Chronicle of May 2011

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].

Chronicle of April 2011

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.

Recording

Music of Tribute, Volume 6: Berg. Ieva Jokubaviciute, Vladimir Valjarevic, pianists; Marjorie Elinor Dix, mezzo-soprano. Labor Records. "Ieva Jokubaviciute may not be a household name yet. (Far from it; it is pronounced YAY-vuh ya-ka-ba-va-SHU-teh.) But anyone who has heard this young Lithuanian pianist -- in one of her infrequent New York recitals, as a member of the Naumburg Award-winning Trio Cavatina or as a most valuable player in season after season at the Bard Music Festival -- knows that she is an artist of commanding technique, refined temperament and persuasive insight. Those traits are amply demonstrated by Ms. Jokubaviciute’s debut recording, issued on Labor Records as part of a continuing multiartist series, Music of Tribute. As in earlier volumes devoted to Bach, Debussy, Villa-Lobos, and others, the program mixes compositions by Berg with works dedicated to him or inspired by his music. Ms. Jokubaviciute’s take on Berg’s Piano Sonata (Op. 1) is lithe, muscular and transparent, creating a sense of spontaneity and play. In Four Songs (Op. 2) she sensitively accompanies Marjorie Elinor Dix, a skillful mezzo-soprano who counts among her roles Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck. The rest of the program, most of it previously unrecorded, provides a useful range of responses to Berg. Giacinto Scelsi’s furtive Poema No. 4: Passage du Poète conjures mystery and majesty. Franghiz Ali-Zadeh’s Sonata No. 1, jittery and ruminative by turns, evokes the presumed danger of embracing Berg during the 1970s in that composer’s native Azerbaijan. Other works tap into Berg’s music directly. The opening of his Violin Concerto provided the germ for Ross Lee Finney’s wistful Variations on a Theme by Alban Berg. In Reflections on Three Chords of Alban Berg Jacob Gilboa turned a frugal borrowing from Wozzeck into a gripping exploration of touch and timbre. And Hans Erich Apostel, Berg’s student and friend, transformed the fourth piece from the Lulu Suite into Variations From Berg’s Opera Lulu, an appealing gambol for piano, four hands. Here and throughout this fascinating disc Ms. Jokubaviciute is an authoritative, compelling guide" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 11/12/10]

Chronicle of August 2010

August 1

Salzburg Festival presents Alban Berg's Lulu. Felsenreitschule, Salzburg, Austria. "[I]t was clear that musical matters were in very capable hands. The German conductor Marc Albrecht drew a consistently plush, urgent and taut performance from the Vienna Philharmonic. In the prologue, as the baritone Thomas Johannes Mayer snarled and bellowed the words of the Animal Tamer, inviting the audience to witness a menagerie in which the principal attraction was the snake representing 'woman’s original form and nature,' the orchestra reveled in Berg’s insinuating music for the bleakly comic scene: all abrupt phrases, jagged lines and bursts of astringent chords. But Berg’s 12-tone score is also rich with wistful allusions to late-Romantic lyricism. Under Mr. Albrecht, the chief conductor-designate of both the Netherlands Opera and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna musicians played Berg’s score as if it were a natural extension of Wagner, late Brahms, and early Strauss -- a completely valid approach. The warmth and body of the Vienna Philharmonic’s strings proved ideal for Berg’s unfinished final work (played here in the now standard three-act version, with the final act orchestrated by the composer Friedrich Cerha). Still, the talk of any new production at the Salzburg Festival inevitably focuses on the staging. Well before opening night, predictions circulated in the opera world and on opera chat lines that this Lulu, by the Bulgarian director Vera Nemirova, was going to be another Eurotrash outrage. Yet Ms. Nemirova’s daring and engrossing production earned her, and the production team, a sustained ovation. She has clearly worked closely with the German artist Daniel Richter, who designed the sets and painted some stunning flats. In Act I the backdrop is a huge blowup of a surreal portrait of the voluptuous Lulu, dressed only in underclothes and wearing incongruous angel wings, that the Painter is working on as the lights go up. And in Act II, when a cholera epidemic has broken out, the backdrop is a panorama of sickly, ghostly faces in garish reds and yellows that change color with the stage lighting. That Ms. Nemirova is more than a purveyor of directorial high concept comes through in the minutely detailed characterizations she draws from her cast. The French soprano Patricia Petibon is a blithely amoral Lulu. When we meet her, she is married to Dr. Goll, a browbeaten professor of medicine. As Lulu, she sometimes sang with a hard-edged sound and wavering high notes. Yet those qualities fit the character of this cagey seductress, who gets ahead by using the only power she has: her allure over men. Slender and sensual, she was riveting in every scene. And she nailed the skittish passagework of this high-lying role while summoning earthy rawness when Lulu was up against it and had to take charge, however ruthlessly. The Painter was the tenor Pavol Breslik, and it was fascinating to see this character, usually an oily opportunist, presented as a handsome, cocky young artist. And as Dr. Schön, the editor of a newspaper, a controlling man who has supported, groomed and demanded sexual favors of Lulu for years, the baritone Michael Volle towered over Ms. Petibon and sang the role with menacing power. All the characters were similarly fleshed out. Though the tenor Thomas Piffka has a big, robust voice, he was movingly befuddled as Alwa, Dr. Schön’s lost-soul son, hopelessly smitten with Lulu. The mezzo-soprano Tanja Ariane Baumgartner as the lesbian Countess Geschwitz, who adores Lulu, brought both pitiable longing and fragile dignity to her portrayal. And the bass-baritone Franz Grundheber as the old, shriveled Schigolch, who may be Lulu’s no-good father (or a former lover or an abusive stepfather; it is not clear), found endless ways to convey the character’s creepiness. Ms. Nemirova’s staging was sometimes heavy-handed in its symbolism. Did we need to see seven agonized, blood-stained, shirtless men of various ages and body shapes crawling on the floor and clinging to Lulu to get that she is irresistibly sexual? On the other hand, the choreographed writhing was quite a sight. For nearly the entire first scene of the final act, which takes place at a Paris soiree, Ms. Nemirova had the cast sing out in the auditorium, walking up and down the aisles with the house lights on. The singers, in over-the-top evening wear (thanks to Klaus Noack’s inventive costumes), passed out drinks and scattered gambling money (bills playfully marked 500 eros) to delighted audience members. The wily Marquis (the tenor Andreas Conrad) walked across the auditorium on a narrow wooden rail that divided two sections of seats. This theatrical coup proved an effective setup for the harrowing final scene, in which Lulu, reduced to prostitution in London, is murdered by a pickup who turns out to be Jack the Ripper. I have never seen the climax staged with such matter-of-fact degradation" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 8/3/10].




August 2

Olivier Messiaen's Visions d l'Amen. Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY. "Visions de l’Amen (1943), Messiaen’s work for two pianos, is as prismatic and astounding in its way as his Quartet for the End of Time (1941), a glimpse of the apocalypse crystallized as a work for clarinet, violin, cello and piano. That the scoring of Visions is more monochromatic scarcely matters: Messiaen approached the piano not only with an organist’s sense of sonority but also with an imagination that drew on birdcalls, Asian music (and tuning systems) and recent innovations in Western harmony, as well as his own ideas about Roman Catholic mysticism. Sarah Rothenberg, who studied Messiaen’s piano music with his wife, Yvonne Loriod, and Marilyn Nonken, who performs with several new-music groups hereabouts, have just released a recording of Visions de l’Amen on the Bridge label, and to celebrate -- CD release parties being all the rage in classical music circles -- they played the seven-movement piece at Le Poisson Rouge . . . Messiaen’s kaleidoscopic writing, with its exoticism and mystical underpinnings, wrested the attention and commanded it fully" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 8/3/10].



August 3

The Knights. Naumburg Bandshell, New York, NY. "[Conductor Eric] Jacobsen invited the audience to dance along to two waltzes by [Dmitri] Shostakovich: the first from his score for the 1948 Soviet film Michurin and the second, used in the 1999 film “Eyes Wide Shut,” from his Suite for Variety Orchestra. Both were performed in appealing arrangements by Lev Zhurbin, known as Ljova. After intermission came Henri Mouton’s arrangement of Debussy’s Children’s Corner suite, originally for piano. Debussy dedicated it to his daughter, Claude-Emma, nicknamed Chou-Chou, who was 3 when he composed the work in 1908. The Knights played three of the six movements: Serenade of the Doll, The Little Shepherd, and Golliwogg’s Cakewalk. Jim Roe was the excellent oboe soloist" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 8/4/10].


August 4

Asphalt Orchestra. Lincoln Center, New York, NY. "[One] might have wondered what on earth was going on when a large, eclectic crowd made a frenzied dash across 65th Street, following a ragtag band of musicians who had careened across the road like deranged pied pipers. The moblike scene occurred during a performance by the rambunctious Asphalt Orchestra, an avant-garde 12-piece marching band presented here by Lincoln Center Out of Doors. This quirky ensemble, the brainchild of Bang on a Can, marches to an iconoclastic beat, eschewing typical brass-band fare for funky arrangements and inventive new works. The event began in a comparatively sedate fashion, with the audience seated on the steps in front of Alice Tully Hall, as the ensemble entered from 65th Street and paraded up and down the triangular staircase on the corner of the plaza. The musicians stopped in front of the hall for their first work, Carlton, by Stew and Heidi Rodewald. Listeners stayed seated despite the toe-tapping rhythms and ear-catching tunes. At a few points the band shouted out the letters of the song title. There was an element of performance art throughout the approximately 30-minute show. The musicians played with virtuosic flair while twisting, turning and executing moves choreographed by Susan Marshall and Mark DeChiazza, no easy feat when dealing with complex metric shifts and carrying bulky percussion and brass instruments as large as a sousaphone. The performance art aspect seemed particularly vivid during the premiere of Yoko Ono’s Opus 81, when the trumpeter Stephanie Richards, dressed in shorts and boots, stood alone in Lincoln Center Plaza’s reflecting pool playing a mournful solo. Her colleagues gathered at the edges of the pool, their insistent motifs underpinning Ms. Richards’s elegiac solo. The action shifted to the grove of trees nearby for the premiere of Two Ships, by David Byrne and Annie Clark (who is known as St. Vincent), and Ms. Richards’s arrangement of the sultry Wild About My Daddy, by the Laneville-Johnson Union Brass Band. Some members of the large, appreciative crowd that followed the Asphalt players as they moved through the plaza swayed to the irresistible beats in the lively arrangement of Thomas Mapfumo’s Ngoma Yekwedu, by Alex Hamlin, the band’s soprano saxophonist. The musicians snaked over to the fountain for their final piece, an arrangement by Peter Hess (the group’s tenor saxophonist) of Frank Zappa’s Zomby Woof. Patrons waiting for a Mostly Mozart concert to begin at Avery Fisher Hall leaned over the balcony to enjoy a vigorous rendition of the arrangement, with slapstick musical touches, rapidly shifting time signatures and wailing trumpet solos that echoed through the plaza" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 8/5/10].


August 6

A jury rejects the lawsuit brought by a classical music critic Donald Rosenberg of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland who sued his newspaper and the Cleveland Orchestra management after being reassigned following complaints about negative reviews. Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, Cleveland, OH. "The eight jurors . . . dismissed claims of age discrimination against The Plain Dealer and its editor, Susan Goldberg, and of interference and defamation against the orchestra’s governing body, the Musical Arts Association; its executive director, Gary Hanson; its chairman, Richard J. Bogomolny; and its former president, James D. Ireland III. The plaintiff, the longtime critic Donald Rosenberg, 58, had written a number of negative reviews, mainly aimed at Franz Welser-Möst, the orchestra’s music director. Orchestra officials complained several times to the newspaper’s editors. In September 2008 Mr. Rosenberg was told not to review the orchestra anymore but was kept on the staff as a music reporter and dance critic who writes some music reviews but not of the Cleveland Orchestra. A younger writer was assigned to review the orchestra. The affair became a cause célèbre among music critics, who charged that The Plain Dealer had caved in to complaints from a subject of its reviews, touching a raw nerve among those who review arts for a living. Ms. Goldberg testified that after 14 months as editor, she had concluded that a 'hefty chunk of the community was saying that Don Rosenberg was biased and unfair and that he was compromising our integrity,' according to an article in the newspaper. She said she had made her decision because of 'growing concerns about Don’s fairness,' The Plain Dealer reported. Mr. Rosenberg had a closed mind about Mr. Welser-Möst, she testified. The orchestra argued that in complaining to the newspaper about Mr. Rosenberg, it was merely making its opinion known. In a statement after the verdict, the Musical Arts Association called the jury’s decision a recognition of its members’ 'First Amendment rights to express their opinion in defending their institution.' The trial lasted four weeks and included video depositions from Mr. Welser-Möst and his predecessor as music director, Christoph von Dohnanyi. Thomas Goldstein, the director of the mass communications program of the University of California, Berkeley, testified for the orchestra’s management. Tim Page, a Pulitzer Prize-winning classical music critic, took the stand on Mr. Rosenberg’s behalf. In a brief telephone interview, Mr. Rosenberg called his legal battle a fascinating, grueling process that was worthwhile because it highlighted the issue of critical independence. 'We gave it our best shot,' he said. 'I stood up for what I believed. I don’t regret a moment of it.' Mr. Rosenberg said that his life at the paper had been 'uncomfortable' since he was reassigned two years ago but that for the time being, he had no plans to leave. 'I have a lot to think about,' he said. After taking vacation and furlough time to attend the trial, he went back to work on [August 5]. . . . [The next day] he and another reporter had a front-page story -- about the city’s opera company" [Daniel J. Wakin, The New York Times, 8/7/2010].


August 7

Aaron Copland's The Tender Land. Glimmerglass Opera, Cooperstown, NY. "Copland wrote The Tender Land for youthful singers in 1953; . . . it served as an apt vehicle for the first production entirely turned over to members of the Glimmerglass Young American Artists Program. Inspired by Walker Evans’s Depression-era photographs in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the opera contains some of Copland’s most luminous strains, along with a libretto by Horace Everett (pen name of Erik Johns) that ranges from quiet poetry to mawkish sentimentality. As Laurie, a teenager who yearns to experience the wider world beyond her grandfather’s farm, Lindsay Russell sang with gracious tone and ample volume, soaring over the rich strains of Copland’s original full orchestration. Andrew Stenson was a thoughtful, lyrical Martin, the drifter who briefly desires a settled life with Laurie; as Top, his travel companion, Mark Diamond was boisterous and entertaining. Joseph Barron was a gruff Grandpa Moss, Stephanie Foley Davis a poised, touching Ma Moss. Apart from one stiff dance number, Tazewell Thompson’s direction was unfailingly potent and insightful; Stewart Robertson, the conductor, drew outstanding playing from the orchestra" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 8/9/10].


August 13

Bard Music Festival: Berg and Vienna. Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. "[O]ne aspect of Berg’s career continues to draw attention above others: He was a prominent disciple of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose development and promulgation of atonal and 12-tone composition decisively shaped the course of modern music during the middle of the 20th century. For those who view Schoenberg as the start of everything wrong in modern music, Berg is guilty by association. In subscribing to Schoenberg’s methods, Berg extended a putative lineage devoted to musical logic, from Beethoven and Brahms into Schoenberg’s work. What made Berg’s music stand apart from that of Schoenberg and most of his disciples was a reconciliation of modernist techniques with emotional efficacy and unambiguous communicativeness: qualities that made Berg as much an inheritor of a Romantic line running through Schubert, Wagner and Mahler. Accordingly, and somewhat unusually for a Bard presentation, you sensed an agenda at work during the first weekend, titled Berg and Vienna. In six long concerts and related lectures, weight was shifted from Berg’s debt to Schoenberg toward his strong connections to other Viennese late Romantics, like Mahler, Zemlinsky and Schreker (whose opera Der Ferne Klang was presented here in previous weeks as a precursor to the Berg events). Th initial concert . . . was a concise overview of Berg’s career arc . . . . Jeremy Denk’s account of the Piano Sonata, a wistful, elusive study in post-Wagnerian chromaticism, seemed conjured on the spot. Wagner and Strauss resounded in the vocal lines of the Seven Early Songs, mingled with Impressionist daubs in the piano writing; the soprano Christine Goerke sang magnificently, with elegant accompaniment from the pianist Pei-Yao Wang. Berg’s Four Pieces (Op. 5), for clarinet and piano, had dramaturgical concision and a lapidary gleam in a riveting performance by the clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein and the pianist Danny Driver. And even if you didn’t know that Berg planted numerous references to an extramarital affair in his Lyric Suite, a superb account by the Daedalus Quartet made plain the urgent passions and melancholy regrets encoded into the work" [Steve Smith, 8/16/10].


August 14

Bard Music Festival: The Vienna of Berg's Youth. Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. 'The . . . afternoon program . . . included rudimentary piano works and fledgling songs by Berg that pointed to the strong influence of Schubert and Brahms. The . . . late-Romantic sound of a similarly youthful Piano Quintet by Anton Webern, who along with Berg became a Schoenberg adherent, offered no hint of the gemlike miniatures of Webern’s later years. More distinguished were two works by Zemlinsky, based on poetry by Richard Dehmel. The pianist Alessio Bax showed a dreamy ease in Fantasien über Gedichte von Richard Dehmel (Fantasies on Poems by Richard Dehmel); the tenor Nicholas Phan, with Ms. Wang, was poised and insightful in five elusive songs Zemlinsky composed nearly a decade later. Agreeable works by Joseph Marx and Karl Weigl indicated a more conservative agenda. [The] night’s concert by the American Symphony Orchestra, meant to show the powerful influence of Mahler, opened with a businesslike account of the Adagio from his unfinished Symphony No. 10: music searing in its emotional impact and rich with the promise of future developments Mahler would not live to realize. Berg’s Three Pieces (Op. 6), despite a shaky performance, suggested how Berg’s orchestral writing might have emerged from Mahler’s. Christiane Libor, a soprano, sang majestically in Berg’s first orchestral composition, Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtkartentexten von Peter Altenberg (Five Orchestral Songs on Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg), and Akiko Suwanai, a violinist, played with supple beauty and authority in Berg’s final completed work, the Violin Concerto. . . . Korngold’s Prelude and Carnival Music from “Violanta” and . . . two selections from Pfitzner’s Von deutscher Seele (Of the German Soul) made Berg’s originality and brilliance more apparent" [Steve Smith, 8/16/10].


August 15

Bard Music Festival: Teachers and Apostles. Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. "Morning brought a characteristically Viennese intermingling of love and death, sexual frankness and psychotherapy, during a cheeky recital of songs by Berg, Schoenberg, Strauss, Alma Mahler and others; it was narrated by Byron Adams, a composer and musicologist. Four excellent young singers -- Mr. Phan; Marnie Breckinridge, a soprano; Fredrika Brillembourg, a mezzo-soprano; and Thomas Meglioranza, a baritone -- sang with style and dramatic flair, elegantly accompanied by Ms. Wang and Lucille Chung. The program ended with a speculative reconstruction of the final movement from Berg’s Lyric Suite, arranged by the composer and Berg scholar George Perle to make audible a Baudelaire poem Berg wrote into a score presented as a gift to a mistress. With the Daedalus Quartet, Ms. Breckinridge gave a luminous performance. Mr. Driver opened [th] afternoon’s program . . . with a superb performance of Schoenberg’s Six [Little] Piano Pieces (Op. 19), along with a bravura romp through Viktor Ullmann’s Variations and Double Fugue on a Theme by A. Schoenberg. Egon Wellesz and Theodor Adorno were revealed as lesser lights within the Schoenberg constellation. But the program’s real meat came in confirmed classics: Webern’s Four Pieces for Violin and Piano (Op. 7), brilliantly played by the violinist Soovin Kim and Mr. Bax, and Berg’s String Quartet (Op. 3), one more outstanding performance by Daedalus. . . . [At] night Mr. Kim joined Mr. Denk and members of the American Symphony Orchestra in Berg’s formidable, passionate Kammerkonzert (Chamber Concerto). Focusing on lean works . . . -- Busoni’s limpid Berceuse Élégiaque; Schoenberg’s gamboling Chamber Symphony No. 1; Hindemith’s brash Kammermusik -- the concert also showcased the orchestra’s excellent principal string and wind players" [Steve Smith, 8/16/10].


August 16

International Contemporary Ensemble. Rose Theater, New York, NY. "Here . . . was a top-notch contemporary-music ensemble, under the brilliant direction of the fast-rising French conductor Ludovic Morlot, in a program featuring three audaciously modern scores by three living composers. The hall was packed; the audience gave cheering ovations to each work. . . . [T]he specific credit for [this] program goes to the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the curator for Bach and the Polyphonies, the adventurous six-part series that ended with this thoughtful concert. Using works by Bach as a focus, Mr. Aimard’s programs explored the technique of polyphonic writing by looking backward to the sources of polyphony (or counterpoint) in medieval and Renaissance music and to contemporary practitioners like the three formidable composers presented here: George Benjamin, Harrison Birtwistle and Helmut Lachenmann. . . . Mr. Aimard loves assembling programs that juxtapose new and old music in ways that invite audiences to hear musical commonalities. He began with the short, somber Fantasia VII by Purcell, performed here in an ingenious arrangement by Mr. Benjamin for clarinet, violin, cello and celesta (played by Mr. Aimard). Mr. Benjamin’s recasting of the music highlights the mix of lacy counterpoint and haunting harmonies. The performance was an ideal setup for the next work, Mr. Benjamin’s 20-minute Antara. He composed it in the mid-1980s while working at Ircam, the electronic-music center in Paris, where a band of Andean folk musicians often played in the square outside. Mr. Benjamin was entranced by the sounds of the panpipes (Antara is the Incan name for that folk instrument). He uses two digital keyboards to evoke the panpipes, and the large chamber ensemble includes other dueling pairs of instruments. In this context the work came across as music driven by overlapping, interacting contrapuntal lines. The leap from Purcell to Mr. Benjamin, and back, seemed not that far. Next came two short pieces from Mr. Birtwistle’s Bach Measures, arrangements of eight chorale preludes for organ by Bach, as a mood-setting prelude for Mr. Birtwistle’s complex, arrestingly visceral Slow Frieze. In this 1996 work he tries to evoke in music the effect of seeing a series of ancient friezes, bas-relief panels that seem to convey movement as you walk by. Beginning with staggered bursts of chords for a solo piano (played incisively by Jacob Greenberg), the music evolves in chunks of sound that on the surface seem to be static blocks but quiver with activity within. The third pairing began with Luciano Berio’s arrangement of the final Countrapunctus from Bach’s Art of the Fugue. This was Bach’s last work, left incomplete. Most performances just stop cold where Bach’s score breaks off. Berio ends his wondrously colorful arrangement by having the instruments trail off into some realm of the beyond. This piece served as a prelude for Mr. Lachenmann’s stunning Mouvement ( -- vor der Erstarrung). The parenthetical phrase translates as 'before paralysis' or 'before stillness.' This tense, skittish and pointillist piece from the early 1980s is like a series of dialogues in fits and starts for a large ensemble of instruments, grouped by category and separated onstage. The allure of the music comes from the strikingly inventive writing for the instruments, using unconventional techniques like tapping on clarinets and blowing into them without the mouthpieces, and all manner of string glissandos and scratches" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 8/17/10].


August 23

Taka Kigawa. Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY. ["T]he sense of clarity and apparent ease he brought to a parade of harmonically thorny and, in some cases, texturally dense piano works. He gave himself no breaks in this short but intense recital. You get an idea of how difficult the program was once you realize that the least demanding score Mr. Kigawa played was the Webern Variations (1936), a piece that taxes both the technique and imagination of a pianist intent on winning an audience to its charms. Making listeners as passionate about the Webern as he is -- Mr. Kigawa said, in comments from the stage, that it was one of his favorite works -- was clearly among his goals. Where many pianists use the score’s sparseness as the foundation of a disembodied, abstract interpretation -- certainly a legitimate approach -- Mr. Kigawa used it as the basis of a warm, shapely account that put its structural logic and occasional playfulness in the spotlight. Every phrase was carefully defined, and Webern’s silences were embraced as part of the music’s fabric. Iannis Xenakis’s Evryali (1973) is everything the Webern is not. Though not as opaque or harmonically complex as other Xenakis works, it made the Webern seem light textured and breezy by comparison. That said, harmony often takes a back seat to rhythm as the driving impulse of Evryali. Chords are frequently repeated with an almost Minimalist insistence, but rhythmic patterns evolve. At times the work takes on a mechanistic character, like an engine gone mad, but even in these passages Mr. Kigawa was firmly in control. And when Xenakis shifts suddenly from a heavy, repetitive whirlwind passage to a moment of delicate tracery at the top of the keyboard, Mr. Kigawa negotiated the change deftly. Like the Webern and Xenakis scores, pieces by two young composers (both born in 1971) proved an appealingly contrasting pair. On a Clear Day (2004) by Matthias Pintscher is a gentle, atmospheric meditation that Mr. Kigawa played with graceful restraint. Jason Eckardt’s Echoes’ White Veil (1996) is a more outgoing and eventful work, with a fast, richly dissonant opening section that melts into a quieter, more variegated finale, full of sparkling figuration and captivating pianissimo writing. The Eckardt also has an improvisatory spirit at times, and Mr. Kigawa played it with the fluidity that a jazz player brings to an extended solo. More surprising, he brought that same sense of freedom to Pierre Boulez’s First Sonata (1946). Mr. Boulez’s early serial works can sound abstruse and severe, but there is more in them than that. Mr. Kigawa recast the sonata as an essay in how to apply suppleness to virtuosity, and the result was an energetic but also characterful account" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 8/25/10].


August 24

Ted Hearne conducts his Katrina Ballads. Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY. "His ensemble [consisted] of 11 musicians and 5 singers. . . . The texts of the 10 Katrina Ballads are drawn entirely from news reports, mostly from the week of the storm. It is in the selection of those texts, and in the way they are set and accompanied, that Mr. Hearne’s sadness and anger come through. What he was after was not a documentary about Katrina as the people of New Orleans experienced it, but rather an inflected, interpreted record of how the rest of the country watched it unfold -- that is, as the news media presented it, complete with resoundingly famous sound bites. They include President George W. Bush’s praise of Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” -- which Mr. Hearne made into the full text of an extended jazz aria, and Kanye West’s declaration that 'George Bush doesn’t care about black people.' To commemorate the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina -- and to celebrate the release of the Katrina Ballads on CD (New Amsterdam) -- Mr. Hearne and nearly all the musicians on the recording performed the full cycle. . . . The contrast between the disc and the live performance was extraordinary: the fastidiously produced recording, though it delivered some of the work’s punch, left me cold. But the concert reading had a tough edge and a wildness of spirit that suited the music, and the subject. It had an important visual element too. The four vocal soloists sat on high stools in front of a scrim, with the instrumental ensemble, conducted by Mr. Hearne, behind it. A film by Bill Morrison, using footage from New Orleans, as well as some of the television interviews Mr. Hearne set to music, was projected onto the scrim and a wall to the side of the stage. Mr. Hearne’s Prologue uses part of a report from The Houston Chronicle about New Orleans’s vulnerability, originally published in 2001, and set as a slow blues number. René Marie sang it with a supple, evocative lilt, with the rest of the singers joining in for a staid, polyphonic rendering of the final line, 'to some extent, I think we’ve been lulled to sleep.' The melding of popular and classical styles begins immediately. The bluesy vocal line of the Prologue is underpinned by a score that seesaws between chamber scoring and rock guitar. The second ballad, When We Awoke, It Was to That Familiar Phrase: New Orleans Dodged a Bullet, is mostly an essay for French horn and electronics, and the two instrumental interludes take in some of the livelier elements of New Orleans jazz. Dennis Hastert: 8.31.05, given a dark, jazz-tinged rendering by the tenor Isaiah Robinson, is accompanied by a churning, almost Minimalist piano figure. The work’s centerpiece is a setting of an interview conducted by an angry Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor, with the calmly, almost robotically diplomatic Senator Mary Landrieu. It is presented first as a duet between Anthony Turner and Abigail Fischer and as a quartet when Mr. Cooper presses Ms. Landrieu to say she is angry, and at whom. But an extended, jazzy riff built around President Bush’s 'heck of a job' statement, sung with unbridled energy by Mr. Hearne, is also a clear highlight, as are Mr. Robinson’s barnstorming performance of Mr. West’s speech and Ms. Marie’s affectingly direct rendering of a long, reflective quotation from Ashley Nelson, an 18-year old resident of New Orleans" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 8/25/10].


August 25

Dan Pritzker's Louis. Chicago, IL. "[Pritzker] believes he’s got a film that will satisfy an audience unmoved by superhero sequels and 3-D extravaganzas: a black-and-white silent movie (with hints of color) based loosely on the childhood of Louis Armstrong. And for the price of your ticket, you also get music composed and arranged by Wynton Marsalis, and performed live by him and a group of 11 other musicians. . . . The moment of inspiration came for Mr. Pritzker in the late 1990s, when a stage manager first told him about Charles (Buddy) Bolden, the turn-of-the-20th-century cornet player credited as a creator of jazz. . . . Mr. Pritzker spent several years consulting with authors and musicologists on Bolden, a forerunner to Armstrong who died in 1931 and recorded little if any of his work. In writing what became the scripts for Louis and a second feature, Bolden, Mr. Pritzker concluded that it was easier to fabricate large swaths of his stories because Bolden’s history was nebulous, and Armstrong’s adult life was documented to death. 'After he got to Chicago, everybody knows every minute of that guy’s life,' Mr. Pritzker said with some exaggeration. . . . Instead, his Louis puts a Chaplinesque tilt on Armstrong’s childhood in New Orleans, where a fictionalized version of the future trumpeter (played by Anthony Coleman) in 1907 plays a crucial role in a comically complicated affair involving a corrupt politician (Jackie Earl Haley) and a prostitute (Shanti Lowry) who has given birth to his child. . . . Mr. Marsalis, a New Orleans native who was approached a few years ago by Mr. Pritzker to provide the music for his films, said the director’s fictionalized presentation of his subjects’ lives was perfectly appropriate. . . . Besides his own original compositions, Mr. Marsalis provided contemporary arrangements of classic jazz tunes like Jelly Roll Morton’s Black Bottom Stomp" [Dave Itzkoff, The New York Times, 8/27/10].


August 27

Pianist Steven Beck plays Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Debussy. Bargemusic, New York, NY. "To perform Schoenberg’s 12-tone Suite for Piano (Op. 25) as expressively as he did seemed a greater feat than offering a poetic rendition of a Chopin nocturne, something within the grasp of most competent pianists. Schoenberg’s five-movement atonal work, modeled on a Baroque suite, represents an important step in his development as a serial composer. The rhythmically lively Gavotte parodies Baroque music. Details abound in other movements, like the ostinatos in the Intermezzo. Mr. Beck infused his interpretation with myriad colors and textures, even occasionally rendering Schoenberg’s logic poetic. Stravinsky, in his elegant Serenade in A, which opened the program, also toyed with Baroque forms, reflecting the 18th century through a 20th-century prism. Mr. Beck offered a thoughtful and suitably unsentimental rendition, the moments of harmonic acidity emerging with sharp edged clarity. Debussy’s Twelve Études, which reflect his less pictorial side, concluded the program. The French pianist Alfred Cortot dismissed these pieces as pianistic exercises. Whether music sounds like an exercise depends in large part, of course, on the interpreter. (Bach’s cello suites, for example, were also considered mere finger workouts before Pablo Casals redeemed them.) Messiaen conceded that Debussy’s Études lacked the charm of Chopin’s effort in the genre but remarked on their complexity -- describing Debussy’s as 'exceptional above all as a result of the allusive nature of their form,' adding, 'Things are unsaid, implied, elusive.' Mr. Beck intelligently conveyed the elusive nature of these difficult and unconventional études, which Debussy dedicated to Chopin. Each addresses a pianistic challenge from a particular angle, using intervals of a third, fourth, sixth and octave, for example. In the first etude Debussy parodies Czerny’s five-finger exercises. Playing with an impressive technique and cleanly articulated touch throughout, Mr. Beck illuminated the quirks of each étude, beginning with the ironic glint of the first and the harmonic twists of the second (In Thirds) and third (In Fourths). He explored the allusive structures and elusive ambiances noted by Messiaen, with the technical intricacies of the multilayered For Octaves and the cascading runs of For Eight Fingers revealed with crystalline articulation" [Vivien Schweitzer, 8/29/10].


August 29

Michel Galante and his Argento Chamber Ensemble. Austrian Cultural Forum, New York, NY. "Called Lunar Movements, the series includes five programs (one per month, to be repeated every week, through December 19). Most are built around movements from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, and works influenced by that seminal score. The first program . . . (it was also performed on August 22, the opening of the series), may not have been the best indication of what is to come. For one thing, it included nothing of Pierrot itself, though one work -- an electronic piece by Eric Lyon -- included a quotation from it. If the idea is to show the influence of Schoenberg’s 1912 work, what was a movement from the Ives String Quartet No. 1 -- composed in 1900 -- doing here? And what is the influence of Pierrot on Strauss’s mournful, smoothly flowing Metamorphosen? Perhaps everything will become more apparent after all five programs are performed. Mr. Galante described this one as 'a preview' and began with Heinz Holliger’s Eisblumen (1985), in which a string ensemble, playing entirely in harmonics (the light, whistling sound a player gets by not depressing the string fully), slowly decorates the chord progression of a chorale from Bach’s Cantata No. 56, played at one-sixth its normal tempo. This was not especially inviting, and the performance was too uneven to make much of a case for it. Much the same could be said of Philipp Blume’s S, M, L, XL (2010), an intensely dissonant but texturally varied work meant to explore size and our perception of it. That is a fairly concrete idea for such an abstract work, but the contrasts and interplay among sustained tones, pizzicatos and trills, silences, pianissimos and fortissimos (all musical depictions of size) made the work seem akin to Cubism in the visual arts. An excerpt from a 1949 radio interview with Schoenberg gave the musicians a brief break. They had another when Mr. Lyon’s fascinatingly quirky Sacred Amnesia (2001) was played. Mr. Lyon subjected fragments from Parsifal, a Sousa march, and Pierrot Lunaire, (reharmonized to sound tonal), to electronic distortions that gradually rendered the originals unrecognizable (and even inaudible) within the sonic haze. The players were at their best in the program’s oldies. In the Ives they moved easily among the many quotations and styles, folksy and formal, that swirl around the opening movement of the quartet. And though the original septet version of Metamorphosen lacks the power and heft of Strauss’s more familiar revision, for 23 strings, the musicians gave it a sumptuous, deeply expressive reading. They closed the concert with focused, rich-hued performances of two Schoenberg fragments, a Septet (1918) and Toter Winkel (1899)" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 8/30/10].

Budget Wozzeck Bargain / Mark Alburger

Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1922) is a huge work calling for 17 woodwinds, 13 brass, a large percussion section, 50-60 strings, onstage military and tavern music, and a small ensemble reflecting the instrumentation of Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony. So, when the Ensemble Parallele announced its intentions to present the West Coast premiere of John Rhea's 21-piece orchestration of this seminal atonal operatic masterpiece, one could only think "stripped down" and "Berg on a budget."

But what was presented at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens on January 30, however, turned out to be a gripping retelling of this classic, in a full-bodied manner that rarely reflected any sort of artistic compromise whatsoever.

Everything in life is a trade-off, of course. For a big performance of Wozzeck, a big theatre is needed, with much of the audience at a distance remote from the action. At Yerba Buena's 757-seat Novellus, viewer-listeners had the opera in their faces and ears. And what faces, voices, and sounds! Beginning with John Duykers, as the Captain, simultaneously projected behind the performers as if from a 1920's newsreel. Both Duykers and Philip Skinner (the Doctor) were in danger of stealing the show whenever they appeared, such with their stage presence and vocal prowess. Not to be outdone, nevertheless, were Bojan Knezevic and Patricia Green as leading man and lady (Marie). Knezevic brought pathos and power to his interpretation of this demanding role, while Green provided a lyrical lilt to her lovely Lullaby in Act I, evolving into the torment and terror of ensuing scenes.

Other supporting cast members included the menacing and commanding AJ Gleukert (the Drum Major), sympathetic and shining J. Raymond Meyers (Andres), and the lovely and strident (as called for in the role of Margaret) Erin Neff. First and Second Apprentices John Bischoff and Torleff Borstling took their turns at the comic and soulful, in counterpoint to Michael Desnoyer's brief electrifying cameo as the Madman. San Rafael fifth-grader Kai Nau made for an affecting Child, but where were his playmates in the final scene? Offstage adults, evidently.

A trumpet here, and piano there -- apart from a few obvious instrumental question marks, Rhea's practical re-orchestration kept the power of the original, and kept his relatively small orchestra quite busy over the course of the intermissionless evening, sparklingly and darkly interpreted by conductor Nicole Paiement, in an arresting staging by Brian Staufenbeil. Imaginative set and lighting from Matthew Antaky worked in, shall we say, parallel with Austin Forbond's engaging cinematic imagery. The final scenes brought it all together musically and visually, as Wozzeck drowned in a pond of smoky dry ice against visions of his filmic demise (couldn't help but think of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings Frodo in the brief underwater scene): the summation of his life in the instrumentally brilliant final interlude (which serves as a kind of reverse prelude) mirroring the "life flashes before the eyes" of death.

Pretty great evening. Good to be alive. Appreciate it while you can -- Wozzeck, and everything else.