Chronicle of March 2009

March 3

Opening Nights Festival. Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "[A] five-and-a-half-hour celebration of what was once called downtown music, although it long ago moved uptown to places like Tully, and from the avant-garde into the mainstream. As a prelude, the idiosyncratic string quartet Ethel gave the premiere of Phil Kline’s Space as a free concert in the hall’s large new public area. The quartet’s players were deployed individually to the north, south, east and west of the restaurant and waiting area, and a loudspeaker in each corner carried the amplified, electronically processed sound of one musician. (The sound designer, Jody Elff, was given equal billing with Mr. Kline.) Mr. Kline’s hypnotically attractive 45-minute work begins with the quartet playing a tremolando figure that gradually shifts to new harmonies and textures before moving through the lexicon of string ensemble effects. Along the way it explores sustained tones and lightly dissonant harmonies, with a bagpipelike timbre; pizzicato figures supporting soaring, lyrical viola and cello lines; and ornate violin solos bathed in tape delay that created an almost fugal illusion. The main concert, New York, New Music, New Hall, inside the renovated hall, was presented as a look at three generations of new-music ensembles and the composers they are drawn to, beginning with the youngest, Alarm Will Sound, and moving backward through the Bang on a Can All-Stars to the venerable Steve Reich and Musicians. But the multigeneration idea didn’t mean much. There is scarcely any stylistic difference between the music Alarm Will Sound and the Bang on a Can group play, and both ensembles perform Mr. Reich’s work. Alarm Will Sound, conducted by Alan Pierson, began its set with Derek Bermel’s Three Rivers (2001). The title, Mr. Bermel wrote, refers to his melding of classical, jazz and pop influences in the score. But jazz, which has tendrils in the other two styles, dominated, and many of its flavors, from swing to avant-garde, were represented. Cartoonish touches turned up as well: a police whistle followed quickly by a xylophone figure fleetingly evoked Spike Jones. Caleb Burhans’s oh ye of little faith ... (do you know where your children are?), commissioned for this concert, covers vast stylistic ground in only 10 minutes, beginning with a softly angular, almost music-box-like celesta and vibraphone ostinato and building toward a sunburst crescendo based on crunching electric-guitar chords. Much of the piece is elegiac: a melancholy string figure, set against the pitched percussion ostinato, is akin in spirit to Arvo Pärt’s Fratres. But that theme takes on a more robust character when the strings surrender it to the woodwinds and brasses, and it’s a short leap from there to the guitar-driven denouement. Between the Bermel and the Burhans, Oscar Bianchi’s Mezzogiorno (2005) explored the contrast between raucous pop currents and hazy introspection effectively, if less memorably. Bang on a Can started in the mid-1980's as an alliance of the composers Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe and David Lang, and evolved into an ensemble that mostly plays music by others. But for the Tully concert, the group returned to its roots. The players revived Ms. Wolfe’s Lick (1994), in which short bursts grow into a rhythmically complex mechanism, and offered the New York premiere of Mr. Lang’s chromatic, style-hopping Sunray (2006) and the world premiere of Mr. Gordon’s luminous, texturally shimmering For Madeleine (2009). The Bang on a Can players also poached repertory that should have been in Alarm Will Sound’s territory if the multigeneration concept meant anything: Glenn Kotche, the drummer for the rock band Wilco, joined the ensemble to perform his own bright-edged, vigorously syncopated Mobile (2007). The concert ended with Mr. Reich and his group giving a supple account of Music for 18 Musicians (1976), a pivotal work in Mr. Reich’s canon and a score that helps define the boundary between Minimalism and post-Minimalism. Its Minimalist DNA -- the insistent ostinato that runs through the hourlong score, and note-by-note evolution of the superimposed themes -- grabs the attention. But the density and variety of those themes are the work’s real meat, and they were a revolution for Mr. Reich. With his later works in mind, a listener can now hear the roots of other developments here too. A repeating, chordal crescendo, for example, turns up in The Desert Music (1984), and a two-note descending slide found its way into Different Trains (1988).


March 4

Clash Tango: The Orchestra of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble. Morgan Library & Museum. "[T]he clashes in the essentially tonal, melodic music were few and actual tangos even fewer. To the extent that tangos were heard, Astor Piazzolla was somehow involved, if not as a composer then as an inspiration. Unalloyed Piazzolla -- the spirited, flute- and clarinet-dominated Muerte del Angel -- closed the concert. And the first half included Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round (1996), a memorial to Piazzolla, who died in 1992. . . . In another work, Lullaby and Doina (2001), Mr. Golijov sublimated his Latin roots to his Jewish ones, quoting a Yiddish melody and pairing it with a klezmer-tinged dance, scored to allow the theme to pass among the clarinet, the cello and the flute, all played with a rich, singing tone. In the Piazzolla and Golijov pieces popular and classical elements are tightly intertwined. Other works lean more decisively in one direction or the other. Clovis Pereira’s Três Peças Nordestinas (1971, heard in a 1993 quartet arrangement) sounds as if it were meant to be played in an elegant tearoom. . . . Both the Pereira and Paquito D’Rivera’s rhythmically vital Wapango (a variation on the Mexican huapango dance form), also for quartet, use pizzicato figures to evoke the sound of the guitar. And Guido López-Gavilán’s Mi Menor Conga, for string quintet, turns the string players into part-time percussionists and singers: at several points the musicians tap out conga rhythms on their instruments, and toward the end they vocalize. At the more formal end of the spectrum Gabriela Lena Frank makes modest but effective use of extended flute techniques (including multiphonics and an evocation of a distantly howling wind) to suggest an imagined pre-Incan antiquity in her Cuatro Bosquejos Pre-Incaicos (2006), for flute and cello. And the program’s oldest work, Villa-Lobos’s Piano Trio No. 1 (1911), pays homage to European models so completely that if the score embodies any specifically Brazilian themes, rhythms or textures, as so many of Villa-Lobos’s later works do, they are thoroughly submerged" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 3/6/09].


March 12

Kurt Weill’s operetta The Firebrand of Florence. Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "[The work] was doomed by an inadequate cast and a lackluster staging when it opened on Broadway in March 1945. It closed a month later and (except for a few songs) was neglected until a decade or so ago. A lively semistaged performance . . . revealed both the intricacies of Weill’s vibrant score and the libretto’s comedic elements, aptly framed by Roger Rees’s narration and direction. Ted Sperling conducted the Collegiate Chorale, the New York City Opera Orchestra and stars from the opera and theater worlds in a taut, snappily paced rendition of Firebrand, one of six musicals Weill composed for Broadway. The lyrical score shifts rapidly between satirical musical-theater-style excerpts and more serious, quasi-operatic numbers. The operetta, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, is based on Edwin Justus Mayer’s 1924 play about the 16th-century Florentine sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (also the subject of an opera by Berlioz). Benvenuto escapes being hanged after the Duke of Florence frees him so he can finish a previously commissioned sculpture. Benvenuto then energetically woos Angela (his favorite model, whom the Duke also has a crush on) while the Duchess of Florence chases the wily sculptor. . .
There was plenty of amusing onstage chemistry. Victoria Clark portrayed the man-eating Duchess with flair and apt comic timing. (The role was first sung by Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife, who was panned in the original production.) The baritone Nathan Gunn was charismatic as the womanizing Benvenuto, swaggering around the even sleazier Duke, given a dynamic performance by Terrence Mann. The soprano Anna Christy was sweetly coy as Angela. The excellent cast also included David Pittu in roles including the villainous Count Maffio; Krysty Swann as Emilia (Benvenuto’s maid); and Patrick Goss as the treacherous Ottaviano de’ Medici" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 3/13/09].


March 13

Composer Portraits: Arlene Sierra. International Contemporary Ensemble performs five of the composer's works, conducted by Jace Ogren. Miller Theater, New York, NY. "Arlene Sierra has been inspired by an unusually wide range of sources, including bees, poetry and Chinese and Roman military tactics. . . . Sierra uses a colorful palette in compositions like Neruda Settings, for 10 players and soprano . . . . In one [movement], Ode to the Lizard, darting, coloristic fragments from a flute, a celeste, a harp and a violin are woven around the text. The music ebbed and flowed in intensity, reaching a peak at 'To/a fly/you are the dart/of an annihilating dragon.' . . . The other three poems in Ms. Sierra’s set are Ode to the Artichoke, Ode to the Plate, and Ode to the Table. Susan Narucki sang them (in Spanish) with expressive conviction. . . . [S]tudying East Asian history at Oberlin College had provided fodder for compositions like Cicada Shell for septet. Militaristic and rhythmically driven in Marziale (the first section) and more subdued in the ensuing Misterioso, espressivo, the work was inspired by ancient Chinese battle tactics. Military themes also figure prominently in Surrounded Ground, whose three movements -- Preamble, Feigned Retreat, and Egress -- were composed as a companion to Aaron Copland’s 1933 Sextet. The marchlike rhythms of the first section are followed by a vivacious dialogue between instruments and an almost jazzy finale. The program also included the world premiere of Colmena (Spanish for beehive), whose multilayered textures and colorful effects mimic those of its namesake insect. The concert concluded with the kaleidoscopic Ballistae. Inspired by the ballista, an ancient artillery machine, the work is built on percussion riffs; uneasy, fluttering fragments; and repeated motifs, ending with a bang" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 3/16/09]

Chronicle of March 2008

March 1

The New York Times reviews Alarm Will Sound (Gyorgy Ligeti's Movimento preciso e meccanico, Harrison Birtwistle's Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum, Gavin Chuck's Philosophy of the World, Conlon Nancarrow player piano studies in chamber versions, John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony, and Mochipet's Dessert Search 4 Techno Baklava, 2/27, Zankel Hall); Elliott Carter's Piano Quintet, (2/27 Weill Recital Hall); and Benjamin Britten's Peter Grime (2/28, Metropolitan Opera). NY.

75th-Birthday Tribute to Julian Bream, including Frederic Hand's For Julian, Toru Takemitsu's All in Twilight, Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal, Heitor Villa-Lobos's Five Preludes, Joaquin Rodrigo's En los Trigales, and works by Manuel de Falla. 92nd Street Y, New York, NY.

Ensemble Pi in The Rest Is Silence. John Harbison's Abu Ghraib, Frederic Rzewski's Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier, Kristin Norderval's Far From Home, Lou Harrison's In Memory of Victor Jowers, Philip Miller's Nine Drawings for Projection, and Dimitri Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2. Cooper Union, New York, NY.

Vienna Philharmonic in Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.


March 2

William Bolcom's Symphony No. 8 performed by the Boston Symphony, conducted by James Levine. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.

Escher String Quartet in Alexander Zemlinsky's String Quartet and Maurice Ravel's String Quartet. New School, New York, NY.


March 3

Sequitur's cellist, Greg Hesselink, assisted at times by associates, in Harrison Birtwistle's Nine Settings of Lorine Niedecker, Harold Meltzer's Silas Marner, Bernard Rands's Walcott Songs, Warren Benson's Moon Rain and Memory Jane, Arlene Zallman's Per Organa di Barberia, and Morton Feldman's Voices and Cello. Merkin Concert Hall, New York, NY.


March 4

The New York Times reviews the Vienna Philharmonic's 2/29 performance of Claude Debussy's La Mer at Carnegie Hall. New York, NY.

Gabriel Faure's Requiem performed by the Oratorio Society of New York. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.

Death of Leonard Rosenman (b. 9/7/24, New York, NY), of a heart attack, at 83. Los Angeles, CA. "[He was] an Oscar-winning film composer who helped introduce avant-garde music to Hollywood movie scores. . . . Rosenman, who could also write lusty traditional film scores, composed the original music for dozens of well-known pictures. Among them were East of Eden (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), . . . [and] Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) . . . He earned two Oscars for musical adaptation: for Barry Lyndon (1975), which drew on music by Handel, Schubert [Vivaldi, J.S. Bach, Frederick The Great, and Irish folk music, the latter in renditions by The Chieftains] and Bound for Glory (1976), based on Woody Guthrie songs. With the composers Bernard Herrmann and Alex North, Mr. Rosenman was widely credited with bringing film music -- long awash in . . . Romanticism -- squarely into the 20th century. For The Cobweb (1955)), Mr. Rosenman wrote what is believed to be the first major Hollywood score to draw heavily on 12-tone techniques. . . . For Fantastic Voyage (1966), one of Mr. Rosenman's most highly regarded scores, he wrote urgent, atonal music that some listeners compared favorably to the work of Alan Berg. . . . He wrote music for The Defenders, Combat!, Marcus Welby, M.D. and many other shows. . . . [H]e earned a bachelor's degree in music from the University of California, Berkeley. He also studied composition with Schoenberg, Roger Sessions and Luigi Dallapiccola. Settling in New York, where he intended to make a career as a concert composer, Mr. Rosenman supported himself by teaching piano. One pupil was a young actor named James Dean. After Mr. Dean was cast in East of Eden, he introduced Mr. Rosenman to the film's director Elia Kazan. Mr. Kazan hired Mr. Rosenman to write the score. Mr. Rosenman was divorced twice and widowed once. he is survived by his fourth wife, Judie Gregg Rosenman; three children from his first marriage . . . and four grandchildren. Throughout his career, Mr. Rosenman continued to write concert music. Some of his work was performed by famous artists, including the violinist Elmar Olveira, who in 1997 played the world premiere of Mr. Rosenmans Violin Concerto No. 2 with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Bur Mr. Rosenman often expressed regret that his Hollywood work appeared to have cost him greater recognition in the concert hall. Where younger composers like John Corigliano and Philip Glass have been able to move seamlessly between film and concert music, those of Mr. Rosenman's generation faced largely unbreachable wall. In an interview with The New York Times in 1982, Mr. Rosenman reflected on the difference between those two types of composition: 'With film one is given an a priori construct,' he said. 'It is a very sophisticated version of seeing an array of numbers from 1 to 100, connecting them and winding up with a picture of George Washington. The pot is to fill up space, and the work is dictated by literary considerations. With concert music -- even in opera, the most literary form -- the composer's task is to shape the text into a fundamentally musical work'" [Margalit Fox, The New York Times, 3/6/08].

Violinist Mayuko Kamio in Karol Szymanowski's Fontaine d'Aretuse from Mythes. Zankel Hall, New York, NY.


March 5

Alan Gilbert conducts the New York Philharmonic in Luciano Berio's Folk Songs. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY.


March 6

Gabriela Montero in Alberto Ginastera's Piano Sonata No. 1 and her own improvisatory variations. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. "She turned Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star into a neo-Baroque contrapuntal twister, before segueing into a moody minor section that might have been a Rachmaninoff evocation of Bach, with more biting and pungent harmonies. using Beethoven's Fur Elise as a theme, she wisely steered clear of the Beethoven style in her improvisation, creating music that began like updated Albeniz, then evolved, with a sense of rightness, into something obsessive and jazzy, like John Coltrane's take on My Favorite Things" [Anthony ;:Tommasini, The New York Times, 3/8/08].


March 7

Percussionist Martin Grubinger in Anders Koppel's Marimba Concerto No. 3 and Toccata, Minoru Miki's Marimba Spiritual, Evelyn Glennie's Little Prayer, his own Aus dem Leben einer Trommel, and Iannis Xenakis's Rebonds B. Weill Recital Hall, New York, NY.


March 8

San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra -- conducted by Mark Alburger, John Kendall Bailey, and Martha Stoddard -- in Erling Wold's Mordake Suite No. 2, Michael Cooke's Sun and Moon, Dan Reiter's Toccata and Fugue, Stoddard's A Little Trip to Outer Space, Alexis Alrich's Fragile Forests, Philip Freihofner's The Bell Tree, and Lisa Scola Prosek's Chain Saw. Old First Church, San Francisco, CA.

Brooklyn Philharmonic in John Adams's The Dharma at Big Sur, Bela Bartok's Divertimento, and Toru Takemitsu's Three Film Scores. Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, NY. "Sri Moonshine [is] the second movement of Mr. Adams's West Coast homage" [a reference to Terry Riley's Sri Moonshine Ranch outside of Nevada City, CA - ed.] [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 3/10/08].

Kent Nagano and the Montreal Symphony in Claude Debussy's Martyre de St. Sebastien and Unsuk Chin's Rocana. "Chin had tearfully called earlier to say that her plane was grounded by a blizzard in the Midwest. By intermission, alas, she had only just arrived at Kennedy Airport. . . . [T]he piece is a knockout. It begins with a gnarly, clattering, explosion; call it the Little Bang. Then comes a pattern of background harmonies, always simmering, eerily quiet and pervasive. But throughout the work, jolts of energy keep happening; leaping lines, ominous 12-tonish themes that pierced the tranquil background buzz, outbusts of wailing brasses and metallic strings that come at you like a musical flamethrower. The piece might be described as a response to Ives's Unanswered Question" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 3/10/08].

Soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian and her pianist-husband Seroug Kradjian in Francis Poulenc's Banalities, Jake Heggie's Songs and Sonnets to Ophelia, and Maurice Ravel's Five Popular Greek Melodies. Zankel Hall, New York, NY.


March 9

Garrick Ohlsson in Norman Dello Joio's Piano Sonata and Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 2. Town Hall, New York, NY.

New Amsterdam Singers in Ronald Perera's Why I Wake Early and Matthew Harris's Love Songs and Innocence and Experience. Church of the Holy Trinity, New York, NY.


March 10

Mark Alburger premieres the complete solo version of his L.A. Stories with hats and toys, on a program with poets Kenneth Goldsmith and Denise Newman. Boxcar Theatre, San Francisco, CA.


March 11

Pierre Laurent Aimard's recording of J.S. Bach's Art of Fugue goes to the top of the charts of both Billboard and iTunes, and is featured on the iTunes homepage along with Snoop Dogg and U2.

New York Festival of Song presents William Bolcom's Lucrezia and John Musto's Bastianello. Weill Recital Hall, New York, NY.

Michael Tilson Thomas, The San Francisco Symphony, and Gil Shaham in William Schuman's Violin Concerto. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.


March 12

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony in Jean Sibelius's Symphony No. 7. Richard Straus's Four Last Songs, and Samuel Barber's Andromache's Farewell. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.


March 13

The New York Times reports on the premiere of Jake Heggie's Last Acts at Houston Grand Opera (Houston, TX). New York, NY.


March 14

Bela Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin Suite, Gustav Holst's The Planets, and Claude Debussy's Three Nocturnes performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.

Deborah Voigt leaves the stage during Act II of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because of a stomach ailment and is replaced by Janice Baird, in her Met debut. Gary Lehman makes his debut, replacing John Mac Master (due to allergies), who had himself been filling in for Ben Heppner (due to a viral infection). Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY.

Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar. Perelman Theater, Philadelphia, PA.


March 18

Counter)induction presents Mauricio Kagel's Atem and Der Schall, Anthony Coleman's Flat Narrative, Douglas Boyce's L'Homme Arme, and Gyorgy Kurtag's Hommage a R. Sch. Merkin Concert Hall, New York, NY.

Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, and guests, in various configurations, in a program including Igor Stravinsky's Duo Concertante and Richard Danielpour's Book of Hours. 92nd Street Y, New York, NY.

Spirit of Uganda. Joyce Theater, New York, NY.

Gary Lehman slides down the raked stage into the prompter's box during Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, stopping the show at the start of Act III, but soldiering on to the work's conclusion after a brief interval. Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY. "Tristan und Isolde has long been a magnet for trouble. Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, the first Tristan, died of a heart attack in Munich in 185, at 29, within weeks of the premiere, leaving he first Isolde -- his wife, Malvina [!} a widow. In 1959, when each of three possible Tristans announced, one after another, that he was too ill to perform at the Met, Rudolf Bing, the opera's legendry general manager, persuaded each to sing one of the three acts. . . . Nor are the mishaps limited to Tristan und Isolde. The soprano Hildegard Behrens got bonked on the head by a foam rubber beam from the Immolation Scene in Wagner's Gotterdammerung at the Met in 1990. Ms. Behrens, playing Brunnhilde, had just finished the last notes of the six-hour opera. She withdrew from the final performance and was replaced by Gudrun Volkert. And after singing the line 'You can only live so long' from a ladder minutes into the Met premiere of Janacek's Makropulos Case in 1996, Richard Versalle fell 10 feet to the stage, having suffered a fatal heart attack at 63. The show was canceled, and Mr. Versaille's replacement, Ronald Naldi, did not climb the ladder in future performances. 'Everybody went into shock,' said Joseph Volpe, then the Met's general manager. 'They thought it was part of the staging.' Asked to recount some of his run-ins with the tenor Luciano Pavarotti and his temperamental throat, as when Pavarotti failed to appear for his farewell performances at the Met, in [Giacomo Puccini's] Tosca in 2002, Mr. Vole said, 'I'm not going there.' There continues to be debate as to whether, during the Met's 2002 production of Prokofiev's War and Peace, a supernumerary portraying one of Napoleon's defeated soldiers fleeing Moscow (Simon Deonarian) fell or jumped into the pit. Mr. Vole -- who took the stage at the end to tell the audience that 'our retreating French grenadier lost his w in the snowstorm' but was unhurt -- said he jumped for publicity. Mr. Deonarian said he fell. In any case, the incident stopped the orchestra during the final scene for a delay of three minutes. When American Ballet Theater was performing [Prokofiev's] Romeo and Juliet on the Met Stage in 1998, the front of the Capulet mansion came down form the flies and never stopped. 'The set just kept grinding into the floor,' said Michael M. Kaiser, then the ballet's artistic director. 'No one's ever seen me run so fast as I did backstage.' As for conflagrations, the curtain came down in 2004 during Act II of Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri because of a small fire above the stage that had to be extinguished. The Metropolitan Opera House has also had its brush with murder. In 1981 a Met stagehand, Craig Crimmins, was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for hurling a violinist, Helen Hagnes Mintiks, to her death down an airshaft from the roof of the opera house. Ms. Mintiks had disappeared during an intermission of a Berlin Ballet performance" [Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, 3/20/08]. "Mr. Lehman seldom faltered, even when the Met's stage macheinery seemed out to get him. Act III begins with the wounded Tristan stretched out on a pallet propelled slowly from the back of the stage to the front. Things careered out of control at the end of this trip, sending Mr. Lehman, on his back and head first, crashing into the prompter's box. Stage managers rushed onstage; the curtain went down, but within 10 minutes Mr. Lehman was back singing Tristan's long and strenuous rant to brave effects" [Bernard Holland, The New York Times, 3/20/08].


March 19

Death of actor Paul Scofield, of leukemia, at 86. UK. "[He was a] darkly embittered Salieri in Amadeus" [Benedict Nightingale, The New York Times, 3/21/08].

Brentano String Quartet in Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 15. Weill Recital Hall, New York, NY.


March 20

Pierre Lauent Aimard performs Arnold Schoenberg's Five Pieces, Op. 23. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.

New Music Champions. Alice Shields's The River of Memory, Don Byon's Seven Etudes, Huang Ruo's Written on the Wind, Steven Burke's Skin, Michael Lowenstern's Mash Up, and Joan La Barbara's ATMOS. Symphony Space, New York, NY. Repeated 3/24, SUNY, Purchase (NY).

Joshua Redman. Village Vanguard, New York, NY.


March 21

Elliott Carter's Oboe Concerto presented by Musicians from Marlboro. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.


March 22

Perlman Music Program, featuring Bela Bartok's String Quartet No. 3. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.



Aretha Franklin. Radio City Music Hall, New York, NY.


March 25

Death of conductor and composer Gerhard Samuel (b. 1925, Bonn, Germany), at 83. Seattle, WA. "Samuel served as music director of both the Oakland Symphony (1959-70) and the San Francisco Ballet (1961-71) and was the first music director of the Cabrillo Music Festival. he also founded and led the Oakland Camber Orchestra and made a few guest appearances with the San Francisco Opera. . . . Over the course of a decade, nearly one-third of the [Oakland] orchestra's repertoire consisted of music by 20th-century composers, and in some seasons nearly every program included at least one premiere. The stylistic range was broad enough to encompass . . . Lutoslawski and Stockhausen and . . . Terry Riley and Henry Brant. . . . Mr. Samuel's taste for contemporary music made him an obvious choice to lead the Cabrillo Festival, the 1961 brainchild of bassoonist-composer Robert Hughes -- who had played under Mr. Samuel in Oakland -- and composer Lou Harrison. . . . Samuel . . . moved to the United States with his family in 1939 to escape the Nazis. he studied conducting and violin at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, NY, then went on to study composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale and conducting with Serge Koussevitzky at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts. After a brief stint conducting musicals on Broadway, he spent 10 years as violinist and associate conductor with the Minneapolis Symphony before coming to Oakland. On leaving Oakland in 1971, he joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic as associate conductor under Zubin Mehta. He joined the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music in 1976 and became musical director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet in 1982. He retired in 1996. Among the rarities that Mr. Samuel recorded were Charles Ives' Universe Symphony . . . and Mahler's re-orchestration of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. His own music, written in a complex, expressionist style, includes several orchestral works, settings of Whitman and Hans Christian Andersen, and two string quartets. At his death he was at work on an operatic treatment of Thomas Mann's novella The Blood of the Walsungs" [Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, 3/29/08].


March 26

An Evening with Stewart Copeland, including the premiere of his Celeste. Savannah Music Festival, GA.

Laurie Anderson's Homeland. Zankel Hall, New York, NY.

Paul Haas and Symphony in Traces, including Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. Angel Orensanz Center, New York, NY.


March 27

The New York Times announces the discovery of a 10-second recording of the folk song Au Clair de la Lune, made on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph (a machine designed to record sounds visually but not to play them back) made by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, which predates by 19 years Thomas Edison's spoken-word recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb (now playable due to technology developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA). New York, NY.


March 28

Augustin Hadelich performs Bela Bartok’s Sonata for Solo Violin and Bright Sheng's Night at the Chinese Opera (2006) (with Robert Kulek). Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Bartok’s subtleties were pretty much lost in this big space. . . . Bright Sheng’s . . . filled the room at least. Bright and shiny -- dare I say flashy? -- this collection of florid gestures and doctored Chinese pentatonic melody worked hard to entertain in cheerful show-business fashion" [Bernard Holland, The New York Times, 3/31/08].

Ornette Coleman. Town Hall, New York, NY.


March 29

Making Music: Thomas Adès, his Five Eliot Landscapes, Chamber Symphony, Living Toys, and Court Studies. Zankel Hall, New York, NY. "Talking with the moderator Ara Guzelimian about his upbringing, Mr. Adès said he began teaching himself the piano at an early age. In the house was a big box of recordings, all those 'classical great things,' as he put it, with 'odds and ends of folk music,' which he loved for the sounds of the earthy voices and 'twiney instruments.' A fascination with sound inspired the Eliot songs. His grandmother had a cassette recording of Alec Guinness reading Eliot; and though Mr. Adès was mystified by the poetry, he was hooked by the way this great actor spoke the elusive lines. . . . Though the lustrous soprano Valdine Anderson sang with allure, Mr. Adès has set the words in a way that made it impossible for her to sing them with clarity. Comprehension was obviously not a priority. The most striking song was the last, Cape Ann, a[n] homage to Messiaen that evokes wildly skittish bird calls. In this act of imitation, the young Mr. Adès found his own voice. The Chamber Symphony, arrestingly played by the top-notch Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Mr. Adès, is the audacious work of a fledgling composer. One could trace the stylistic elements of this episodic 17-minute score, which begins with an elusive evocation of a queasy tango, then segues into a jazzy, frenetic episode featuring a slurpy solo basset horn (an alto clarinet). Mr. Adès creates impressively precise and transparent sonorities, especially during the pensive middle section of timeless and quivering music. The Birmingham players also gave an exciting account of another early work, Living Toys (1993), an impish score for which Mr. Adès wrote (after the fact) a fictitious scenario about a group of Spanish men questioning a precocious child about his dreams and plans. I was the most intrigued by Court Studies (2005), scored for violin, cello, clarinet and piano" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 3/31/08].

Franco Zeffireli's production Giacomo Puccini's La Boheme in its 347th performance, more than any other at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY.


March 30

Gunther Schuller's Grand Concerto for Percussion and Keyboards performed by the Met Chamber Ensemle, conducted by James Levine. Zankel Hall, New York, NY. "Mr. Schuller’s three-year-old piece crowded Zankel’s limited stage with an encyclopedic collection of percussion instruments. Twelve musicians with barely room to turn around darted from one device to another. Musical works like this are also a theater for the eyes. Musicians dance as well as play them. The Grand Concerto tinkles, rasps, booms and flutters in every imaginable way. Snare drums rattle; keyboards create mellow, wow-wow vibrato. All this constituted a different kind of harmony and counterpoint, one that had little to do with Mozart’s major-minor harmonies, crossing voices and bar lines. Some of Mr. Schuller’s instruments were unpitched; they made noise, in other words, not melody. Others -- piano, harp, celesta and mallet percussion -- were tuned pretty much the way Mozart would have tuned his music. The Grand Concerto uses both types for the same purpose. Time and color are the elements, and the finesse and delicacy were noteworthy. Despite its potential to overwhelm by sheer numbers, this was music always open to the light. You could look inside it and pick out the play of castanets, maracas, cowbells and water gong, one against another" [Bernard Holland, The New York Times, 4/1/08].


March 31

The New York premiere of A White House Cantata, a concert adaptation of Leonard Bernstein's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (libretto by Alan Jay Lerner). Rose Theater, New York, NY. "[In the year of] the 90th anniversary of [Bernstein's] birth . . . there is increasing consensus that this prodigiously gifted musician may have been underrated as a composer during his lifetime. . . . At its 1976 premiere, the show was a colossal failure, closing after seven performances and demoralizing its creators. Those hoping that the Collegiate Chorale’s presentation, directed by the actor Roger Rees, would uncover an overlooked treasure may have been disappointed. The original musical was an ill-conceived venture with a pretentious book offering a historic panorama of the White House occupants, from Washington to Theodore Roosevelt. Woven through this narrative was a pontificating story about slavery. A White House Cantata is a pared-down, 90-minute version of the musical, and the score has some lively and effective music, including deft evocations of Dixieland, along with metrically fractured waltzes. But from the opening prelude, with its quizzical rumblings in the orchestra, rich with wandering chromatic harmonies and hints of hymn tunes, the music sounds as if it is straining to be serious. When a humming chorus joins it, atop an ominous pedal tone in the orchestra, the effect is hokey. The prologue segues into Ten Square Miles by the Potomac River, an intentionally crude march during which Washington and delegates from the 13 states have a feisty contrapuntal debate over where to locate the nation’s capital. Though Take Care of This House, a wistful piece sung by Abigail Adams, may be a touch saccharine, it has won a place in the song-recital repertory. Bernstein certainly had a feeling for dance, as proved by a calypso-driven ensemble during the marriage of Lud and Seena, stand-ins for three generations of black servants in the White House. Still, as a theater composer Bernstein may have been at his best when he had nothing to prove and could use his great skills to get the job done, as in his charming, witty score for Wonderful Town, which he composed quickly under pressure. In A White House Cantata you sense his struggle to lift the genre of the musical to some higher musical plane, and the effort comes through. The baritone Dwayne Croft brought a robust voice and dramatic flair to portrayals of all the presidents. The soprano Emily Pulley, singing the first ladies, stopped the show with her tour-de-force Duet for One, in which she portrays both the incoming first lady, Lucy Hayes, on the Inauguration Day for Rutherford B. Hayes, all aflutter with excitement, and the outgoing one, Julia Grant, full of sniping complaints about her successor" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 4/2/08].

Chronicle of July 2005

July 2

The New York Philharmonic, conducted by Brmwell Tovey, in New York, New York. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "Amid snappy comments about why orchestras rarely use saxophonists ('you don't know where they've been') as well as Independence Day, Canada Day and dog-walking in New York, he offered nicely phrased descriptions of the music at hand, which he conducted deftly. Turning to the audience just after the curtain-raiser, the Kander and Ebb classic New York, New York, Mr. Tovey told a stream of latecomers, "I'm ever so sorry you just missed that," and suggested that they buy tickets to the Sunday performance for a second chance. They didn't miss much, really. Bruce Broughton's splashy symphonic arrangement included tips of the hat to everyone from Dvorak to Nelson Riddle, and it had a certain endearing energy at times. But the Philharmonic doesn't do this sort of thing well: mostly, it was trying too hard to sound as if it were having fun rather than simply slumming. Gershwin's Walking the Dog, with Stanley Drucker shaping the sultry clarinet line nicely, was more persuasive. So were three charming trifles by Leroy Anderson, Fiddle Faddle, The Penny-Whistle Song, and Bugler's Holiday, period pieces that nevertheless let the orchestra's strings, flutes and trumpets show their strengths. Leonard Bernstein's music suited both the program's New York theme and its crossover ambitions. Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, for example, is top-drawer symphonic jazz. And if the orchestra's brass and reed instruments were slightly strident, they captured the music's sizzle, with Mr. Drucker arresting the attention with a beautifully fluid account of the virtuosic solo line. Bernstein's more emotionally intense side was represented by the symphonic suite from his dark-hued On the Waterfront soundtrack. The program also included a solid if insufficiently atmospheric reading of Aaron Copland's Quiet City, with Thomas Stacy as the English horn soloist and Thomas V. Smith playing the solo trumpet line" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 7/4/05].



July 8

Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James Levine, in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 8 "Of a Thousand"). Tanglewood, MA. This work's logistics and cost (there are eight vocal soloists), to say nothing of the complexities of directing vast choral and orchestral forces in so dense a score, have made it a rarity, yet this is its third appearance at Tanglewood since 1972. Mr. Levine launched into the score with decisively brisk tempos - no lingering on that opening 'Veni, creator spiritus,' just a grand choral statement accompanied by a remarkably taut orchestral sound. There would, of course, be ample time to temper those qualities, both by magnifying them, as in the over-the-top conclusion of Part 1, and by pulling back to create transparent, heavenly pianissimos, and in the most compelling moments in Part 2. Among the vocal soloists, Heidi Grant Murphy's exquisitely floated rendering of the 'Mater gloriosa' lines, sung from a perch above the orchestra, proved the most memorable. But the other singers - Deborah Voigt and Susan Neves, sopranos; Yvonne Naef and Jane Henschel, mezzo-sopranos; Johann Botha, tenor; Eike Wilm Schulte, baritone, and John Relyea, bass - all made important contributions, as did the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the American Boychoir. But the real thrill here was the Boston Symphony's rich sound and sheer virtuosity. It has been many years since this orchestra sounded so energized" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 7/11/05].


July 12

Paul Jacobs in music of Max Reger, and movements from Maurice Durufle's Suite (Op. 5) and Olivier Messiaen's Nativite du Seigneur. Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, New York, NY. "[M]ovements from Duruflé's Suite (Op. 5) and Messiaen's "Nativité du Seigneur" were offered as an uninterrupted group. . . . Reger's Fantasies on 'Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme' (Op. 52, No. 2) and 'Hallelujah! Gott zu loben, bleibe meine Seelenfreu' (Op. 52, No. 3) are craggy and torrential, and Mr. Jacobs played them with an intensity and a thoughtful, fluid use of dynamics and color. Those same qualities helped create a surprising common ground between Duruflé's worldly Sicilienne and Toccata and a pair of Messiaen's mystical ruminations" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 7/14/05].


July 17

Summergarden. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. "Sitting in the air-conditioned museum, looking out at the soggy sculpture garden and remembering how the roar of Midtown traffic overwhelmed the amplified concerts in past summers, it was hard to fathom the attraction of having these performances outdoors in the first place. The museum really should reconsider; the rest of us can pray for rain. . . . The most memorable of the program's five works was the opener, Benjamin Yusupov's Quintet (1996). Mr. Yusupov, a composer from Tajikistan who now lives in Israel, writes in a style that is bold, assertive and more complicated than it seems: its harmonies often seem static over all, yet there is extraordinary movement and interplay in the individual lines. Roberto Sierra's Kandinsky (2003), a piano quartet, was as colorful as Mr. Yusupov's work and more varied, since each of its 11 movements represents a Kandinsky painting, and each is scored for a different combination of the four instruments. Conveying visual art in music is difficult, and to do it a composer relies partly on the listener's suggestibility. Do those rash strokes of violin tone really evoke Kandinsky's sharp lines? Why not? As it was, Mr. Sierra's piece, with its shifting color combinations and its inherent virtuosity -- most notably in a blistering solo viola movement, played brilliantly by Glenda Goodman -- worked well in purely musical terms. Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, a composer from Azerbaijan whose works Mr. Sachs has presented both with the contemporary-music ensemble Continuum and at the Juilliard School, contributed Impromptus (2004), a seven-movement piano trio cast in sometimes fiery, sometimes haunting hues, with vivid solo movements for violin (Miranda Cuckson) and cello (Claire Bryant). The program also included Gerald Barry's Piano Quartet No. 1 (1992), a weirdly off-kilter work that was sometimes agreeably zany and sometimes plain annoying, and Paul Schoenfield's Carolina Réveille (1996) an eclectic set of variations on Carolina in the Morning" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 7/19/05].




July 20

International Keyboard Institute and Festival: Ursula Oppens. Mannes College of Music, New York, NY. "[A]nyone looking for Liszt's shadow in her program might have found it in Frederic Rzewski's Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues and in La Valse, [Maurice] Ravel's swirling and sometimes muscular evocation of the ballroom. . . . Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues . . . first evokes the mechanistic din of the mill, then moves through a Gershwinesque fantasy on the song it was named for toward an eerie finale. Ms. Oppens gave incisive, transparent performances of Conlon Nancarrow's texturally spare but rhythmically thorny Two Canons for Ursula. She closed with Ravel's waltz fantasies, the poetic Valses Nobles et Sentimentales and the bright-hued La Valse. Her readings, if not note-perfect, capture the music's spirit vividly" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 7/23/08].


July 21

Brian Ferneyhough' Shadowtime (libretto by Charles Bernstein. Rose Theater, New York, NY. "[T]heir new work based on the writings and life of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, a "thought opera." Among operatic types, that's a new one. "Shadowtime," which had its premiere at the Munich Biennale in 2004, is a work of uncompromising complexity. By calling it a thought opera, Mr. Ferneyhough, a high modernist British composer, and Mr. Bernstein, a noted American poet, are doing more than signaling that the work explores the intellectual issues Benjamin dealt with, including the nature of time, language, melancholy and dialectical materiality. They are implying that the audience must put aside traditional notions of musical drama - of storytelling, narrative and character development - and enter an intellectual journey. A large audience presumably willing to do just that arrived at the Rose Theater on Thursday night when the Lincoln Center Festival presented the North American premiere of Shadowtime. But halfway through this work, which lasts two hours and 15 minutes without intermission, a steady trickle of audience members began leaving. While I was intrigued by Shadowtime, which bracingly challenges the very notions of what opera can be, I sympathized with those who gave up on the work. . . . [T]he opera seems intentionally obscure and needlessly convoluted. It relies on the surreal images of the director Frédéric Fisbach's production and, of course, the subliminal pull of Mr. Ferneyhough's music to make the drama, such as is it, emotional and resonant. For all its ingenuity, Mr. Ferneyhough's music, scored for diverse chamber orchestra and chorus, becomes exasperating. What makes his style engaging, but also difficult, is his penchant for layering events. In the instrumental prologue, as a gaggle of instruments snarl and dart about in barely contained frenzy, other instruments -- lacy melodies in the winds, a ruminative cello line -- slowly thread through the din of atonality. Amazingly, though, Mr. Ferneyhough writes with uncanny clarity even in the densest moments. Yet when the textures thin for long stretches of delicate and pensive music, the multiplicity of musical events keeps right on going. Almost never does Mr. Ferneyhough give listeners a break -- say, a passage where all the instruments play in unison or an episode of sublime harmony, the kinds of moments that ravish you in the operas of earlier modernists like Berg and Messiaen. In one scene, called Shadow Play, which depicts the descent of Benjamin into the underworld, a solo pianist and reciter, meant to be a Liberace-type entertainer, plays a violently difficult and mesmerizing piano work of nearly 20 minutes while reciting a text that mixes droll philosophical questions with gibberish. As a major work on a solo piano recital, this piece would be a knockout, especially as performed here by the formidable pianist and actor Nicolas Hodges. But as a scene in an opera it seemed artificially inserted. Shadowtime also challenges the traditional role of words in opera. From the opening scene, phrases of the libretto are sung and spoken simultaneously, often layered as thickly as the instruments in the orchestra. There is not even a pretense that the words will be audible to the audience as sung from the stage. Essential lines are projected in supertitles. The text becomes just another element of musical fodder. . . . The choristers from the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and the musicians from the Nieuw Ensemble Amsterdam, brilliantly conducted by Jurjen Hempel, seemed engrossed by this work. The festival deserves much credit for courageously presenting it. In a program note, Mr. Ferneyhough writes that listeners must 'let go of a fixed notion of what constitutes musical form' to understand Shadowtime. Maybe so. But that comes very close to saying that if you don't like my opera it's your fault" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 7/23/05].


July 24

Alarm Will Sound in music of Richard D. James -- the British techno composer who works under various names, most notably Aphex Twin -- plus works by Richard Devine and Stefan Freund. Allen Room, Rose Hall, New York, NY. "On its new recording, Acoustica (Canteloupe) Alarm Will Sound offers 13 of Mr. James's concise electronic tone poems in arrangements for an orchestra fortified with electric guitar and bass and a handful of exotic instruments. . . . There is a degree to which the medium is the message in Mr. James's music. His recordings use a large palette of timbres that often morph in surprising ways. Some are entirely electronic; others are sampled acoustic instruments, though even those are often manipulated, distorted, speed-shifted or set within a distinctive electronic ambience. His selection, juxtaposition, balancing and stereo placement of these sounds are compositional decisions, but instead of a printed score his efforts yield a recording that is in effect the piece. Or maybe not. Alarm Will Sound's view is that Mr. James's quirky, often wistfully melodic works transcend their original timbres and textures. The players could justifiably argue as well that in Mr. James's world, great value is placed on inventive remixing - even to the point where the original is barely recognizable - and that their arrangements are essentially deferential remixes. (Oddly, they abandoned this argument by calling their concert 'Unremixed.') The performance, conducted by Alan Pierson, did not fully resolve this debate, but even though a listener inevitably made piece by piece comparisons, the ingenuity of the rescoring and the vigor of the performance were seductive. In Mont St. Michel, for example, Alarm Will Sound replaced tightly focused electronic beats of the Aphex Twin version with a hefty percussion sound - a very different sensibility, but it created its own powerful resonance. In Cock/Ver 10, the ensemble gave up on Mr. James's synthetic splashes and reproduced his rhythms and riffs with the energy of a hot jazz band. In some cases the job was easy: Aphex Twin's Avril 14 is a sweet piano solo, and the Alarm Will Sound version added nuance and warmth that pointed up its Parisian hues. And in some cases the group's arrangements are still evolving. On its recording of Logon Rock Witch, the ensemble replaced Aphex Twin's low-pitched repeating electronic tone with a male voice. In concert, the group used a jaw harp, which better approximates the original sound. The Aphex Twin pieces were punctuated by imaginative and involving electronic improvisations (billed as remixes) by Richard Devine, and ended with Stefan Freund's Unremixed, a work that begins as a Philip Glass-style essay in repetitive transformation and quickly grows into a big, ferocious score with jazzy rhythms and rich, brassy textures" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times].


July 25

River to River Festival: Summer Stars: Svet Stoyanov. Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, Pace University, New York, NY. "Mostly, he played the marimba, and he did so with a winning combination of gentleness and fluidity. He also doubled on the vibraphone in one work, and offered short solos on a trap set and the tapan, a Bulgarian drum. . . . He began with Eric Sammut's Four Rotations, an easygoing, gracefully melodic suite for marimba. Mr. Sammut's jazz-inflected harmonic language and contrapuntal textures often called to mind the Modern Jazz Quartet's flirtations with classical works. And at four short movements it was exactly the right length. For a Fantasy on Popular Bulgarian Rhythms, the first of two works played bearing Mr. Stoyanov's composition credit, he used the tapan, a round drum that looks like a small military bass drum but produces a lighter timbre. The piece offers what its title promises: an inventive and varied essay built on the metrically uneven patterns of Bulgarian folk dances, presented with an understated but unmistakable virtuosity. Mr. Stoyanov's other work, Improvisation, for trap set, is based on Latin rhythms, or so he said when he introduced it. Here too, the textures were complicated and understandably showy, but the Latin influences were only fleetingly noticeable. The centerpiece of the program was Mr. Stoyanov's arrangement of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, originally for guitar and a recording of 10 more guitar lines and two bass parts. Mr. Stoyanov persuaded Mr. Reich to let him transcribe the work for marimba and vibraphone, and made the recording that he uses in his performances. The transcription works, although the marimba and vibraphone produce softer-edged sounds than the guitar. But if the work seemed gentler over all, this version surrenders nothing in rhythmic drive. Mr. Stoyanov closed his concert with Khan Variations, Alejandro Viñao's rhythmically wide-ranging meditation on a theme he heard sung by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the great Qawwali master" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 7/27/05].