship in 24-year-old Michael Stubblefield's March of the Defiled Horde.  An amazing, astonishing, and awesome work, again from The Opus Project Orchestra.

Calendar for October 2013

October 3

Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring.  Diablo Valley College, Pleasant Hill, CA.


October 4

U.S. premiere of Gravity, with music of Steven Price.  


October 12

Gustav Holst's The Planets, with The Awesome Orchestra.  Firehouse Art Hangar, Berkeley, CA.

Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.  Mormon Temple Auditorium, Oakland, CA.


October 25

Allison Lovejoy's Seven Deadly Pleasures.  Community Music Center, San Francisco, CA.

October 26

The Opus Project presents Opus 10.  Arnold Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10, No. 3; Bela Bartok's Image, Op. 10, No. 2; Igor Stravinsky's Petrushka: Russian Dance, Anton Webern's 5 Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10; Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 10: Allegro; Darius Milhaud  Poem of Lucile de Chateaubriand, Op. 10, No. 3; Paul Hindemith's String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10, No. 1; Kurt Weill's Frauentanz, Op. 10, No. 1; Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1, Op. 10, No. 2: Trio; Samuel Barber's James Joyce Song, Op. 10, No. 1; Benjamin Britten's Variation on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op. 10, No. 1; Oliver Knussen's Ocean de Terre, Op. 10, No. 1; John Bilotta's The Lottery in Babylon; and Mark Alburger's Nocturnes for Insomniacs, Op. 10, No. 1.  Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street, San Francisco, CA.

Writers

MARK ALBURGER is Editor-Publisher of 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, an award-winning ASCAP composer of concert music published by New Music; Music Director of The Opus Project, San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra; and San Francisco Cabaret Opera; Instructor in Music History and Theory at Diablo Valley College, author and subject of articles in The Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd ed.), and Grove Online; music critic, musicologist, oboist, pianist, recording artist, and vocalist.  His Double Piano Concerto ("Fellow Travellers"), Op. 204, will be premiered at Old First Concerts in San Francisco on November 9.

PHILLIP GEORGE is an editor for New Music, and serves on the staff of 2IST-CENTURY MUSIC.

MICHAEL MCDONAGH is a San Francisco-based poet and writer on the arts who has done two poem/picture books with artist Gary Bukovnik, Before I Forget (1991) and Once (1997), the former being in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Berkeley Art Museum, and the New York Public Library.  He has also published poems in journals including Mirage, and written two theatre pieces -- Touch and Go, for three performers, which was staged at Venue 9 in 1998; and Sight Unseen, for solo performer.  His critical pieces have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Review of Books, 3 Penny Review, California Printmaker, Antiques and Fine Art, The Advocate, High Performance, and In Tune.  He writes for The Bay Area Reporter and heads the Bay Area chapter of The Duke Ellington Society.  He co-hosted nine radio shows on KUSF with Tony Gualtieri with whom he now shares a classical-music review website -- www.msu.edu/user/gualtie3 -- which has also been translated into Russian and appears in Intellectual Forum.  He is currently working on a collaboration with clarinetist-composer Rachel Condry.

CAROL MARIE REYNOLDS is a Bay-Area music consultant, critic, pianist, and student of languages and literature.